Colorado Gators Reptile Park. August, 2011. What remains of the summer I saved for the first days of fall. This is the last installment from photographs from this series, taken outside of Alamosa, Colorado at a place that will let you wrestle with alligators for a feee. It’s another Pacman adventure –the last for the warm months.
Colorado Gators Reptile Park is a collage of strange. The place started as a tilapia farm and began picking up alligators to use as garbage disposals for dead fish. Years later, the number has grown exponentially –enough that the actual count per pond evaded our guide. Perhaps 60 to 80 in this one, 40 to 50 in that. The park feels like a schizophrenic menagerie, with old fish ponds stuffed full of gators, pens with an assortment of domestic farm animals right next to exotic creatures that would feel right at home in a zoo. For a 15 dollar entrance fee ($12.50 if you buy your ticket at the nearby UFO Watchtower), you’re free to wander the grounds. You’re even allowed to dig your hands into buckets stuffed with dead, rotting tilapia to toss to the eager reptiles.
But the grand prize costs a king’s ransom of 100 dollars. For that price, you can join a small group of tourists eager to take their shot at wrestling a gator. The wrestling is ostensibly to help the park isolate and treat wounds that the gators develop over time. You wrestle the gator into submission and then a staffer inspects the gator for cuts, putting antibiotic cream on its lacerations before releasing it back into the pond from which it came. Far be it from me to judge the actual motivation for the wrestling, I was in tow to see Mr. Pacman take a crack at these prehistoric beasts.
These pictures are the result from the last summer field trip of 2011.
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