Chris White | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Chris White, founder and builder of Yurts at Poncha Pass, grew up in Santa Fe, left to become a marine biologist and oceanographer who studied gray whales in British Columbia and bottlenose dolphins and wave energy in Peru, and has since moved to the mountains of Colorado to build an earthship and a sustainable community.
He talks about all that with Adam Williams in this conversation, as well as his becoming an EMT as a sophomore in high school. Chris has many years of experience on ambulances and as a firefighter, including wildland, and as a ski patroller. He and Adam also talk about time banking, a community-based economic concept that Chris uses at Yurts at Poncha Pass.
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Public Health & Environment: Office of Health Disparities.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio FM in Salida, Colo.
Chris White
Website: yurtsatponchapass.com
Instagram: instagram.com/yurtsatponchapass
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:11): Welcome to We Are Chaffee: 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 Poncha Pass where a handful of yurts offer affordable housing and where he is building an earthship and developing a model for sustainable community. It’s 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, he’s committed to a life of building community and sustainable practices in the landlocked mountains of Colorado.
(00:59): 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.
(01:28): The Looking Upstream 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 published at wearchaffeepod.com. You can see more photos and support the podcast @wearchaffeepod on Instagram. All right, here is Chris White.
[Music transition, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (01:46): 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 Poncha Pass?
Chris White (02:21): That’s a good question, and I guess the answer’s 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 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 our knowledge between, let’s say, corals and micro-grazers 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.
(03:47): And so I really came around to the idea that if people are the source of this problem, then 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 of 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 ourselves and our ecosystems that I needed to move away from that fundamental research.
Adam Williams (04:28): 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’ve been more central to something like New Mexico, Colorado, the mountains?
Chris White (04:44): Yeah, that’s an interesting question too. I always felt like I was born a couple of hundred years too late. I always wanted to be an explorer and see new things. I think a lot of people, especially van lifers this day and age, in a world where everything is 9:00 to 5:00 and regimented and under this capitalistic guild, people want to have this new experience. And so I always thought I want to be an explorer. And 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 pushing buttons to keep yourself alive. At least that’s where we are with space right now in my opinion.
(05:26): But if you go underwater, it’s literally the closest thing you’ll get to an alien world. If you ever seen a squid come up to you and use its chromatophores and just change colors and it’s literally communicating with you, it looks 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 it because what you see underwater is just fascinating.
Adam Williams (06:06): I got certified many years ago and then never did anything more with it scuba diving-wise. 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?
Chris White (06:38): Yeah, I guess there was 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 go into the Broken Group islands. It’s one of the most pristine areas on the west coast of Vancouver Island. And we would take these pictures of these. We’d find the whales. You’d see them spouting off, and it’s sunrise.
You can see their spouts. That was how we would find them. And then we 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 into a database and basically start ID-ing them to the individual. And I had maybe 50 to 75 interactions over the course of a month or two.
Adam Williams (07:37): Wow.
Chris White (07:38): And realized after it was all processed that it was the same seven whales that I was hanging out with every day. And that made it a lot of sense. And it brings up the site fidelity that a lot of these whales, the gray whales, it’s the largest mammal migration on Earth. They go from Baja all the way to the Bering Sea, but a lot of these older ones 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. I equate it to culture a lot. So if you have humans, humans have very different diets depending on where they are in the world, and also different activities that they do. And you’ll find that it’s the same in nature.
(08:26): 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 move over 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 different impact on the world.
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?” Because they have very different impacts in our environment and social activities. They’ll play sounds to otters of resident killer whales, and these otters don’t care at all. They just keep hanging out. But then they play transient noises and the otters are immediately alerted because that’s the one that’s coming after them. So even the otter understands that there’s different types of orcas here.
(09:25): And you’ll keep going into this. It’s a wormhole of information. And we talk about humans and human health, how much we know about our own health, about medicines. It’s one of our most exhausted forms of education or knowledge that we’ve invested in ourselves. And I think that really exists with whatever information platform that you’re searching. You can find out more and more information. And so yeah, really fascinating.
(09:57): And then I went to Peru specifically after that effort and was studying bottlenose dolphins. Same thing, photo identification. We studied about 200 kilometers of the 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 boat 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.
