[00:00:11] Speaker A: Welcome to we are Chafee's looking upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanness and well being rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I'm Adam Williams. Today I'm talking with Chris White. He's the founder and builder of yurts at Ponchapaz. A handful of yurts offer affordable housing and where hes building an earthship and developing a model for sustainable community. Its a big effort with a long term vision. We talk about that vision and I was so curious to know how and why he came to this place geographically and philosophically. From a career as a marine biologist and an oceanographer. He used to study gray whales in British Columbia and bottlenose dolphins and wave energy in Peru. Now hes committed to a life of building community and sustainable practices in the landlocked mountains of Colorado. Chris also has many years of experience as a firefighter and EMT, which he started doing when he was a sophomore in high school. He also has years of experience on ski patrol. And along with all that, we talk about time banking, a community based economic concept that Chris uses at Yurts at Poncha Pass.
Overall, Chris shares some really thoughtful insights. He clearly is a deep thinker who brings a lot to a conversation. I enjoyed this. I hope you do as well.
The Looking up stream podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority. Show notes with photos, links and a transcript of the conversation are
[email protected]. dot. You can see more photos and support the podcasteare chafypod on Instagram. All right, here is Chris White.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: I'm going to jump right in with you, Chris.
One of the most burning questions on my mind since I've heard of you, learned about you just a little bit is how did a marine biologist who dedicated many years to advanced studies in the field in marine biology, oceanography, conservation, how did you end up landlocked in the mountains of Colorado, building yurts at Ponchapas?
[00:02:21] Speaker C: That's a good question. And I guess it's the answer's kind of a winding road to that destination.
From if you do any sort of biological research where you just spend time in a world that's kind of pristine, let's say, like a biological or a rainforest or a coral reef, you just see this intricate dance between species, and this has been crafted over millions and millions of years. It's just such a wondrous sight to really pay attention to it. And when you see something like that, it'll quickly turn you into a conservationist and so I was doing a lot of coral reef science, specifically towards the end, during a master's with the University of Amsterdam, and just realized very quickly that the research I was doing was fundamental research. So you're doing small interaction, trying to add a tile to the pile of.
[00:03:27] Speaker D: Our knowledge between, let's say, corals and micrograzers or something, but meanwhile, you have this insane process happening of carbon emissions and eutrophication and sea level rise and sea surface temperature rise, just these really crazy threats. And so I really kind of came around to the idea that if people.
[00:03:52] Speaker C: Are the source of this problem, then.
[00:03:53] Speaker D: People are the solution. And I wanted to live my life in a way that had some sort of, let's say, today, impact versus studying some fundamental research, being able to put those papers into journals and then having a couple hundred people read those. But right now, I think there's just so much more pressing work that needs to be done in the literal saving of our ourselves and our ecosystems that I needed to move away from that fundamental research.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: I know that you grew up in Santa Fe, and I'm curious, again, landlocked. How did you even become interested in the ocean, in marine biology, as opposed to maybe conservation that might have been more central to something like New Mexico, Colorado, the mountains?
[00:04:44] Speaker C: Yeah, that's an interesting question, too. I always felt like I was born a couple hundred years too late. I always wanted to be an explorer and see new things. I think a lot of people, you know, especially like van lifers, this day and age, in a world where everything.
[00:05:01] Speaker D: Is nine to five and regimented and.
[00:05:03] Speaker C: Under kind of this capitalistic guild, people want to have this, you know, new experience. And so I always thought, you know.
[00:05:12] Speaker D: I want to be an explorer, and.
[00:05:14] Speaker C: I used to maybe think of being an astronaut, but then the more you learn about that, you realize you're in a tin can kind of pushing buttons to keep yourself alive.
[00:05:22] Speaker D: At least that's where we are with space right now, in my opinion.
[00:05:26] Speaker C: But if you go underwater, it's literally the closest thing you'll get to an alien world. I mean, if you ever seen a squid come up to you and use its comatophores and just change colors, and it's literally communicating with you, it looks.
[00:05:41] Speaker D: Like you're on an alien planet. And so I was really driven by this exploration of the unknown. And going underwater literally is that place, I think, and it still is in so many regards. If people haven't been scuba diving, I encourage them, because what you see underwater is just fascinating.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: I got certified many years ago and then never did anything more with it, scuba diving wise.
So I only have a few dives. Whatever it took to get certified, I think it is amazing. I wish that I maybe had explored a little further. I think you did a lot further. Can you tell me more about some of that experience from your time as a marine biologist? I think you worked with bottlenose dolphins. I know you explored wave energy. What are some of those areas that you tapped into for a while before deciding to move on to the mountains again?
