For quite a few years he was a curator or director of several important regional history museums, including that of the Cripple Creek, Colorado gold mining district, where he occupied the third highest position in the museum profession - 9500' above sea level! Ten years in Cripple Creek, both a time warp and a semi-ghost town, rendered him "with little gold but much experience", as was said of the first groups of men to return to the States from the Klondike gold rush.

In 1987 Mr. Lummis left the museum profession to take long rambling excursions all over the West, sleeping in his truck in the most remote and unspoiled places he could find. His stated purpose for these trips was "to study the museum by the side of the road."

In 1992, given the concept "that one has to live somewhere", he settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, purchasing a casita in what one local described as "a humble neighborhood". He lives quietly among his mostly Hispanic neighbors, who hardly notice his various comings and goings. He continues to roam the West, especially when the pretensions of Santa Fe, which are many and growing, weigh too heavily upon him. He finds remote and unspoiled areas fewer and fewer, always threatened to be drawn into the new recreational West that Mr. Lummis equates with what he calls "the Perfumado West" ("perfumados" being what Pancho Villa desparagingly called the dandies who attempted to administer Mexico from their palaces in the capitol.)

Perhaps his attitude toward the changing West and its attendant growth can be best illustrated by his famous remark made when serving as the Teller County, Colorado, delegate to the Governor's Conference on the Front Range in 1975: "Ladies and Gentlemen, the only way growth will be controlled in Teller County will be by the introduction of bubonic plague!"

His book of Western poetry, HIGH LONESOME, consists of vignettes of people and places he has encountered on his wanderings. The poems are meant to be read out loud, in the troubadour tradition. HIGH LONESOME is an old Western term, meaning either a geographic location, or the abrupt setting out on an unplannned and ill-advised journey.

His next book, nearing completion, will contain essays going back to his earliest days in the West, at his father's hardscrabble ranch in the isolated mountain country of Southern California. The essays continue up to the present, with descriptions of his recent wanderings and comments on the changing West, as well as observations on his current residence, Santa Fe, which he views as a severely compromised environment. The book more or less chronicles his evolution into something of "an anarchistic crank", who in many ways has come full circle in the West, now dangerously close to squeezing back through that little hole wherein he passed so many years ago.