“Bless this house, which has given so much to so many.” — Program Book from St. Benedict’s Monastery’s last Mass, Jan. 11, 2026
OLD SNOWMASS — Before first light hit the eastern flank of Mount Sopris — before the sun could warm the mesas and forests of Old Snowmass, or bake the sprawling ranches and fields on the valley floor — the Trappist brothers of St. Benedict’s Monastery would rise from their beds, and they would pray.
They listened to scripture. They meditated. They read, they studied, and they prayed. By the time they opened the chapel doors to the public for morning Mass, the Catholic monks of St. Benedict’s had been praying longer than most anyone else had been awake.
And when the angle of the sun was just right — around, say, the second week of January — it could set the stained-glass window above the chapel’s altar aglow, just in time for the start of the service. At the monastery’s final Mass on Jan. 11, as the Rev. Charles Albanese shared gratitude for “the silence and wonder of the sacred valley,” and preached of acceptance, forbearance and perseverance to a crowd of several hundred people, this vision of a Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus appeared almost lit from within. If you spent enough time at St. Benedict’s, you might have felt just the same way.
“You just want to be out there all the time. You just want to absorb it all,” said Jill Sabella, who first encountered St. Benedict’s as a college student in the 1960s and reached “a whole different kind of intimate level” when she moved to Old Snowmass in the early 2000s.
Animal tracks pepper the snow outside St. Benedict’s Monastery in Old Snowmass on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. The monastery was known for its religious traditions, agricultural heritage and open space; it sold to a new owner on Dec. 15, 2025. (Kaya Williams/Aspen Journalism)To her, the significance of this place was not about going to a church, as in an institution. Instead, “it’s the awakening and nurturing and acceptance up there, the contemplation and the solitude,” she said. It was also, inextricably, about the monks, each with their own sense of humor and intellect and grace and humanity, whose life of prayer would continue into a day of work and worship before they entered a “great silence” at night.
“I think a lot of people like myself are drawn to it, because there’s something in us that has wanted to live that life too,” Sabella said.
Now, they will have to look elsewhere. Seventy years after the monastery was founded in Old Snowmass, by a group of monks dispatched from an abbey in Massachusetts, St. Benedict’s has closed. The property of more than 3,700 sparsely-developed acres sold Dec. 15 for $120 million to Espen LLC.
One day after the sale closed, the Wall Street Journal identified the buyer as Alex Karp, the billionaire CEO of a Denver-based data analysis software company called Palantir, known for its contracts with military and intelligence agencies and major businesses.
Two weeks later, in a story headlined “The Year of the $100 Million House,” it was noted that “Karp in a statement to the Journal said he plans to work with the previous users of the property to continue to care for the land.”
An access easement to the onsite cemetery will allow the family of buried monks as well as members of the Trappist order to still visit the gravesites. Among those buried are renowned spiritual leaders like the Rev. Thomas Keating, a giant in the world of contemplative spirituality, and the Rev. Joseph Boyle, who served as abbot of St. Benedict’s for more than 30 years.
The cemetery at St. Benedict’s Monastery includes gravesites for beloved spiritual leaders like Father Thomas Keating and Father Joseph Boyle, as pictured here on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. Though the monastery is now closed, an access easement will allow family of those buried and members of the Trappist Order to continue to visit the cemetery. (Eleanor Bennett, Aspen Journalism)‘A considerable impact’
The sale and closure had been initiated by higher-ups in the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, which is commonly known as the Trappist order, as those decision-makers considered factors like an aging and dwindling population of monks in Snowmass.
The order’s General Chapter of abbots and abbesses from around the world voted to close the monastery in the fall of 2022. The St. Benedict’s bookstore and retreat center shuttered the following spring, and the property hit the market with a list price of $150 million in April 2024. It had received interest from multiple prospective buyers.
Abbot Vincent Rogers, who oversees the monastery’s “mother house” of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, confirmed after the last Mass that Espen LLC’s offer was approved by a department of the Holy See (also known as the Vatican), as required by Canon Law for a transaction of this magnitude.
Four of the five monks who remained at St. Benedict’s left for different houses in the Trappist order the week after the last Mass: three to the mother house of St. Joseph’s Abbey, and one to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a monastery in the forest of Carlton, Oregon, southwest of Portland.
One, the longtime ranch manager, is remaining onsite to help the new owner with the intricacies of a property that has been revered in part for the way the monks treated the land, with a philosophy that combined work with prayer in service of coexistence with the natural world.
A line of cars inches toward St. Benedict’s Monastery for the last public Mass on Jan. 11, 2026. Hundreds of people filled the chapel, corridor and nearby meditation room to say goodbye to the place and community. (Eleanor Bennett,Aspen Journalism)Meanwhile, much of the money from the sale will support other monasteries in the Trappist order, including those to which these Snowmass monks are transferring.
The assets are also significant enough that some may go to the needs of the locality around St. Benedict’s, Rogers confirmed after the last Mass. Rogers said a Commission of Closure in charge of the distribution is taking into consideration the various causes that Snowmass monks have supported over the years.
“It is essential to recognize the influence the monks have had on the community, both spiritually and through their exemplary stewardship of the land,” the monastery’s co-listing agent Ken Mirr said in a post on Mirr Ranch Group’s social media last month.
