Exit78 Photo of the Day #41
We first saw this beautiful Catholic church perched on a rock about nine miles south of Estes park on Colorado 7 in the early 1990s. On our 2011 trip, we stopped to get some pictures from the road.
Chapel on a Rock (St. Catherine of Siena Chapel), Allenspark, Colorado, September 16, 2011 (Pentax K10D)
St. Catherine of Siena Chapel is built on a large piece of granite that the Colorado highway department once planned to dynamite to widen and straighten the road. Located on the grounds of Saint Malo Retreat, Conference, and Spiritual Center, which was badly damaged in a fire in November 2011, the chapel was completed in 1936, fulfilling a 20 year-old inspiration of Monsignor Joseph Bosetti that was based on the Biblical phrase “upon this rock I will build my church.”
Plans to rebuild the Retreat Center were thwarted when 2013 devastating floods and mudslides badly damaged the land and infrastructure needed for the restoration, though it left the chapel, built on that granite rock, undamaged. Current restoration and renovation plans will rebuild portions of the property with a new retreat center built elsewhere due to the unpredictable conditions of the land and the possibility of future sediment flows and mudslides. Improvements inside the St. Catherine of Siena Chapel have been completed.
Series notes:
- The photos in this series are (usually) randomly selected from a batch of photos specifically “curated” for Exit78 Photo of the Day.
- Each photo in this series is an “original work” – a copyright term – of Michael Goad.
