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Dan Petersen lives and works on his land, but not in a traditional way. The main use for his 130-acre Sage Canyon is as a retreat center. Businesspeople visit to improve their professional lives through personal development. The land is the “terrain of transition.” Dan is the coach.
The full course, called Open Focus, usually runs about one year, but Dan likes to begin his clients with a three- to five-day “vision quest.” The clients spend most of their time solo, camping in the desert. Dan meets with them each day for an hour or two, directing their meditation and discussing their self-discoveries. “It’s rare these days for people to get in touch with things that go beyond human life,” he says. “Coming here allows you to develop a dialogue with nature like most people have never done before.”
For more information on Open Focus, contact Dan Petersen, PO Box 2075, Durango, CO 81302; (970) 259-1223
From before 1 a.d. to 1275 a.d., the Ancestral Puebloan Peoples inhabited the Southwest, and thousands of their dwellings remain in the canyons of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona.
“They sought out canyon environments for a suite of resources that provided all they needed for living,” says Mark Varien, director of research at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez. These resources included:Water source. Many canyons featured springs, seasonal creeks, or year-round rivers.Local building materials. Hard sandstone could be found in cleavable layers exposed along the canyon walls.Food. Wild game (rabbits and deer) were drawn to the water, and the mesa tops had deep soil for dry land agriculture.
The Peoples’ pueblo unit contained structures oriented toward kin-group communities, not individuals. Often built into cliff walls, the buildings usually faced south to maximize passive solar heating. The four basic pueblo features were:Dwelling and work rooms. These tended to be rectangular and small. Lower rooms and rooms to the north were used for storage; upper-story rooms and south-facing rooms were used for living quarters.Plazas/terraces. Open spaces were located directly south of the dwelling and workrooms, or on the rooftop in multistory structures. Terraces had a slight pitch and parapets to control water.Ritual space. Archeologists believe that the kivas—circular rooms with a hearth, ventilator, and sipapu (hole to the lower stratum)—were ceremonial.Refuse pile. The midden was incorporated into the pueblo’s “boundaries,” directly south of the plaza.
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