“The new owner is committed to the current and future care of the property, including maintaining the property’s character as a local cattle ranch while preserving habitat for wildlife,” according to the statement from Mirr, who listed the property with his daughter, broker associate Haley Mirr, and with Michael Latousek of Douglas Elliman Aspen. “While many tears will be shed by the closing of St. Benedict’s, the proceeds will have a considerable impact on lives throughout the world.”
An interspiritual legacy
“The thing that attracted me from the very beginning is, even though the monastery was a Catholic monastery, they welcomed everyone” regardless of their faith, said Becky Ward, who has more than four decades of history with the monastery and who was a regular at St. Benedict’s with her husband, Craig.
“There’s a higher being for all of us” was the idea, Becky Ward said. “And … the important thing is how we treat each other, and take care of each other.”
This was no accident. In the 1960s, a series of meetings by the Second Vatican Council led to significant changes in the Catholic Church. These shifts, commonly known as Vatican II, opened the door for institutions to engage in interreligious dialogue and contemporary issues.
Thomas Keating, a leader at both St. Benedict’s and St. Joseph’s, embraced the call, and in 1984 spearheaded a series of conferences in Snowmass that welcomed the leaders of different faiths. The series would continue for the next three decades.
“Thomas would often say it’s not enough to just tolerate other religious traditions, other spiritual paths,” said Rory McEntee, who became a mentee of Keating and served as an administrator for the final years of the dialogues. “We have to learn to love them with all that we are, and so it goes beyond even respect and tolerance, to a kind of unity.”
McEntee is now the executive director and president of the Charis Foundation for New Monasticism and Interspirituality, which he cofounded in 2015 with Netanel Miles-Yépez and Adam Bucko after a retreat at St. Benedict’s with Keating. The foundation supports several initiatives that continue such deep-thinking dialogues, and hosts retreats in New Mexico, where the foundation is based.
Father Charles Albanese celebrates Mass at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Old Snowmass with fellow monks, as pictured in the book “Come to the Mountain.” When the angle of the sun is just right, it sets the stained-glass window above the altar aglow during liturgical services. (Courtesy of Jill Sabella via Aspen Journalism)It also supports the growth of the New Monastic movement, which applies monks’ spiritual traditions to a life out “‘in the world,’ amongst intimate relationships, friendships, family and daily hardships,” according to the Charis Foundation website.
That philosophy still requires some solitude, said Bucko, an Episcopal priest who is cofounder and director of the Center for Spiritual Imagination at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York and a member of the New Monastic Community of the Incarnation.
“All of us need places of refuge where we can go and truly spend an extended period of time, immersing ourselves in silence, going into the desert of our hearts and listening deeply to what is there,” Bucko said. For many, he added, St. Benedict’s was that place.
Bucko sees the closure of this monastery as “part of a larger trend”: Religious properties elsewhere have been sold and turned into residences too; people are “migrating outside of churches,” and they aren’t “going to monasteries in [the] numbers that they used to, in terms of vowed religious life.” To him, this is a “tragedy.”
But he also sees this time of flux as an opportunity for something new: “There are many people who practice contemplative prayer. There are many people who are trying to learn from monastic spirituality and live that in the world.” (Just look at Contemplative Outreach, an organization for which Keating was a founding member: It now supports more than 90 active chapters in 39 countries and serves more than 40,000 people.)
Continuing this work “probably needs to include some properties,” Bucko said, to fulfill that need for “places of refuge.”
Yet there are also ways to find peace in the absence of a physical space, said Jennie Curtis, who used to run retreats at St. Benedict’s through her work for the organization Contemplative Outreach of Colorado.
The contemplative life is “an inner silence and solitude,” Curtis said. The external environment “certainly supports that.” But “it’s not the place, so much, especially for contemplatives, as what the place has offered us over the years.”
‘Replacing one steward with another’
Though past efforts to place a conservation easement on the land never came to fruition, some remain hopeful that the property could maintain its character of open space: Pitkin County’s land use policies already limit new development, while offering incentives for preserving scenic and ecological values on a property.
Karp also has a proclivity for properties like this one: secluded, surrounded by nature, and close to cross-country skiing. His biographer Michael Steinberger writes in “The Philosopher in the Valley” that while Karp’s portfolio of properties is wide-reaching, with several acquisitions in recent years, “none of the homes were palatial — most were modest.”
Karp is also a self-described introvert, who likes to be alone with his thoughts. This property, just a brief flight or few hours’ drive from Palantir’s headquarters in Denver, could offer him just such a place in short order.
With a transaction like this one, Ken Mirr said in The Land Bulletin podcast last month, “we’re really just replacing one steward with another.”
Now, onlookers are praying this place might hold on to some of its heritage in its next chapter.
“It is a very sacred place and a very sacred land,” said McEntee, from the Charis Foundation. “And I think it’s possible it can have a transforming effect on whoever is on the land, if they’re open to it.”
Kaya Williams is a freelance journalist based in Aspen and originally wrote this for Aspen Journalism, which is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. This is an abridged version of a longer story that can be read aspenjournalism.org.
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