Chosen Place: 10,000 feet

Kelton Wright and her Shangri-La.

This is Chosen Places, a series on the places we choose to call our homes. So often those places choose us, so often we have no choice. But when we do, when we have the joy (or the burden) of choice, where do we choose to live? Where, with all the continents and countries and condos, do we decide to call home?

Of all the places I’ve landed in my life, this is the most chosen. Everywhere else there was a job, a need, an invitation, or a last resort. Some places are wistful memories, others cautionary tales. Some homes are defined by the jobs I had, others are defined by the people I knew—but this one? This home was a mission. It was dreamt, searched for, and hunted down over the span of several years.

We chose it.

This is a new series for the Shangrilogs Community about those chosen places. When someone does have the chance to choose where to call home, how do they decide? How did they get there? What drew them there, and what keeps them there?

It’s only fair I go first:

Where have you lived so far?

I was born in Gettysburg PA, and my family moved to rural Ohio when I was 2. I spent the next 16 years there before leaving for university. I studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a summer in Florence, Italy, and another summer in the Richmond in San Francisco. When I graduated, I moved to the British Virgin Islands. I lived on land for the first part of the year, and on a few different boats for the second part.

When I had to leave the BVIs in a hurry, I bought a one-way ticket to Washington, D.C., because that’s where I knew the most people. Then it was a career blur from DC to the East Village in New York, then Boulder, CO, then Santa Monica, CA, then up to Topanga Canyon, and then finally back to Colorado where I now live at 10,000 feet in a log cabin in a very, very small town.

How did you end up where you currently are? What drew you to this place initially?

When my husband retired from pro road racing and I left my job at Headspace, we didn’t have anything material tethering us to LA anymore. We were considering starting a family, and if we were going to have a kid, we wanted to raise them somewhere they could have more everyday freedom. Plus, we wanted to be in the mountains.

We went on a road trip in 2019 all over the West. We visited all sorts of places trying to see if it felt like a fit: in Utah we went to Midland and Park City, in Colorado we went to Crested Butte, Nederland, Boulder, Ward, and a few others, in Idaho we went to Hailey, Salmon, Stanley, and McCall, we went through Oregon and Northern California, and at the end of it, we just couldn’t stop thinking about this one tiny town with its Western architecture and avalanches.

We had this list of things we wanted in a home:

• Not rainy or consistently windy

• Notable access to the arts

• Remote and challenging to get to/close neighbors

• Wild West influenced architecture

• Progressive community

• Exceptional trail access out the front door

• High-speed internet

• In our budget

• And my personal favorite: had to “feel right”​

And this place hit every single one. Except the wind. It’s very, very windy.

What’s a small, everyday joy that comes from being there?

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but it stems from it always being cold in the house: the best everyday joy is when you’re finally warm. When you’ve got on the right layers and the right slippers and the right beverage, and you finally forget that you were cold for the last several hours. That moment when you’re warm again and the wind is blowing and the mountains are high, that is my biggest everyday joy.

In what moments does this place really feel like home?

When my neighbor and I yell to each other across the street about our dogs, that feels like home. In fact, every time I run into a neighbor in the woods, in the street, at the trash barn, and especially at the grocery store 70 miles away, it really feels like I live here, like I am of this place.

In Topanga, our little shack felt like home, but whenever I would leave, it merely felt like LA. And I loved LA! I really love that sprawling, dynamic place. But only the shack and maybe the road it was on felt like actual home.

Here, it’s almost as if the whole region feels like home. Whenever we’re roadtripping, which is somewhat often, my husband and I always note that it feels like the drive is over, like we are in fact home, when we’re within some 90 miles of the house itself. I can assure that 90 miles from my shack in Topanga felt like the very opposite of home. It felt like a never-ending freeway.

Has this place changed how you see yourself or affected your priorities in life? Do you feel different—mentally, emotionally, physically—since moving there?

I had big corporate aspirations when we moved here. I was going to be a Chief Content Officer. In some ways, I am… it’s just the other kind of content. I am the chief officer of my own happiness now. Caring more about your happiness than your salary does make money tighter, but it has also made joy more abundant. That shift in desire, from Content to content, is because of this place.

The every day is more planted in reality. We have to manage our own trash. We have invasive weed days. We are constantly trying to get this house to a livable temperature. And I enjoy these menial tasks. I enjoy that much of my life is off screen. No surprise that it has quelled a great deal of anxiety simply by making my priorities more tangible.

What is community like there and how do you see yourself as part of it?

There are certainly people who live here to escape—there is that option—but most people here are aware that in such vast wilderness, our roles are to protect it and to educate about it. Protect in the sense that we want to preserve the ecosystem, not gatekeep it. And in order to do that, we need to educate.

In the broader sense of the wilderness, I do try to aid in that education with my newsletter even though I never explicitly say where I am. It’s all beavers and coyotes to me. They need to be protected no matter whose backyard they’re in because after all, it’s theirs—it is, in fact, their backyard first.

Day to day here, we are neighbors. We let each other’s dogs out, water each other’s plants, pick up stuff at the store, etc. And that is a dream to me.

But, like any area outside of a ski town, it’s quickly becoming too expensive to live here, so an ongoing concern is how do we ensure this community stays welcoming to everyone. If you’ve figured that out, let me know.

How long do you see yourself staying in this place?

We want to raise our kid here, so 18 years? Longer? We love it here, and we can’t think of another place we would want to live. But life is long and strange, and so are we. Wherever there’s big nature and good people, I imagine we could find ourselves at home.