Sky Mountain on Healing, Community, and DMT

Do you want to meet God? Catch a glimpse of the cosmic webbing connecting all things? See the divine face of ecstasy herself?

Look for it in the desert.

Winding up a mountain ridge in the Sonoran Desert, you’ll drive past towering saguaros towards Sky Mountain, a private retreat where psychotherapists Roger Kaufman and Dustin Kerrone will serve as your emissaries to the infinite.

Or, in more atheistic terms, they’ll help get you really high.

Kaufman and Kerrone are both trained in the therapeutic administration of psychedelics, an expanding field of psychology that they put into practice at Sky Mountain. While both have substantial personal experience with a wide variety of psychedelics, they agree that none are quite as spiritually and emotionally potent as 5-MeO-DMT.

Historically derived from the venom of the Colorado River toad (and now synthetically produced), 5-MeO-DMT is not your typical brain-altering chemical.

“DMT, which the more formal name is N,N-DMT, is more of a visual experience, and you’ll find DMT in ayahuasca, in psilocybin,” says Kaufman. “5-MeO-DMT is a very different experience. It’s much stronger than N,N-DMT because it has this unique ability to take you through this massive expansion of consciousness into a very palpable experience of source, God, divine.”

Before opening Sky Mountain, Kaufman and Kerrone were both licensed marriage and family therapists. The duo first tried 5-MeO-DMT in 2020. They had experimented with psilocybin up until that point, but both felt that 5-MeO-DMT marked a radical shift in their mindsets, struggling to put into words the feeling of first experiencing the psychedelic. Despite 5-MeO-DMT’s indescribable nature, both swore by its therapeutic effects based on their own personal experiences.

“It’s sort of like when the mind can get out of the way,” says Kerrone. “There is a sublime simplicity that I feel like is available to us all. In a way, it’s not really a psychedelic. You don’t usually see a lot of visual things. So in that sense, it’s almost like it reveals your innermost essence.”

The revealing of one’s “innermost essence” through 5-MeO-DMT is particularly important for Kaufman and Kerrone, who are both gay men. Indeed, many of Sky Mountain’s clients are queer and come to the desert retreat seeking respite from self-loathing, childhood trauma and personal identity crises, among other issues.

“What I find can emerge from myself and with our guests who are queer is that oftentimes we grow up feeling marginalized and having to work hard to feel a good sense of self,” says Kerrone. “It’s like what can be revealed is our own innate divinity that’s directly connected to our gender identity and sexual orientation. It’s really wonderful to feel people embody the fullness of their being and to appreciate these aspects of themselves that haven’t fit with the mainstream.”

According to Kaufman, these sensations can also help queer people to cope with an increasingly hostile sociopolitical environment by breaking through restrictive personal narratives passed down from a queerphobic culture.

“What 5-MeO has done is let me know that I am so much bigger than I think I am,” says Kaufman. “And by ‘bigger,’ I don’t mean larger in body or a bigger ego. I mean that my capacity for love, my capacity for expanded consciousness, for creativity, is so vastly more than I ever realized before.”

Kaufman, who has been out as a gay man since 1977, says 5-MeO-DMT enabled him to accept himself in a deeper way than he could have before.

Despite this glowing praise, some people may remain skeptical of potent psychedelics like 5-MeO-DMT—After all, taking mind-altering drugs with two strangers in the desert may sound less spiritual enlightening and more Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. However, Kaufman and Kerrone emphasize close guidance and consent through the entirety of their guests’ visits, offering two consultation and preparation sessions on Zoom before their clients make the trip to the Sonora Desert. Once guests are ready to take the plunge and actually inhale 5-MeO-DMT, Kaufman and Kerrone ask them for their consent once more and guide them through a short ceremony intended to create a meditative headspace.

Non-religious people may be put off by Sky Mountain’s repeated references to God and spirituality, but Kaufman and Kerrone don’t ascribe the 5-MeO-DMT experience to any particular belief system. Instead, they say that the molecule endows its users with a sense of “OKness” and an order to the universe. What this means will vary between individuals depending on their personal beliefs and life experiences. For queer people, who often feel out of place in a chaotic world, such a sense of order can be hard to come by.

Despite the potentially enlightening effects of 5-MeO-DMT, the ‘God Molecule’ still has its limitations—No matter how potent it is, its psychoactive effects will always be limited to one person at a time. Such an individualized experience is unlikely to elevate the queer community’s position in society as a whole. In addition, some potential guests of Sky Mountain also may not be able to afford even the lowest price ($800) for a stay there, although the retreat does offer a ‘scholarship’ program and reduced fees for those in need. In the future, Kaufman and Kerrone also hope to offer larger retreats for a lower per-person price. Despite these limitations, Kaufman and Kerrone believe that their queer clients can take the positive effects of the molecule back home with them.

“Ideally, anyone who wanted to could experience 5-MeO-DMT in a safe and supportive setting like what we provide,” says Kaufman. “But I do think that a lot of the people who have come here are influential in the queer community, are people who work at the LGBT Center in Los Angeles, for example. Each of these individuals does have an influence in the community, and I think that ripples out in a really beautiful way.”