Outside of archaeology, he was best known as part of the earliest Beat circle and inspiration for several characters in the novels of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.
In high school, by composing a fictional dialogue between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, he attracted the attention of an official and a Columbia alumnus from Denver called Justin Brierly.
Brierly, who had a reputation of selecting young male protégés and placing them to his own alma mater, recommended Chase to Columbia University.
"[1][8] In 1951, Chase went to Mexico and briefly reunited with some of the Beats there, including William Burroughs, and Frank Jeffries, his childhood friend who also went to Columbia University.
Her father, named Charles Bailey, was a voice teacher, and her mother, Ida Mayhew, taught piano.
[11] On the High Plains Archaeological Expedition in 1949, Chase, along with Robert Stegler who also came from Columbia University, set up their field camp beside the Purgatoire River.
Later that summer, Chase and Stegler excavated and recorded more rock art panels at the Snake Blakeslee site on the Apishapa River.
[9] In 1951, Chase took a teaching job at Trinidad State Junior College,[13] and during that time contributed in setting up the archaeology programme there.
Instead, he lived in rural California for the next few decades, leading a life of building sailboats and Renaissance musical instruments (including lutes, viols, and vihuelas[14]), as well as other activities including "subsistence farming, orchard-tending, and dairy production", according to fellow archaeologist Chris Lintz's account of him in 1999.
Most of Kerouac's works are romans à clef (novels that were largely based on real people and events).