Sunday, February 16

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Who We Are: Whitney Strong Witnessing, celebrating Crestone-Baca’s across 40-plus years

By Gussie Fauntleroy.

“I’ve planted a lot of seeds and now, I love seeing the sprouts of rebirth,” Whitney Strong mused, sitting in her small, comfortable, hogan-shaped home near the entrance to the Baca, one of the first houses built here in the 1970s. Whitney has been in Crestone-Baca almost as long, and the seeds she’s referring to are projects and organizations she either began or helped start, and led, many years ago.

Among them: A couple of years after moving here in 1980, she created the community’s first artists’ collective, arranging for exhibitions by artists from around the Valley at what is now the (defunct) White Eagle, known at the time as the Inn at the Baca. In 1982 she organized the first July Fourth parade in Crestone since 1937. In the mid-1990s she established and hosted Performances at Baca, bringing monthly concerts to the Colorado College Baca Campus until 2001 — the organization was recently revived by local resident Peter Gyallay-Pap. 

In 1984 Whitney began publishing an independent local newspaper, which ran for three years. In 1990, when Baca resident Mark Elliott organized The Gaia School, a predecessor to the Crestone Charter School, she accepted Mark’s invitation to teach journalism to the primary-school-age pupils. She led them in writing and publishing the Gaia School News, which was distributed at the post office and Curt’s Store. 

In the decades since then, newer Crestone-Baca residents have dreamed of and created updated versions of all these community efforts, and Whitney has delighted in watching them emerge, morph and thrive. She believes they come from the same motivation that fueled her and others more than 40 years ago: a vision of creating a better place for all who live here.

Whitney — no relation to Hanne Strong, as she has patiently explained countless times — is a self-described networker and organizer who sees what needs to be done and sets out to get it accomplished. She is also a warm, positive thinker with an easy smile. At 84, her daily routine includes reading and reflecting on spiritual wisdom of the Dalai Lama and others, playing her piano, and walking with Marley, her coonhound-lab mix. She has witnessed enormous changes in Crestone-Baca over the decades, welcoming this community’s ongoing transformation with the same adventurous spirit she’s had all her life.

Growing up in Oklahoma City, Whitney concedes she was a “free-spirited handful,” for her parents, who owned a fashion boutique for women. She was a daddy’s girl and from him she learned practical skills and the value of common sense. On his advice she spent two years in college earning a secretarial certification. Then, as she puts it, “While I was born in Oklahoma, I was reborn in New York City in the summer of my 25th year.”

She had always dreamed of living in New York, and a series of connections took her there. She was working for the Salk Institute in California, typing manuscripts for Nobel Laureates, when the organization’s president moved to New York City to join the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies. He offered her a position there. She spent eight years in special events organizing, helping produce fundraising events for major organizations focusing on education, medical research, history, civil rights and performing and visual arts.

It was a “wonderful time” of hard work and excitement — and serendipitous moments. One day at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, she was setting up for a dinner to benefit Kei Takei’s Moving Earth Dance Company. Hearing a heavenly voice singing “Amazing Grace,” she peeked into the cathedral’s vestibule. There was Aretha Franklin, alone and singing because the vestibule’s acoustics were so good. The singer whispered, “Don’t tell anyone I’m here.”

In 1976 Whitney relocated to Aspen to help manage the successful lieutenant governorship campaign for her friend Nancy Dick. She remained there and married a rodeo cowboy. 

Four years later she came to Crestone to visit her dear friend Lyn Lindsay, resident manager for the Aspen Institute’s newly established seminar building in the Baca. Lyn asked Whitney to stay a couple of months to help organize the Institute’s annual meeting. Inspired by Hanne Strong’s vision of bringing together the world’s major wisdom traditions to live in peaceful coexistence on this sacred land, Whitney remained. The rodeo cowboy returned to Aspen.

Whitney recalls moments of tension in the early days between old-time town residents, of whom there were fewer than 35, and the influx of elite Aspen Institute attendees and new residents in the Baca development. After the Institute decided to leave the Baca in 1984 — in part because of mosquitoes and a lack of cultural events for attendees — Whitney was the Institute’s liaison with Colorado College. The college leased the seminar building and three townhouses and began bringing students here. She became the Baca Campus resident manager.

For a number of years Whitney had several jobs at once, also managing the Baca Townhouses, owning the Collection Connection, a fine art and consignment shop at the golf course and serving as a secretary at the Baca Grande Corporation. In 1983, the Baca Grande Property Owners Association (POA) asked her to assume editorship of its monthly publication. 

In July 1984, after reporting news unfavorable to bringing in new property owners, she was summoned to a POA board meeting and confronted about it. Unwilling to change her reporting style, she resigned and soon started the High Valley Independent newspaper. Its motto: “Dedicated to the spirit of independent thought and freedom of expression.” In 1987, exhausted from overwork, she regretfully ceased publication of the HVI.

Since retiring from Colorado College in 2002, Whitney has indulged her passion for travel. She and her four-legged family have traveled more than 120,000 miles in Bumpin’ Along, her 1986 VW Westfalia van. She has also traveled internationally. 

On the road or at home, each morning she sits quietly and in neat, tiny script writes affirmations, which read in part: “We struggle when we are attached to the way we think things should be. When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. Let us be free from struggle and attachment.” These words have guided her through countless changes in Crestone-Baca and her own life.

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