[00:06:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I guess there was kind of, like three distinct areas. I used to study whales, specifically gray whales, up in Canada. That was during my bachelor's, and that was interesting. We'd go out every morning at dawn in a little boat, and you'd go into the broken group islands. It's one of the most pristine areas on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
[00:07:01] Speaker D: I.
[00:07:01] Speaker C: And we would take these pictures of these. We'd find the whales. You'd see them spouting off, and at sunrise you can kind of see their spouts. So that was how we would find them. And then we kind of hang out with them about 100 yards away. And every time they would porpoise or they would fluke and show you the bottom of their tails, you take a picture, and then you can.
Really painstaking process, but put those pictures.
[00:07:26] Speaker D: Into a database and basically start id ing them to the individual. And I had maybe 50 to 75 interactions over the course of, like a month or two. Wow.
[00:07:38] Speaker C: And realized after it was all processed that it was the same, like, seven.
[00:07:42] Speaker D: Whales that I was hanging out with every day. And that made a lot of sense.
[00:07:47] Speaker C: And it kind of brings up the.
[00:07:48] Speaker D: Site fidelity that a lot of these.
[00:07:50] Speaker C: Whales, the gray whales, it's the largest migration mammal migration on earth. They go from Baja all the way.
[00:07:56] Speaker D: To the Bering Sea.
[00:07:58] Speaker C: But a lot of these older ones.
[00:08:00] Speaker D: Are the ones with calves. They don't go all the way up. And so there's a lot of questions, and you start getting into these intricacies of why people or why these animals do things.
[00:08:09] Speaker C: I equate it to culture a lot.
[00:08:10] Speaker D: So if you have humans, humans have.
[00:08:14] Speaker C: Very different diets depending on where they are in the world and also kind.
[00:08:18] Speaker D: Of different.
[00:08:20] Speaker C: Activities that they do, and you'll find that it's the same in nature. So there's been a lot of research on killer whales, orcas, for example, and they found that there's resident orcas off the coast of Vancouver island that live there, and then there's transients that kind of move everywhere else. And transients have a very specific ecological fact. They will eat mammals, whereas the residents eat fish. So these keystone species have this very.
[00:08:51] Speaker D: Different impact on the world.
[00:08:52] Speaker C: So we say, oh, well, we have enough killer whales, or there's populations healthy enough. And it's like, well, which culture of killer whales do you have? What is the makeup?
[00:09:02] Speaker D: Because they have very different impacts in our environment and social activities.
[00:09:07] Speaker C: They'll play sounds to otters of resident.
[00:09:11] Speaker D: Killer whales, and these otters don't care at all. They just keep hanging out. But then they play transient noises, and the otters immediately are alerted because that's the one that's coming after them. So even the otter understands that there's different types of orcas here. And you'll keep going into this. You know, it's a wormhole of information. And, you know, we talk about humans and human health, how much we know about our own health, about medicines. I mean, it's one of our most exhausted forms of education or knowledge that we've invested in ourselves. And I think that really kind of exists. With whatever information platform that you're searching, you can find out more and more information. So, yeah, really fascinating. And then, yeah, I went to Peru specifically after that effort and was studying bottlenose dolphins. Same thing, photo identification. We studied about 200 coast south of Lima. I was trying to work with a group to conserve dolphins, and in order to conserve them, you start researching them and you start understanding which dolphins are hanging out with which other dolphins and where they live. And I found there was an interesting thing, and you'd have to put this under research to find it and control for variables. But as we move north, the populations we would encounter would be increasingly likely to come and bow, ride with us and surf on the boat. And I just felt that was an interesting, learned trait that was being learned by different populations. But the further south you would be, the less likely they would interact with you.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: Was it difficult to leave behind this kind of work? And, you know, you described it as the wonders of the world, right? You're out there in this area where so few of us really are spending that time and with intimacy to learn these things and get to know these other very large ocean bound mammals. There's a level of familiarity, and I don't know if I apply the word friendship or something. Maybe I'm putting that on you, maybe I'm putting that on the whales. But you develop a relationship, maybe that's a better word, with those whales that you were studying, for example, and you can narrow it down to, oh, it's only about seven, and you keep seeing them. I guess I'm just wondering if it was difficult to say goodbye to that when you decided, I need to go do something else, which is we're going to get to talking about, in part, yurts at Panchapas and building an earthship and the community that you are there.
[00:11:53] Speaker C: Yeah. So I guess it's one of those things where once you've learned something, you can't unlearn it, you know, and then it becomes part of your truth. And for me, learning about climate change and, you know, just plastic and these human processes that are largely unsustainable right now, you know, in order to save the thing that you love, you have to sometimes go away from it, and that's just the truth of it. And if you try and stay there, in a way, you're not living that truth anymore and you just know that you could potentially be in doing more. And for me, that just became an overwhelming feeling of, I have to try and do something here that's meaningful in some way besides just being with these creatures and this ecosystems and just writing about it, you know, it's not having the impact that's necessary right now. And, yeah. So then when I made that decision, I was recruited to lead an operations of wave energy. So actually, this company called at motion out of Santa Fe, which is interesting. I was the only marine biologist kicking around in Santa Fe at the time.