Adam Williams (11:00): Was it difficult to leave behind this kind of work? And you described it as the wonders of the world. 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 Poncha Pass and building an Earthship and the community that you are there.
Chris White (11:53): Yeah, so I guess it’s one of those things where once you’ve learned something, you can’t unlearn it and then it becomes part of your truth. And for me, learning about climate change and just plastic and these human processes that are largely unsustainable right now, 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 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 these ecosystems and just writing about it. It’s not having the impact that’s necessary right now.
(12:57): And 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.
So we went down to Peru, or I did, and suddenly was 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. That took about two years, but we got the first permit to test wave energy in Peru, which was really pretty wild. And we just started testing wave energy.
(14:00): And it was really interesting because was the idea of perhaps hacking a new source of clean energy for the world, what a phenomenal impact that could be. And so we tried that. And then the ocean is just this wild, chaotic place. There’s just seawater is 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.
Adam Williams (14:33): 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?
Chris White (15:00): I give a lot of credit to just the school I was going to. They demanded we did a certain amount of community service, and I did a couple of years of teaching kids or whatever on how to read or things. And then ultimately, again, 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 put me on a trajectory of going to calls and they put me through my EMT. They paid for that in my senior year. And then it became this trade that I would be able to do whenever something wasn’t working. So I graduated my bachelor’s in 2009, and that was right after 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.
(15:58): And so yeah, that became what I did every time something happened. So then I applied for grad school while on the ambulance and then went to grad school. 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’s 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, steel boats and buoys and pontoons and pumps, and there was a lot of interesting ideas. 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.
(16:56): 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 right on the edge of the Atacama 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 to shore, put it through a pellet or 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.
(17:40): But if we were successful and you now are generating fresh water in the driest place in the world and you bring 2, 5, 10 more million people there and they’re suddenly dependent on these systems that are in place built for the good of humanity and in good intention, but then create this place for people to live that inherently wasn’t sustainable in the first place. And I pulled a lot from that because it’s like, okay, well what is sustainability? How do we live in harmony with nature and not create such an intense impact that causes so much chaos? When you start talking about this, we’re talking about this goes into coastal cities. It goes into building on fault lines. Just I don’t know if humans are capable at our scale of not putting ourselves in precarious positions. It’s in our nature perhaps.
Adam Williams (18:45): 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.
Chris White (18:57): Yeah, I guess it goes back to that explorer. Why can’t I do it, right? Climbing a mountain, climbing the 14 or climbing Everest, going under the ocean, going into space. Humans inherently want to see if they can do something, if they can be in a place and accomplish something. You look at X Games, you look at sports, it’s what we’re driven. And maybe that’s like a biological cue.
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 to survive is by no means guaranteed. And we’re flying through space on this rock surrounded by zero temperature and just really intense circumstances. The very idea of life is struggle, make it happen or else, and it’s been that way. It’s in our cues, I guess.
(20:09): But if we step back and we say, “Okay, hold on. Let’s talk about sustainability again.” And I think that’s ultimately what a lot of processes are taking us. COVID was a good 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 lives on farms, people on farms probably woke up the next day and kept farming. The people in the cities are the ones who are locked up and the most struggling the most. So I think it’s 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?'”
(21:08): And so that whole thing, especially the wave energy, made me step back and say, “Okay, how do I tie into this?” And it was really, let’s start with your own home, then start with your community, then start with your town. 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.
There’s definitely 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 a lot of it has to come from ourselves, and we all need to start taking a level of responsibility for ourselves and our community if we actually want to realize these more sustainable living practices. And so that’s why I started Yurts at Poncha Pass and a mixed use education facility for people to come out and learn about these things.
Adam Williams (22:18): I want to get to Yurts at Poncha Pass. 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. You would just go on calls. It wasn’t necessarily, I’m assuming it 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.” What was that like at 15, 16 years old to be part such real human tragedy and whatever else you encounter?
Chris White (22:59): 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. One of my first jobs was serving, and I had worked in the same restaurant serving the same people for two years. It was a retirement community. I had only done it on Sunday starting in seventh grade or something.
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 leaving on good terms and this table that I’ve been serving for two years turned to me and said, “Are you new here?” And it just felt, it just deflated 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.
