At the end of every school day for nine years, Chuck McKenna, the principal at Longfellow Elementary in Salida, would tell his teachers and students that he loved them.
“From my very first day to my last, I would say ‘I love you all.’ Different kids would come ask me why I said that. Some of them had never heard that before,” McKenna says. “That came from that place. It had very little to do with me. I just allowed that to happen. That came from the monastery.”
McKenna spent four years 40 years ago at the St. Benedict’s Monastery in Old Snowmass. The 3,700-acre property recently sold for $120 million. The Wall Street Journal this week identified the buyer as billionaire Alex Karp, the co-founder and CEO of Palantir, a 22-year-old Denver-based data analysis firm that recently landed a $10 billion software contract with the U.S. Army. The sale marks one of the largest residential sales in Colorado history.
The monastery was built in the 1950s — including a 24,000-square-foot main building — by Trappist monks seeking a life of silence and prayer. Located in the Capitol Creek Valley, the property includes a cemetery as well as three creeks, irrigated meadows for cattle and senior water rights in the Roaring Fork Valley. The Mirr Ranch Group listed the property for $150 million last year, following a decision by the abbey to begin closing down in 2022.
For seven decades, the St. Benedict’s Monastery has been one of the largest privately-owned properties in Pitkin County, a span that has seen spectacular growth in the Roaring Fork Valley. The property is bordered by Forest Service land and private parcels that have been protected with conservation easements held by the Aspen Valley Land Trust and Pitkin County Open Space. Pitkin County in 2022 proposed a conservation easement on the property for $27 million. A nonprofit group of Roaring Fork Valley residents calling themselves “Friends of the Monastery” formed last year to help the monks and conserve the monastery’s open spaces.
Ken Mirr with the brokerage did not identify the buyer but told the Wall Street Journal the new owner was not planning to use the property as a home.
About a half-dozen monks live at the St. Benedict’s Monastery. The seller is the General Chapter of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, which oversees about 150 Trappist communities across the world, including 14 abbeys in the U.S.
McKenna left St. Benedict’s in the early 1990s. He eventually married and raised two daughters in Salida. His family would often visit the monastery, where he maintained close relationships with the monks.
He remembers how the monks embraced his decision to leave. Back then, leaving a monastery was a sign of failure. But Abbott Joseph Boyle and the monks urged him to take the lessons he learned at St. Benedict’s into the world, McKenna said, “and do that well.”
“I fell in love with the place and that idea that if everything goes quiet, the thing you start hearing is what’s going on inside of you,” said McKenna, who now works as a therapist in Salida. “So many learning experiences there.”
He remembers bringing his daughters to services honoring Boyle, who died in 2018. They were young as they solemnly sat with the abbot’s body in the chapel.
“My oldest said ‘He’s not there any more isn’t he? He’s gone somewhere else,’” McKenna said. “What a great thing to notice. We had this wonderful discussion about what happens when you die with an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old. And that’s what the monastery did. It gave us a spot to talk about things we don’t have much opportunity to talk about elsewhere.”