That's probably what happened, to be honest, and had been to Peru and had learned Spanish and had some experience in the country. They asked if I wanted to be the operations of that project.
[00:13:31] Speaker D: So we went down to Peru, or I did, and suddenly was, you know, in charge of trying to do fabrication and imports and tried to get the first marine permit for testing wave energy, which I ultimately was able to do.
[00:13:49] Speaker C: That took about two years, but we got the first permit to test wave energy in Peru, which was really pretty wild. And, yeah, we just started testing wave energy and it was really interesting because it was the idea of perhaps hacking a new source of clean energy for the world, like what a phenomenal impact that could be.
[00:14:10] Speaker D: And so we tried that and then.
[00:14:14] Speaker C: The ocean is just this wild, chaotic place. There's just, you know, seawater's corrosive, there's crazy forces, there's just so much energy in the ocean.
It was really a difficult thing to hack. And so, yeah, it was a challenge.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: Let me ask about your EMT and firefighting experience, because that, I know, started at a young age, too. And it's an interesting. I don't know if it's a parallel line, as you would consider with these other studies, and, I don't know, career and life work sorts of lines. When and why did you also pick up that piece of your life to be an EMT and a firefighter?
[00:15:00] Speaker C: I give a lot of credit to the just the school I was going to. They demanded. We did a certain amount of community service, and I did a couple years of teaching kids or whatever how to read or things, and then ultimately, again.
[00:15:15] Speaker D: That same kind of excitement. And I guess I wanted a lot of responsibility. I joined the fire department in 10th grade, and that just kind of put me on a trajectory of, you know, going to calls, and they put me through my EMT. They paid for that in my senior year. And then it became kind of this trade that I would be able to do whenever something like wasn't working. So I graduated my bachelor's in 2009, and that was right after kind of the economic collapse. And it was brutal trying to get work, but you can always get a job on an ambulance, plugging holes and pulling people out of homes.
And so, yeah, that kind of became what I did every time something happened. So then I applied for grad school.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: While on the ambulance, and then went to grad school.
[00:16:09] Speaker D: And then while writing my thesis for that, I was back on the ambulance and then waiting for the next thing. And then I ended up doing the wave energy thing. And that ultimately didn't work out. And I learned a lot in that aspect of this wave energy thing because it was kind of this top down idea again. So we're going to create a new energy source, and when it doesn't work and you have all this manufacturing, you know, steel boats and buoys and pontoons and pumps, and there was a lot of interesting ideas. Like, it was a small, modular concept, so we were trying to engage small fishermen to run the systems and be in charge to give them the local employment. So there's a lot of really good aspects of it that I was still thinking might make it work. But when it ultimately didn't work, just because the physics of the ocean was eating this system, it got me thinking, because we were working in IlO mostly, which is just north of Chile, it's like, right on the edge of the Aracama desert. This is the driest place in the world. If we had been successful and we had implemented all these pumps to basically pump seawater ashore, put it through either a Pelton wheel for electricity, but eventually, with the reduction of wind and solar, that was no longer going to be economically viable. So then it was put it through an Ro membrane and make fresh water, which is, again, fresh water. It's such a big issue right now. And if we could do it with clean energy, that's really important. But if we were successful and you now are generating fresh water in the driest place in the world, and you bring 2510 more million people there, and they're suddenly dependent on these systems that.
[00:17:55] Speaker C: Are in place, built for the good of humanity, but in good intention, but then create this place for people to live that inherently wasn't sustainable in the first place.
[00:18:09] Speaker D: And I pulled a lot from that because it's like, okay, well, what is sustainability? How do we live in kind of harmony with nature and not create such an intense impact that causes so much chaos? And, you know, when you start talking about this, we're talking about, you know, this goes into coastal cities, it goes into building on fault lines. It's just, I don't know if humans are capable at our scale of not putting ourselves in precarious positions. It's kind of in our nature, perhaps.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: Why do you think it's in our nature?
Why wouldn't it be in our nature that we would try to avoid such things? That if we can look out far enough and be like, well, this could be a problem. Building on a fault line, for example.
[00:18:57] Speaker C: Yeah, I guess it goes back to that explorer. Like, can't I. Why can't I do it, right? Like climbing a mountain, climbing a 14, or, like, climbing Everest, you know, going under the ocean, going to space. I mean, humans inherently want to see if they can do something, if they can be in a place and accomplish something, right? I mean, you look at X Games, you look at sports, you just.
[00:19:21] Speaker D: It's.