Adam Williams (23:56): And have connection with people who are on the receiving end.
Chris White (23:59): Yeah, you’re going to work hard at something, you want it to have some sort of value, some sort of impact beyond 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 there’s just a lot of responsibility. You start messing around with a lot of tools. You start learning about, they got as soon as I turned 18, I could drive all the trucks, talking big pumper trucks, these big tonnage vehicles.
Adam Williams (24:28): That’s a lot of responsibility.
Chris White (24:30): 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 still can only deal with so much trauma. I think there’s a level there. And so I knew it was a 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 nearly enough. And I don’t think EMS specifically gets paid nearly enough, but that’s a whole another 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, it’s a pretty brutal industry.
(25:40): But it 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 cracks of debt and things like that.
Adam Williams (25:57): It’s something you still do?
Chris White (25:58): Yeah, so I’ve been working Monarch Ski Patrol. This is going to be my sixth year, and I work in the ICU at the heart of the Rockies. This is also my sixth 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.
(26:31): But yeah, I do still enjoy working at these places and having maybe more of an educator role versus 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 and gung-ho. And it’s okay that they jump at those. And then if I can be there to assist and advise and correct a couple of things here or there, it’s good. It’s a changing of the guard.
Adam Williams (26:59): We obviously need people in those roles. And there is that natural probably risk of turnover just naturally. But you’re talking about the trauma of it. I’m also thinking about the people who were 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.
Chris White (27:30): Yeah, I think 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 3:00 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.
There’s nobody complaining ever. They’re all there because they’re trying their best and trying to support each other. That kind of family 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.
(28:19): 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 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 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.
Adam Williams (29:28): Yurts at Poncha Pass, 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?
Chris White (29:49): So when we go back to, 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 myself and lead by example. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to argue a point with somebody and you might spend an entire night arguing with one person, and if they’re already set in their ways, you’ve lost your whole night trying to make this point or something.
(30:40): And 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 10 people. And so I’d rather have a conversation with 10 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 hard work and getting it done.
(31:10): The idea of Yurts at Poncha 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 the yurts, learn about Earthships, learn about time banking, all these things that have nuances of living practice, sustainable living practices, how to realize them in a way.
A lot of this has come from the process of building a home and realizing that affordability and the fact that most housing is not affordable for young people. You can’t really talk about sustainability if you don’t have the ability to live sustainably or just live. We have to create affordable living practices and community in order to even get to the place where we can discuss sustainability.
(32:21): So in this process of building the yurts, 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 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 like we’re dealing with this juggernaut of let’s say capitalism and these unsustainable practices, and you got to go to the market for dog care. You got to go to the market for childcare. You got to 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 these, it’s all been built over time to largely increase profits for large corporates. It’s going to take a lot of work to 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 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 am not sure that there’s ever going to be a silver bullet here.
(34:15): 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. And we saw that with 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 10 years.”
These rug pulls are just brutal. And it just keeps 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 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 a sustainable community and whatnot.
(35:19): So it’s 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 doing the thing and wondering what kind of impact is this having? And it’s just in the last 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 connect now. And it’s pretty exciting.
Adam Williams (36:02): This is a long-term commitment. You’re talking about you have this land, 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 10, 20, 50-year idea that this is where you are now giving and contributing your life for all of the things you’ve just described?
Chris White (36:29): Yeah, that’s I guess I’ve seen a lot of the world. I’ve been very fortunate to travel a lot for the wave energy project and work and school. And 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 of 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 idea, maybe you just have to watch it on Mondays.
(37:40): And so 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, it takes work. You got to get in there every day and clean yours, and you got to make sure that it’s crystal clean. I say that we’re selling Disneyland to adults. For an adult to come to the middle of nowhere and have a pristine living environment, that’s a weird concept. You’re going out into the middle of nowhere and you expect it to be pristinely clean. That is a Disneyland kind of concept.
(38:35): 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 or fall and allows me to offer and 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, you 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.
For sure it’ll probably be my forever home because it’s just what I’ve committed to, but if we’re having meaningful impact and a variable change of career so you’re 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, that helps me a lot because it’s not one job. I’m not a clog in the clock. I’m running around tinkering with all of it. That helps me.
