Camino, Colorado and Christ: Inside the Adventure Ministry of Creatio
- André Escaleira, Jr.
- Jun 11
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 11
In the age of noise and screens, one Colorado-based ministry is helping people encounter God through dirt paths, holy sites and hard conversations.

Nowhere is the adventure of the Christian life on better display than in the work of Creatio, a Denver-based ministry seeking to “bring participants out of ‘the world’ and into a life of pilgrimage” to help reconnect them with God, creation, community and reality, according to the group’s website.
Creatio facilitates this encounter and community through adventurous walking pilgrimages, hikes and other excursions in nature, from the Camino de Santiago in Spain, to pilgrimages to the Sanctuary of Chimayó in New Mexico or the Shrine of the North American Martyrs in New York, to local Third Saturday hikes in the Colorado Rockies.
“One of the beautiful things about walking pilgrimages is accompaniment. We like to say that God is the teacher, but we accompany our pilgrims on these long walking pilgrimages to holy sites,” said Bo Brustkern, Creatio’s executive director. “They walk together in silence and communion. Because of the long, arduous journey, the conversations move quickly to profound. Great stories are shared between these pilgrims, and that’s where deep connections are made.”
With miles ahead and behind them, the pilgrims and adventurers on Creatio’s various excursions can’t help but enter into silence and communion with those God places beside them — an experience that leads them to deeper faith and connection.
“While all the pilgrims are anchoring their faith in Christ on these pilgrimages, they are supported in that movement by their fellow walkers. That can only be done when there’s a lot of time and when there’s a lot of quiet. When there’s a lot of trail ahead and behind, those ties then become profound, they become strong and reliable, such that I know that I can call any one of them and they will be there for me. If it is a hardship I’m going through or a celebration, those people are intimately tied to me now because we walked 45 miles together,” he said. “That small community has great weight.”
That warm, vital community fosters a great change in participants — one that might even be unexpected or unwelcome at first. Through their encounter with God, creation and neighbor, pilgrims come face-to-face with their need for something more, “and the community is made stronger because of those professions of weakness and desire,” Brustkern told the Denver Catholic.
“The pilgrims go back to their home communities on fire — maybe it’s an ember, maybe it’s a raging flame — but that love, that new spirit spreads from there. ... They go back to their parishes a little bit more in love, and with a little bit more zeal, and with a little bit more openness to their continuing conversion. That has a profound effect on the world,” he concluded.