[00:19:22] Speaker C: It's kind of what we're driven. And maybe that's like a biological cue. Like, if you're going to survive in this world, you have to be able to build a strong enough spore to get to the next tree, to get to the next place. It's part of life is to struggle as hard as possible so that survival is potentially something in biology, the ability.
[00:19:47] Speaker D: To survive is by no means guaranteed. And we're flying through space on this rock, surrounded by, you know, zero temperature in just really intense circumstances. The very idea of life is kind of struggle, you know, make it happen or else, right? And it's been that way. It's in our cues, I guess.
[00:20:09] Speaker C: But if we step back and we.
[00:20:11] Speaker D: Say, okay, hold on, let's talk about sustainability again. And I think that's ultimately where a lot of processes are kind of taking us. Like, Covid was a good kind of reminder that we are fundamentally tied to this world in our ecosystems. And a lot of the most unsustainable practices, like destination resorts, cruise ships flying, all of those got hit the hardest. And the things that actually were the most resilient were probably small mountain towns or people living their, you know, lives on farms. People on farms probably, you know, woke up the next day and kept farming. Right. The people in the cities are the ones who are locked up and the most struggling the most. So I think it's kind of a cue to us to say, wait a minute, let's look at this and say, okay, we are tied to this thing. How do we live in harmony with nature? And so that whole thing, especially the wave energy, kind of made me step back and say, okay, how do I tie into this? And it was really, let's start with your own home, you know, then start with your community, then start with your town. You know, sustainability. I think why it's so difficult to achieve is because it's from the ground up. It's the only real thing that actually has to be grown locally. It's not sure we can do a lot of top down. I mean, there's definitely, you know, utility scale solar, utility scale wind, utility scale battery to transition us from a lot of these fossil fuels and city planning and whatnot, all of these things. But we. A lot of it has to come from kind of ourselves. And we all need to start taking a level of responsibility for ourselves in our community if we actually want to realize, you know, these more sustainable living practices. And so that's kind of why I started yurts at Ponchapas and kind of a mixed use education facility for people to come out and learn about these things.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: I want to get to yurts at Ponchapas. There's a lot I want to ask you about there so we can all learn about this. But before we do, let's go back to when you started with the fire department. You were only a sophomore in high school, and I'm wondering about the experience of that for you, going on calls, because they wouldn't necessarily know what you were going to see or be part of, right? Like, you would just go on calls. It wasn't necessarily, I'm assuming wasn't necessarily selected. Like, oh, this was on the radio. They're saying, this is a pretty bad car wreck. Let's leave you behind. So you don't see the things like, what was that like at 1516 years old to be part of such real human tragedy and whatever else you encounter?
[00:22:59] Speaker C: Yeah, that's interesting.
It just is what it is. I guess I gravitated towards the responsibility. There's a lot of responsibility that comes very quickly and I felt I was mature enough to handle that.
[00:23:17] Speaker D: One of my first jobs was serving and I had worked in the same restaurant serving the same people for two years. It was like a retirement community. I had only done it on Sundays.
[00:23:27] Speaker C: Starting in 7th grade or something.
[00:23:30] Speaker D: And I worked for two years serving these people meals. And then after two years I was about to leave and I was really proud that it was my first job. I was living on good terms. And this table that I've been serving for two years turned to me and said, are you new here?
[00:23:45] Speaker C: And it just felt, it just deflated.
[00:23:47] Speaker D: Me so much because I just felt like I want to have my work be meaningful and maybe that's a common thread in all of it and have.
[00:23:56] Speaker C: Connection with, you know, you're going to.
[00:24:00] Speaker D: Work hard at something. You want it to have some sort of value, some sort of impact beyond, you know, rotating the clock. And on the fire department, when you show up to a call, people are really excited that you're there because they need you. And yeah, there's just a lot of responsibility. You start messing around with a lot of tools. You start learning about, you know, they got. As soon as I turned 18, I could drive all the trucks, talking big pumper trucks, you know, these big tonnage vehicles.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: That's a lot of responsibility.
[00:24:30] Speaker C: Yeah. And it was wild.
They put me into two years of wildland firefighting where you're doing initial attacks in the Grand Canyon and different things and working with helicopters. And it was a pretty awesome thing. I will say that I do think after three tours on the ambulance, each of them about a year, I think the human is still can only deal with so much trauma. I think there's kind of a level there. And so I knew it was a.
[00:25:05] Speaker D: Place where I couldn't stay forever, I couldn't help forever. You can't see that much trauma and keep doing that forever. I think most of the medics I was working with, you could see it in their faces and their lives. And I don't think it gets talked about, about nearly enough and I don't think EMS specifically gets paid nearly enough. But that's a whole other side note, because most of these EMS services in America are privately run, whereas fire and police are funded by cities and states, and EMS is just this. It's a pretty brutal industry, but it.
