The World By Road

Well, one of the goals of our trip is to discover places and things around the world that not too many people many know about. In some cases, you don’t need to go that far to discover something that is not that well known and definitely on the random side of things. the Colorado Gator Farm is just one of those places. The Gator Farm is located just north of Alamosa Colorado, and being thousands of miles away from oceans and swamps, is one of the last places you would expect to see a bunch of alligators and crocs. The place started out as a Tilapia farm and when they needed to get rid of the dead ones, they decided to bring in some gators. The farm sits on a natural spring where the water temp is about 87 degrees and it just so happens that the gators liked the place. Soon, the facility turned into a gator rescue home of sorts and a place for people from New York to get rid of their reptiles once they realized the things get big and tend to have a temper from time to time. As word spread, other reptiles including giant albino pythons, lizards and turtles found refuge. Today, the farm still produces Tilapia and has also grown into a pretty sizeable gator breeding ground, supplying gators and even Nile crocs to zoos around the county. 

Our tour of the facility started out with meeting one of its residents up close and personal. I was presented with a gator, that although small, turned out to be pretty hefty. He was maybe three feet long and weighed about 40 pounds. According to our host, the little guy had jaws that could exert over 300 psi of pressure, enough to snap through the bones in my hand if it got too close. It was actually pretty cool. Gators have a hard coating on their backside, but their belly is covered with soft scales, much like a snake. After messing around with the little guy for a bit, Shoppman and I got a certificate of bravery and it was stamped and sealed in the jaws of the little guy himself. With that, we explored the rest of the reptile house which housed a wide assortment of orphaned and previously neglected snakes, turtles, lizards and iguanas and other reptiles that people though would make great pets.

Next stop were the outdoor containment ponds that were home to probably over a hundred medium sized gators. These things were all over the place and they seemed to enjoy lounging around on top of each other in the spring southern Colorado sun. This was indeed one of the most random places I had ever been, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was in an episode of the twilight zone. Passing the still functioning and booming Tilapia tanks, we ventured out back to were they keep the big boys. These were the gators that were over 10 feet long and were probably big enough and hungry enough that when placed with the smaller gators, would line up to eat like they were in a buffet line in Texas. Starting at the end of May, for $50 one of the fearless hosts at the gator farm will teach you how to be fearless as well and allow you to get in and learn how to wrestle with one of these things. I for one was pretty keen on trying my hand at gator wrestling, but Shoppman said it was just plain wrong… although he said he would do it if someone else did it first.

As we walked around the outdoor ponds, big gators hissing at us as we approached their enclosures, we stumbled upon more and more random animals. The farm was also home to a pair of ostrich who were pecking around at the dirt in a pen outside the gator enclosure. I was not even going to get close to those things. I’ll wrestle a gator, but I won’t even get close enough to touch a bird. I have probably one of the biggest cases of orniphobia imaginable, so while Shoppman tried to intimidate them with his crazy hippy head bobbing, I filmed from a distance and then moved on. (I have a feeling this phobia of  mine will be exploited for the entertainment of our audience at future points in time.) We then stumbled across a pen with a wallaby in it. This place just kept getting weirder and weirder. What they hell were these guys doing with a wallaby? (for those of you who don’t know what a wallaby is, it is like a fuzzy, miniature kangaroo.) Were they going to feed it to the gators? Who knows, but it was just another item in a line of many things that just didn’t seem to fit in the San Luis valley.  After the final walk through the Nile croc ponds and running faster than I have run in any triathlon past the peacock who was allowed to roam free on the grounds, we said goodbye to the gator farm and the two donkeys that were hanging out by the parking lot. Definitely an interesting place and I can see why Ripley’s Believe It or Not did a piece on it… if you had told me something like this existed in Colorado I would have thought you were full of it.