Just after sunrise in a remote town in southern Colorado, a gong rings out across the high desert.

The shrouded body arrives first. 

Pallbearers carry it on a stretcher of open pine slats toward the pyre. Today, a flute player follows behind. Other times, it’s a New Orleans-style trumpet player, or an a cappella women’s singing group, or simply recorded music from a phone. 

The procession circles clockwise around the hearth before the body is laid on an iron grate, head facing east. Each person gathered is given a sprig of juniper — a fragrant, flammable symbol of remembrance to place on the shroud. Then, juniper boughs and cordwood go atop, layer by layer, until the body disappears completely beneath the pile.

Four family members step forward to light their torches from a clay pot of burning frankincense and juniper. They walk to the four openings of the pyre and lower their flames.

For a few minutes after the fire catches, nobody speaks. But the flames roar. Inside the pyre, temperatures reach between 900 and 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Smoke drifts across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. By afternoon, what remains is four and a half gallons of ash and a few fragments of femur, rib, and skull. 

The cremation takes place at the Crestone End of Life Project (CEOLP), a volunteer-run, nondenominational nonprofit in Crestone, a town of little more than 100 residents in southern Colorado’s Saguache County. 

What might seem to some a grisly ordeal is quite often the opposite for those taking part, according to CEOLP’s co-founder Paul Kloppenburg. “People walk away way more cheerful, way more communicative,” he says. “There is a weight lifted off the shoulder.” Not because the grief is gone but because loved ones of the deceased stayed to witness death together. 

But this collective participation is an opportunity reserved for a select few.

Nearly two decades and more than 90 cremations since its inception, Crestone remains the only place in the United States that offers open-air cremation to the public, regardless of faith. Efforts in at least five states to legalize it have stalled, despite its being used for centuries throughout South Asia and also being significantly cheaper than the average American funeral. This, advocates say, shows the tension between the for-profit, closed-door systems underpinning U.S. deathcare and Americans’ growing desire to reclaim care for their dead.