[00:25:41] Speaker C: Was my one trade, and I think that trade was good because it helped me tie different projects together and have something in between to not fall through the crack of debt and things like that.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: It's something you still do.
[00:25:58] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:25:59] Speaker C: So I've been working Monarch ski patrol. This is going to be my 6th year, and I work in the ICU at the heart of the Rockies. This is also my 6th year, both part time now. When I first moved to this area for the yurts to build that idea in 2018, they were full time jobs, which was a lot, but largely, there are places where I can work and help out, but it's something that I'm slowly moving away from in that regard. But, yeah, I do still enjoy working at these places and having maybe more of an educator role versus, you know, you're still doing calls and stuff, but there's other young individuals who are just getting started in their medical career, and they're really excited in Gung ho, and it's okay that they jump at those. And then if I can be there to assist and advise and, you know, correct a couple things here or there, it's good. It's kind of a changing of the guard.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: We obviously need people in those roles, and there is that natural, probably risk of turnover just naturally by you're talking about the trauma of it, I'm also thinking about the people who are older. When you started as a teenager, hearing what you're saying, it almost makes me feel a little surprised that people were like, yeah, let's bring this young kid into it, and it might have an even deeper impact because you were younger and how that might be formative for you.
[00:27:30] Speaker D: Yeah, I think if.
[00:27:32] Speaker C: I mean, the group of people I was with were incredibly supportive. It's really interesting to volunteer initially on the onset. That's how it started for me before I started doing these paid positions. But when you show up at a call at three in the morning and it's just volunteers, it's fundamentally different than a job because everybody that showed up is happy to be there. You know, there's nobody complaining ever.
[00:27:57] Speaker D: They're all there because they're trying their best and trying to support each other.
[00:28:03] Speaker C: That kind of family is.
[00:28:04] Speaker D: Is very strong, and I think the value of even a couple of years of that for our youth is very rewarding and powerful in putting them in good positions. It also occupies a lot of your time. So when you're in high school, and that's a lot of time where you can get in a lot of trouble if you just have idle hands. I think it's the good outweighs the risk in that. And I think there's, with that family, there's a lot of tools and resources to make sure that people are handling calls correctly. And there's definitely times where there's maybe incidences where you have fatalities and there are older individuals that say, hey, just stay in the truck right now. There's no need for you to see this right now. And so I think that was also prevalent. And that's, you know, the family of that department and 70% of our firefighter resources across the country are volunteer firefighters and medics. And so I think anybody listening who is either in a fire department or part of one of these families understands and relates to the idea that we take care of our own and we do our best to do the job right and get it done.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: So, yurts, at Ponchapass, you have three pillars that you go by in your mission for that. Sustainability is one of them, which we've already talked some about. Community and education are the others. I'd like to get into some of that, about this community that you're building. There. You have five yurts. You're building an earthship. What all is going on there?
[00:29:48] Speaker C: Yeah. So when we go back to, you know, okay, let's focus on realizing true sustainable living practices and what that looks like, I felt it was really important to just start doing the practice instead of joining the chorus of, we should do this or you should do that. The world is full of people pointing fingers at each other right now on all the things that they're doing wrong or all the things that we should be doing better. And I think it was imperative for me to just try and do it.
[00:30:23] Speaker D: Myself and lead by example.
[00:30:26] Speaker C: I don't know if you've ever tried to argue a point with somebody and you might spend an entire night arguing.
[00:30:31] Speaker D: With one person, and if they're already set in their ways, you've kind of lost your whole night trying to make this point or something.
I think there's so much more value to creating a place where people actually are seeking you out, and then you can have that conversation with ten people. And so I'd rather have a conversation with ten people on how to make things better and spend my night that way than try and argue with one person. I just feel your time is better spent doing the. The hard work and getting it done. So the idea of your subconscious pass was supposed to be a mixed use concept. So we do affordable housing in the winter for a lot of the young folks who live on the river or live in their vans and want to still live here during the winter mostly I have monarch employees up there during the winter. And then in the spring and fall I started doing workshops so people can come for two weeks and learn about.
[00:31:37] Speaker C: The yurts, learn about earthships, learn about.
[00:31:39] Speaker D: Time banking, all these kind of things that have nuances of living practice, sustainable living practices, how to realize them.
[00:31:49] Speaker C: In a way, a lot of this.
[00:31:51] Speaker D: Has kind of come from the process.
[00:31:55] Speaker C: Of building a home and realizing that affordability and the fact that most housing is not affordable for young people.
[00:32:04] Speaker D: You can't really talk about sustainability if you don't have the ability to live sustainably or just live right. We have to create affordable living practices and community in order to even get to the place where we can discuss sustainability. So in this process of building the arts, I have been pulling in a lot of these ideas of saying, how do we hack situation and make things more accessible to people? And what I've kind of come to realize is that community is fundamentally important.
