New Age Meets the Old West

The US Forest Service has zero tolerance for unpermitted campsites, unleashed dogs, and unsupervised fire rings, so they got really nervous last month when 12,000 members of the Rainbow Family of Living Light began to chant, drum, meditate, drink, drug, and run around naked in Big Red Park, 35 miles north of Steamboat Springs. Faced with so many hippies pooping in the woods, they called in so many reinforcements that cops outnumbered cows. Fat ones from Craig and skinny blonde ones from Boulder helped set up roadblocks and issued close to 600 citations for cracked windshields, panhandling, and illegal use of drugs and public lands.

When the New Age came to the Old West to demonstrate that people can live in harmony with nature and neighbors, if not the Forest Service, the Daily Disappointment spread fear and loathing. They wash in supermarket vegetable misters, shower at the car wash, eat from dumpsters, and steal cars and children. Accessing their website corrupts computers, their dogs spread parvo, and the Forest Service claims the soiree cost honest, hardworking American taxpayers $800,000 to say nothing of the burden trash collection and vagrants placed on city and county budgets. Although the owner of the local head shop, on advice from her personal spirits, locked up her crystals, incense and doors, the rape, pillage and plunder never materialized, and the county’s environmental health officer assures the land will cure itself, certainly by next summer.

Unlike the US Forest Service, the Brothers and Sisters of Love and Light pride themselves in having no spokesmen, no structure and no use for the group camping permit that Rangers insisted be obtained and assured would be denied. Rainbow people have been holding annual July 1-7 Gatherings in remote national forests for three decades. This year’s 8,800-foot Rocky Mountain high in the Routt National Forest was preceded by Colorado sojourns in the Roosevelt National Forest near Granby in 1972, and the White River National Forest near Paonia in 1992.

They came in graffiti-covered school busses, Westphalias and Subarus with American flags hanging in missing windows. They draped themselves in dreads, beads, tie-dye and handkerchief skirts worn over pants and, like their children and dogs, were hygiene-impaired. Some were preppy college kids packing charge cards, others were “weekend hippies” looking to relive Woodstock, but most were runaways, transients, jobless kids simply looking for a place to be. They were very White and very young, born well after 1969 when 450,000 hippies made Woodstock synonymous with creativity, excitement and excess by raising the bar for counter cultural parties and protest, psychedelic drugs and rock concerts, free love and peace movements. The Rainbow Gathering was no Woodstock and definitely not the kind of rainbow Jesse Jackson had in mind.

Thirty-five miles down the Elk River Road in Steamboat Springs—past designer ranches, Black Angus cattle, plein air painters and a “Jesus Saves” sign—stomps and freaks long ago learned to coexist. By the time the Hells Angels rode into town in 1996, locals were pretty much immune to druggies, dropouts and draft dodgers. They shot at each other, not us. Fact is the Boys at the Bar have never had a problem with people who want to make merry, play tunes and question authority. They’ve been cheating on game wardens, building inspectors and their old ladies for years. Colorado was homesteaded by people who found Kansas and Nebraska boring, and has been partying ever since kids learned to do flips on skis in 1913.

So downtown at the traditional Independence Day parade, pioneer picnic, rodeo and barbecues, nobody gave much of a nevermind to the long-hairs. Ardys said, it’s a shame their parents never took them camping. Harvey wondered whether the feds were enforcing logging, mining and grazing permits on public lands with the same gusto. Peter suggested the gendarmes should have taken every outhouse in the county up to Big Red Park so hippies wouldn’t be forced to poop in the woods. Then maybe, they would pass their Magic Hat to balance the federal budget.

Nobody quite understood how Circles for visioning, talking, healing and drumming could create peace. Marv says, you want peace, you don’t stand around ohming in the woods. You want a new world order, you march on Washington or join the Army. Down at the Corral Club, the Boys at the Bar say they are not convinced that peace guides the planets and love steers the stars, but they are darn sure those Rainbow People are going to continue to drive, vote and procreate. The Boys in Philadelphia planned it that way.