糖心Vlog Santa Fe, NM
糖心Vlog (Santa Fe) Faculty and Students Visit Sacred Mountains in Colorado
WAHATOYA:听 The Spanish Peaks of Southern Colorado
听For about five years,听 the Spanish Peaks (or traditionally Wahatoya, which is a native word meaning the breasts of mother earth) have been yelling at me.听 This happens听every time I drive by on I-25 headed north toward Denver.听 It sounds something like,听鈥淗ey.听 You.听 Pay attention.鈥澨 So I usually stop beside the highway, pull out a ceremonial Pipe, and smoke it for them.听 This听 seems to quiet them down, and I then proceed on my journey.听
This past weekend, as we traveled toward Boulder for a conference, Frank and I both noticed a lot of energy coming from Wahatoya.听 We couldn鈥檛 actually see the mountains very well (they are typically somewhat shrouded by fog or clouds whenever I drive by).
Nonetheless, these two mountains, which have been landmarks for travelers for thousands of years, were demanding our attention, but we chose to ignore them, since we were on a time schedule.听听 We were soon bogged down in a traffic jam 10 miles long near Colorado Springs, which delayed us 3 hours.听 I don鈥檛 necessarily blame Wahatoya for the traffic jam which caused us to miss some 听meetings,听but something was definitely up.听 That night, in a Boulder hotel,听 I dreamed of a snow-covered mountain, rounded at the top, with a huge wedge-like protrusion down the side.听 In the dream, I tried to fly around the mountain to get a better look.听 At that point, I awoke, and thought, 鈥淚 have no idea what mountain that is, but it sure has a strange shape鈥.听
The next day, I had time to hike up to Blue Lake, a high mountain lake in the Indian Peaks Wilderness not far from Boulder.听听 The mountain above Blue Lake is called Paiute Peak.听 I thought perhaps Paiute Peak was the mountain in my dream, although it wasn鈥檛 rounded at the top, nor did it exhibit any wedge-like protrusion.
It was, however, gorgeous, so I did a Pipe ceremony there and felt very connected听to both the lake and mountain.听 Standing at the edge of Blue Lake at 11,500 feet,听well above timberline, and feeling a bit high from altitude and tobacco smoke,听 I concluded that this mountain was the mountain in the dream.听
Later that night, Frank (who is very intuitive) said he was sure I was wrong.听 His feeling was that we should actually travel around Wahatoya on our way back to Santa Fe so we could get a good look at the two mountains and compare them to the dream mountain.听 So we turned off I-25 at Walsenberg and found ourselves staring into the huge almost pyramid-like West Spanish Peak, which sure enough had a rounded top and a wedge-like protrusion down the west side.听 Frank found a dirt road which took us to a high pass looking straight into the south side of West Spanish Peak. We hiked out to a viewpoint and smoked a Pipe for Wahatoya.
The Spanish Peaks are in the Isabel National Forest and are protected as a Wilderness area known for its unique geological features, including 听tremendous听dikes of lava which create walls of rock a hundred feet high and up to 录-mile long.听 Locals report many sightings of UFO鈥檚 here.听 Frank and I didn鈥檛 see any UFO鈥檚, but we definitely experienced unusually powerful energy.听 We promised Wahatoya that we would be back soon.
July 31, 2012