We need to empower each other in these ways. So I guess if we step back here, it's kind of like we're dealing with this juggernaut of, let's say, capitalism and these unsustainable practices. And you gotta go to the market for dog care, you gotta go to the market for childcare, you gotta go to the market for food. You live in a cul de sac, you live in a food desert, you're not allowed to change your cul de sac. You're not allowed to have a community garden. There's a lot of intrinsic law and code that's been built. And it's, you know, these are, it's all been built over time to largely increase profits for large corporates.
You know, it's going to take a lot of work to kind of create sustainability. And I think if you're going to talk about grassroots and ground up, we have to, in a way, take back our streets in a lot of aspects. And so some of what I'm teaching is like, how do we do that? So how do we work as a community and with each other to support each other and use each other's value to really leverage our common goals? So, yeah, we have these workshops, and it's about building elegant, tiny houses that are simple, or it's about building maybe a higher sweat equity project like an earthship that's truly off grid, that has no fossil fuels whatsoever. But I'm not sure that there's ever going to be a silver bullet here. Right? So I'm trying to create a space for people to come and explore these different options and these different alternatives to signing up for a 30 year mortgage, buying a home, and being committed to whatever job society is offering them for the next 30, 40 years. We saw that in 2008 when suddenly people are supposed to be retiring at 65 and corporates are saying, oh, sorry, there's no money here anymore. You have to work another ten years. Like, these rug pulls are just brutal and it just keeps kind of happening. And I think a lot of people are feeling very overwhelmed by the lack of power that they seem to have over their own lives. And, you know, how do we get back to that? And I think when we get back to that and we start supporting each other, that's when we can actually then start having the conversation of how do we do this? Where we're actually creating a more resilient community and sustainable community and whatnot. So that's kind of what we're doing there. It's been a very slow process, started in 2018, and that's difficult because you're out there for, I think, the first two years I was out there building the yurts.
You're just out there kind of doing the thing and wondering what kind of impact is this having? And it's just in the last, like two or three years where we're starting to have full workshops and doing two a year in the spring and fall, and seeing how people are impacted by them, that things are really starting to, you know, connect now. And it's. It's pretty exciting.
[00:36:02] Speaker B: This is a long term commitment you're talking about. You have this land, you're. You're building these homes, you're having the workshops. It's already six years or so.
I'm curious about the vision you have for this community going forward and what might be on your mind. Are you thinking this is a 1020, 50 year idea, that, like, this is where you are now giving and contributing your life for all the things you've just described?
[00:36:29] Speaker C: Yeah, that's, you know, I guess I've seen a lot of the world. I've been very fortunate to, to travel a lot for the wave energy project and work and school and.
Yeah. So for me, at some point, it was, I have to start somewhere, and it's hard to not have a tangible place to start from. So I was specifically looking for a piece of land that made sense for the ability to do this project. And very serendipitously stumbled upon this piece. And I think part of it is just building it and building it with other people. And I think as you build more and more community, and I'm certainly working with my neighbors, trying to get a community farm off the ground. That's the goal. In the next couple years, that would be more animal husbandry. I'm not quite there yet because I don't want to be watching the goats every day.
But with enough people committing to the.
[00:37:36] Speaker D: Idea, maybe you just have to watch it on Mondays.
I think as you build more sustainable practices and more resiliency, it actually allows you to step back and have somebody else step into the role of watching things. So we do nightly rentals in the summer. This is our. Let me see. This is the fourth year that I've been doing that. The first year I ran it. And that itself, you know, it takes work.
[00:38:08] Speaker C: You gotta get in there every day and clean yurts and you gotta make sure that it's, you know, crystal clean. I kind of say that we're selling Disneyland to adults.
You know, for an adult to come to the middle of nowhere and have a pristine living environment, that's kind of a weird concept, right? I mean, you're going out into the middle of nowhere and you expect it to be pristinely clean. That is a Disneyland kind of concept. But those individuals are supporting this dream there. That's the economic engine that allows me to do workshops for free for people in the spring and fall and allows me to offer convert the yurts to affordable housing. And that is also supporting the further infrastructure of building this earthship, which will be long term affordable and sustainable housing. So, yeah, it's, you know, you kind of build this clock in a way. And if you can build the clock correctly, maybe it gets to a point where it's running to a certain degree. I mean, for sure, it'll probably be my forever home because it's just what I'm. What I've committed to. But, you know, if we're having meaningful impact and a variable change of kind of career. So you're kind of doing many things. So right now it's mostly building this earthship, but some days it's customers relations, some days it's trying to plant trees.
