When M. and I read this item in the Colorado Springs Gazette, our hearts soared. When we were newlyweds and bought our first house (a barely winterized 1920s cottage, 740 sq. ft.), it was just outside the lower left boundary of this photo of Iron Mountain in Manitou Springs, Colorado.

Iron Mountain is just a foothill, really, but when you look up from below, it blots out the higher ridges behind it.

Before we bought the house, we rented it, and our landlord was Tom McGee, who would later build “The House on Iron Mountain.” (I think the article’s date is wrong; we recall it being built around 1984.)

Before then, we would climb to the summit, where there was a natural stone throne, sometimes using it as a ritual site.

The coven we headed in the early 1980s was the Iron Mountain Coven, and Iron Mountain gave its name to a certain zine of the mid-1980s — Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion.

I put out only four issues, but they helped to inspire Fritz Muntean to start his own zine called The Pomegranate, and look at it now.

As for the McGees’ house, not only did it ruin “our” ritual site, but it was not even architecturally interesting. So they are razing it today? Hurray! And if that land upon which technically we trespassed becomes public open space, someone else can sit in the “throne,” if it is still there. I suspect that the rock outcropping survived the construction project.