Adam Williams (39:47): You mentioned time 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 Poncha Pass.
Chris White (39:59): Yes. This is actually I think one of the most powerful tools that I’ve learned about and I think can be one of these 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 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 of the yurts, and he would come and help me for a day. And then he was building fences around Salida and BV.
And so then I would go and help him. And you just learn that or you see it very quickly that especially in construction, if you and I try and do something, let’s say you spend four hours on it, you might get 4X of work. And you would expect that if I helped you, that we might do 8X worth of work.
(41:00): 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 a multiplier. You get 3X 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 ads 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 exhausted and not properly paid when you’re time banking. And that’s 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 incredibly powerful.
(41:59): And so I think it can be applied to childcare. So 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, I would take care of them on Wednesdays? And suddenly now, yes, you have five kids on Mondays and you probably should do a 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 the only place where there’s safety.
(42:55): 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, all that’s already in place, but how many… If we can just, Yurts at Poncha Pass, it’s just a place to learn or to test out and realize these ideas.
Those ideas can be applied in many places, and 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 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.
Adam Williams (43:57): 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 12 people on their projects. 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?
Chris White (44:24): Well, I think it’s new and 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 the methodology of creating it, and it’s going to be very specific 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 clocking in to 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 walk away because 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 at a certain point, you’re probably going to walk away from that because the value to repay it is too high. So there’s some difficulties of within an industry I think is always important. If it’s childcare or dog care or construction, it’s very hard to probably do it within different industries. If you give me a legal consultation, I’m not sure I can 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 say, “Your rent is cheaper, right? Because you’ve helped me out. And 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.”
Adam Williams (46:36): It sounds like in that case, you’re applying dollar value to those hours.
Chris White (46:41): Yeah. At a certain point, it makes sense to do that sometimes if that’s how it translates.
Adam Williams (46:49): 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. 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.
Chris White (47:26): 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… So if we look at it, politics is incredibly toxic right now.
Adam Williams (47:49): Right, I know.
Chris White (47:50): It just is. It’s just on a national level, let’s say. But I live with people on the other side of the spectrum are all around me 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.
(48:25): And I think if we step back from whatever national politics we might believe one way or another, what we all have in common is incredibly similar, which is 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 you actually get to a place where you’re listening to other people, and I think that’s in the large concept, we need to get back to this. How do we empower each other? And when we do that, there’s a lot of amazing things that start happening.
Adam Williams (49:12): On the one-to-one, face-to-face level, people are good. We help each other. We see that in each other. It’s when we pull back to this more abstract, vague national level where everybody becomes grouped and othered-
Chris White (49:26): Well–
Adam Williams (49:26): … makes it a lot more difficult.
Chris White (49:28): Right. If we can’t rely on our community, and you look at technology, a lot of that’s, this is evolving from that. 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 this person is somewhere else. They’re not right in front of me because people are, most people would not say negative things to somebody’s face because we just don’t want to do that. 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.
(50:05): 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 powerful one. And when people seek it out, now suddenly we’re having a very intentional conversation, which I think is making things, yeah, it’s progress.
Adam Williams (50:57): Chris, it’s been fascinating to talk with you about these ideas. I’m going to include in the show notes, wearchaffeepod.com. We’ll have your website for Yurts at Poncha Pass. 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.
Chris White (51:18): Yeah, pleasure being here. And if people want to come support the mission, every visit helps us move the coin one further step along or getting it so that people are educated and trying to make meaningful progress. So appreciate you having me on.
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Adam Williams (51:44): Thanks for listening to We Are Chaffee’s 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 notes at wearchaffeepod.com. If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me at adam@wearchaffeepod.com.
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.
(52:20): Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer and photographer. John Prey is engineer and producer. Thank you to KHEN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado. And to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment. And to Lisa Martin, community advocacy coordinator for the We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative.
The Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with the Chaffee County Department of Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and it’s supported by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Office of Health Equity.
You can learn more about the Looking Upstream podcast at wearchaffeepod.com and on Instagram, @wearchaffeepod. You also can learn more about the overall We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative at wearchaffee.org. Till the next episode. As we say at We Are Chaffee, share stories. Make change.
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