[00:39:37] Speaker D: That helps me a lot because it's not one job. I'm not a kind of a clog in the clock. I'm kind of running around tinkering with all of it. And that helps me, you mentioned time.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: Banking, and I imagine that's a new concept for almost everyone, maybe. So let's explain that. Let's talk a little bit about what time banking is and how that gets applied at yurts, at punch of pass.
[00:39:59] Speaker D: Yeah, so this is actually, I think.
[00:40:01] Speaker C: One of the most powerful tools that I've learned about, and I think can be one of these, like, game changers for people wherever they are. So if people are listening to this in Denver or they're listening to it in Colorado Springs or somewhere else, it's just such a powerful tool. I kind of came across it when I was working with my friend.
He was a carpenter, and we were during COVID I was still building out the interior and the yurts, and he.
[00:40:32] Speaker D: Would come and help me for a day, and then he was building fences around Salida and BVD. And so then I would go and help him, and I just. You just learn that, or you see it very quickly that when, especially in construction, if you and I try and do something, let's say you spend 4 hours on it, you might get four x of work. And you would expect that if I helped you, that we might do eight x worth of work. But that simply is not true, because when we're helping each other and we're holding boards, it just goes way quicker. So it's kind of a multiplier. You get like kind of three x of work out of that same amount of time. And when I can help you realize your project, and you can help me realize my project, it's so much more valuable to me to be working in my community for the betterment of my community on these different things. And you just start seeing these value adds that keep coming out of basically focusing on ourselves and our community instead of, let's say, corporate taking most of your work, all the value out of that work, and everyone feeling just kind of exhausted and not properly paid when you're time banking. And that's kind of the formalization of it saying, okay, let's just measure hours here. Let's make sure that we're valuing each other equally in our efforts. It's just. It's incredibly powerful. And so I think it can be applied to childcare. So, you know, if you find the right five people, the right five families that are all raising similar age kids, why is it such a crazy idea that of those five people, that you would take care of them on Mondays and you would take care of them on Tuesdays, and I would take care of them on Wednesdays, and suddenly now yes, you have five kids on Mondays, and you probably should do an organized educational structure there. But then you also have four days of childcare taken care of. And again, our society is doing a very good job of pumping out a lot of true crime, a lot of intense things where it says you should not trust your neighbors, you should not trust your community, and you should live in this sterile cul de sac, and you should go to the market for everything, because that's a. The only place where there's safety. And I really reject that idea and think that when we value each other and we have this communal effort and time banking can be applied to wherever you are. And so I know that not everyone can build fresh. We have a lot of infrastructure that's already in place, but how many if.
[00:43:16] Speaker C: We can just yurt at Pontiac?
[00:43:19] Speaker D: It's just a. A place to learn or to kind of test out and realize these ideas. Those ideas can be applied in many places, right? We can go to our hoa if we're in a cul de sac and say, we really do want to change this, where we have a community garden, where we do have like, a commonality. And maybe I am going to post where let's have a meet and greet all the people who potentially want to share childcare in the neighborhood and come up with a system. I think it behooves us to give it a try to empower ourselves.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: I want to ask about maybe a different perspective on time banking, because I'm not necessarily assuming that what you mean is every person who would come out and work on things for you, you're having to make a list and be like, okay, now I owe hours to help these twelve people on their projects. Like, if I come help you, are you going to come to my house then? Is that the only way time banking works? Or is there some other element of this that we ought to describe?
[00:44:24] Speaker C: Well, I mean, I think it's new and I mean, I think it's an old idea, but it's always going to be between you and your community. So whatever shape that looks like. And so when I teach it, I also talk about kind of the methodology of creating it. And it's going to be very specific.
[00:44:44] Speaker D: To everybody's personal circumstances, and there's ways to make it more successful by clearly laying out when you start a project or when you're on the clock and you're off the clock, just like, you know, clocking in and work, you keep track of that. It's important to also close out hours that you owe someone within a season because maybe that person leaves the next season or they go somewhere else or also the gap. If I come and help you and I'm helping you for maybe 100 hours, at maybe a certain point, the value to you is to no longer to like, walk away because, you know, you don't want to keep working. And this is the same with a credit card. A credit card is not going to give you unlimited capital because it's a certain point it's going to. You're probably gonna walk away from that because the value to repay it is too high. So there's, you know, there's some difficulties of within an industry I think is always important. Like if it's childcare or dog care or construction, it's very hard to probably do it, you know, within different industries. Like if you give me a legal consultation, I'm not sure I can, you know, make a meaningful comparison of construction. But on a basis level, when you're living with different people, there's always ways to do that. So I have a lot of people who want to live in the yurts during the winter, and some individuals want a time bank during the summer, and so they come out and help me out on the earthship. And then I just, you know, say you, your rent is cheaper, right? Because you've helped me out and I've, you know, that would equate to so much. And you don't need to pay me that much as rent because I've earned it from your labor. Right.
