DOWN IN THE VALLEY, VALLEY SO HIGH.

Byline: DOUGLAS FAIRFIELD

The San Luis Valley in south-central Colorado has a landmass of more than 11,500,000 acres, making it one of the largest desert valleys in the world. At its southernmost boundary, it crosses into New Mexico, and the Continental Divide runs through the San Juan Mountains that make up its western edge. In other words, it's really big.

Residents and those who have traveled the San Luis Valley say the vastness of it can be taken in with one view at various locations -- which is hard to believe. The sun reportedly shines 360 days a year. It may sound like paradise, but in truth, the valley has one of the harshest environments in the Southwest, with arid summers and bone-chilling winters.

Legend has it that Spanish missionary Francisco Torres named the valley in the mid-18th century in honor of the patron saint of his native village, San Luis, in Seville, Spain, for its breathtaking beauty. Torres has also been credited for naming the southern Rockies Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ). According to that legend, while Torres was dying, after being pierced by an arrow shot by Indians who had been forced to dig for gold, he looked up and saw the red, snow-capped mountains and cried, "Sangre de Cristo!"

Romanticizing aside, the San Luis Valley has a rich past. The people who settled there brought with them deep religious ties that got them through hard times. Today, the historic churches and cemeteries that occupy the valley are its legacy. Writer/artist/photographer Kathy T. Hettinga shares that story in words and more than 200 pictures in her book Grave Images: San Luis Valley (Museum of New Mexico Press), a 14-year project that led her all over the valley.

"It's been quite a project," Hettinga said by telephone from her mother's home in Alamosa, Colorado, the most populated town in the valley. "When I first started, I thought there would be one cemetery for each of the small towns in the valley. But as it turned out, there were often four to five cemeteries in each place, divided up by various religious groups, as well as individual family plots, and some were located outside a town's borders. Probably my biggest challenge during the project was just finding the cemeteries. But I worked with the San Luis Valley Historical Society in gathering research and looking at maps. Without their help, this project would never have been completed. But the project gave me the wonderful excuse to travel to every nook and cranny of the valley. It was truly an awe-inspiring experience."

The inspiration for Hettinga's extended research and travel was a combination of place and tragedy. She was raised in the San Luis Valley, as was her husband. At the age of 24, he died as a result of a feed-truck accident on a dairy farm. "After Duane's death," Hettinga writes in the book, "I began doing art with ghost figures. Collagraphs and lithographs of ghost figures -- distant and fading pentimento people who almost disappear into structures and fields. Next, I created computer prints of abandoned farmhouses found across the San Luis Valley. The small houses built by poor farmers often serve only a generation. In this desert we see that man is like grass, his glory like the flower: the grass withers, the flower fades before us, in a season, in a day, like the day lily. The isolated, deserted structures are empty. They stand with windows open to sun and air."

Hettinga is currently a professor of art at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, outside Harrisburg. She returned to the valley to be reminded of its history and of those who endured its challenges, as well as to photograph what she believes are unusual artistic expressions honoring the dead. "My recent art concerns the historic faith images of the church as I find them in the San Luis Valley cemeteries. Cemeteries --

places to lay the dead. This is how I am tracing the last known vestiges. I see a transition, albeit a slow cathartic one, of explaining in visual language the reality of loss, the reality of our mortality," the photographer writes in the book.

In her conversation with Pasatiempo, Hettinga also reflected about her return as a personal healing. "I think whenever you lose a loved one,

you always remember. But for me as an artist,

I find it true that art can be very cathartic; it helps you to work through questions, helps you to find answers, as well as to look at the mysteries and fragility of life."

According to Hettinga, the general population of the San Luis Valley, despite its numerous villages, has had negligible growth. In the past 125 years, the population in the valley has not even doubled and stands at fewer than 48,000 people. A 2006 census -- the year when Hettinga completed her study -- put Alamosa at just over 15,000 people, with Mineral County (one of six Colorado counties in the valley in which Hettinga examined cemeteries) having fewer than 1,000 residents.

Evidence of human occupation in the valley dates from 8,000 B.C. The Folsom people, migratory hunters, roamed the area at the end of the last ice age. In 1300 A.D., the Taos Indians spent time in the valley hunting for food and searching for turquoise, but they didn't stay. Two hundred years later, Spaniards swept the valley but did not establish settlements, remaining south, in what is now New Mexico. Based on burial sites found near Blanca Peak in the southeast quadrant of the valley and dated to approximately 800, a band of Utes occupied the valley.

Jumping forward to the 19th century, in 1851, San Luis -- a small village on Colorado State Highway 159 -- was the first settlement in what became the Territory of Colorado; it is the oldest town in the state. Soon thereafter, devout Catholics, primarily Hispanic, settled in the southern part of the San Luis Valley, and some of their churches still stand. They were followed by other people of various denominations, including Presbyterians, Mormons, Dutch Reformed Church adherents, Pentecostals, Protestants, and members of the Penitente lay brotherhood. Hettinga covers this aspect of the valley's religious identity in pictures of churches and moradas, but it's the cemeteries, replete with handcrafted markers,

that she showcases, devoting more than half of

the book to them.

"From the beginning of my project, I was primarily interested in the cemeteries and the markers -- what I believe is a profound form of folk art in the San Luis Valley, which is the main focus of the book. But the front part of the book sets up the beautiful spaces of the valley and gives a brief history of the place," she said.

One can find a few grave markers adorned with curious stuff. In a couple of photos, markers for deceased children consist of sandstone slabs embedded with marbles, either as decoration or spelling out a lasting sentiment. More common symbols that Hettinga found on children's grave markers were images of lambs and winged angel heads. In the Del Norte Cemetery in Rio Grande County, she encountered a disembodied, life-size plaster head of Christ, mounted on artificial turf inside a small wooden structure with a view window and a red shingled roof.

One of the most peculiar yet enduring markers Hettinga came across was a textured sheet-metal cross in Costilla County that looks as if it were once part of a rear fender on a heavy-duty pickup truck. But the most unusual and maybe the most meditative markers she discovered were groups of simple stones standing upright on the barren soil in no particular order at the Canero Creek Cemetario in La Garita. Designated simply by chiseled crosses on their surfaces, such natural markers speak to the level of poverty that is prevalent in many of the communities in the valley.

Wayward souls were typically buried apart from those who led a life of faith. Hettinga tells of Creede Cemetery in Mineral County, which is divided into two sections. One of them is the "Shotgun Grave Yard," where those who died by the gun were laid to rest. Its most infamous interred guest is Bob Ford, who killed Jesse James.

Though many of us avoid cemeteries for any number of reasons, they are places of solace for Hettinga. From her engagement with the project, both philosophically and emotionally, she has come to grips with loss and has a renewed sense of community. "What I loved about going into all of the cemeteries is this kind of shared sorrow that you can identify with when reading what's on a marker," she said. "It's about a shared sorrow of humanity. But it's also about the joy and preciousness of life. I find it interesting how people mark that in memorializing death and, in a sense, life in various art forms. That, in itself, was an uplifting experience for me." <