Colorado Gators Reptile Park

In 1977 Erwin and Lynne Young came from Texas and bought eighty acres on the floor of the San Luis Valley near Mosca. The ground had what they wanted: a geothermal well that brings water up at about 87 degrees, warm enough to raise tilapia and African perch in a valley where winter nights fall far below zero. They farmed live fish for market.

The fish farm made waste, the heads and guts and frames left after filleting, and in 1987 the Youngs bought a hundred one-year-old alligators to eat it. The gators thrived in the warm ponds and drew so many curious people that the farm opened to the public in 1990. One of the first, a gator named Elvis, was still there decades later at about twelve feet.

Their son Jay Young runs it now, and the alligators have been joined by crocodiles, caimans, pythons, iguanas, turtles and tortoises, most of them animals people bought as pets and could no longer keep or were never allowed to keep; the park takes them in and uses them to teach which reptiles make bad pets. It holds more than 250 alligators. The fish are still farmed, now as food for the reptiles. The ponds also water wetlands that draw herons and waterfowl. Nothing hatches here: the eggs do not survive the valley's climate. The park sits off State Highway 17 north of Alamosa, the same road the valley's promoters sell as a cosmic highway for its UFO watchtower.