[00:46:36] Speaker B: It sounds like in that case, you're applying dollar value to those hours.
[00:46:41] Speaker D: Yeah, at a certain point there's, you know, it makes sense to do that sometimes, if that's how it translates.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: I think sometimes these concepts can feel abstract, especially when for most of us, we've not spent any time with them or thinking about them and how they apply. I do appreciate the community aspect of that, and it's about knitting together that community. If I. I don't actually know my neighbors, I know them well enough to recognize them on the street and wave. I'm not even 100% sure I'd recognize all of them if I saw them in the grocery store, because now they're out of context. So we don't actually have relationship. But if I had that circle of people where it's like, well, this is what I can do for you, and I can help and you can help me.
It just seems like a neighborly community kind of thing to just help each other.
[00:47:26] Speaker C: Yeah. And there's a lot of value add because when you help your neighbor with whatever they're trying to do, you're creating value in their lives, and that's making them more resilient than it's making them probably happier, more peaceful. All of these things that, you know, so if we look at, like, politics.
[00:47:47] Speaker D: Is incredibly toxic right now, right. It just is. It's just, you know, on a national level, let's say. But I live with people on the other side of the spectrum all around me.
[00:48:01] Speaker C: Right.
[00:48:01] Speaker D: Politically. But when you communicate with these neighbors about the things that we all have in common, like the road and plowing it during the winter or broken things or loaning trailers, I have incredibly good relations with all of them because we have way more in common than we have. That's not in common. And I think if we kind of step back from whatever national politics we might believe one way or another, what we all have in common is incredibly similar, which is, you know, we want the same things for our kids, for ourselves, for our families. And when we find ourselves in a position to empower each other, no matter what the politics may be, I think you find very quickly that there are very strong friendships that develop, and then.
[00:48:56] Speaker C: You actually get to a place where.
[00:48:58] Speaker D: You'Re listening to other people.
[00:49:00] Speaker C: And I think that's in a large concept.
[00:49:03] Speaker D: We need to get back to this. Like, how do we empower each other? And when we do that, there's. There's a lot of amazing things that.
[00:49:10] Speaker B: Start happening on the one to one, face to face level. People are good.
[00:49:15] Speaker C: Right?
[00:49:15] Speaker B: We help each other. We see that in each other. Yeah. It's when we pull back to this more abstract, vague national level, where everybody becomes grouped and othered. Well, makes it a lot more difficult.
[00:49:28] Speaker D: Right? And if we don't.
[00:49:30] Speaker C: If we can't, like, rely on our community, and you look at technology, a lot of that's, you know, this is evolving from that, right? So we're all on our phones, we're all on our computers. All of this communication is happening through a filter. A median of, you know, this person is somewhere else. They're not right in front of me.
[00:49:48] Speaker D: Right.
[00:49:49] Speaker C: Because people are. You're. Most people would, you know, not say negative things to somebody's face, because we just don't want to do that.
[00:49:57] Speaker D: On a fundamental level, I don't think people are willing to do that. But what they're willing to write online is pretty horrible things. And when you add these things of Netflix and just all this occupation where we're consumed by our media, instead of actually taking that time and putting it into our community. When you put that time into your community, you're breaking down all of these walls of them versus us. It becomes us. That community grows and becomes more valuable. And I think in this process, I'm trying to show it as an example. And I think a lot of people are coming and seeing this example and saying it's a very small example, but it's a powerful one. And when people see it out now, suddenly we're having a very intentional conversation, which I think is, you know, making things. Yeah, it's progress.
[00:50:57] Speaker B: Chris, it's been fascinating to talk with you about these ideas I'm going to include in the show
[email protected] dot we'll have your website for yurts at ponchapass. We'll have a link to your Instagram account for that. Thank you for making time today. Otherwise I know that you would be busy with your building and all the work that you do. So thank you very much.
[00:51:18] Speaker C: Yeah, pleasure being here. And if people want to come support the mission, you know, every visit helps us move the coin one further step along or getting, getting it so that people are educated and trying to, you know, make meaningful progress. So I appreciate you having me on the.
[00:51:44] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to we are chafees looking upstream podcast. I hope that our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you and if so, you can learn more in this episode. Show
[email protected] if you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email
[email protected] dot I also invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever platform you use that has that functionality. I also welcome your telling others about the Looking Upstream podcast help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation. Once again, I'm Adam Williams, host, producer and photographer. John Prey is engineer and producer. Thank you to Cahin 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado, and to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffey County Public Health and environment, and to Lisa Martin, community advocacy coordinator for the we are Chafee Storytelling initiative. The Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with the Chaffee County Department of Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority and is supported by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environments Office of Health Equity. You can learn more about the looking upstream
[email protected] and on Instagram erchapypod. You also can learn more about the overall we are Chafee storytelling
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