{"id":43064,"date":"2021-12-22T18:54:49","date_gmt":"2021-12-23T01:54:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-gators-started-as-a-natural-garbage-disposal-now-its-a-tourist-attraction\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T03:11:25","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:11:25","slug":"colorado-gators-started-as-a-natural-garbage-disposal-now-its-a-tourist-attraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-gators-started-as-a-natural-garbage-disposal-now-its-a-tourist-attraction\/","title":{"rendered":"Colorado Gators started as a natural garbage disposal. Now it\u2019s a tourist attraction"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jay
Jay Young, the owner of Colorado Gator Reptile Park, interacts with a young alligator in Mosca. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span>Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

MOSCA \u2013 As Jay Young rolls his pants up and wades into the murky pond, Elvis emits a guttural hissing. It sounds like a pressurized water hose cleaning out a barrel.<\/p>\n

Young taps the 12-foot-long, 600-pound alligator\u2019s snout and the gnarly armored creature lunges forward, toothy maw wide.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe still wants to eat me after all these years,\u201d says Young, deftly dodging Elvis, a gator his father acquired in 1987 as a wee thing to help eat piles of fish guts.<\/p>\n

Elvis was among the first residents of the Colorado Gators Reptile Park, a geothermal oasis in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristos. The San Luis Valley attraction ranks among the oddest on Colorado\u2019s trophy shelf of tourist draws, luring about 40,000 visitors a year to one of the nation\u2019s only alligator refuges outside of the South and Texas.<\/p>\n

There are 270 alligators spread across 80 acres at Colorado Gators, plus two Nile crocodiles and a couple of spectacled caimans. Young\u2019s dad, Erwin Young, bought the acreage in 1977 and started farming tilapia in 87-degree pools filled from geothermal wells. A decade later, overwhelmed by the carcasses of filleted fish, the Youngs bought a bunch of alligators to serve as a sort of natural garbage disposal.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for the gators to draw visitors and the Young\u2019s business plan moved away from selling fish. (He\u2019s still farming fish, but as food for gators, not people.) Today, Jay Young travels the country rescuing all sorts of alligators, pythons, tortoises and iguanas.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s such a cool story with how it started and the innovation over there,\u201d says Kale Mortensen, the director of Visit Alamosa, which counts the gator park among its top draws. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely a big part of our tourism economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jay
Jay Young interacts with Elvis, a 12-foot 600-pound alligator at his gator park in Mosca. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span>Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Carly Holbrook has spent 15 years marketing Colorado tourism attractions for both the Colorado Tourism Office and regional visitor bureaus. She always recommends a stop at Young\u2019s gator menagerie out in the middle of nowhere, west of Great Sand Dunes National Park. She remembers being a teenager, posing with her siblings as she grasped a young gator, \u201cwith slightly frightened smiles,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She said she always walks out of Young\u2019s oasis wondering \u201cwhere the heck am I?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJay is an excellent marketer of his unexpected and wacky offerings \u2026 and I totally agree that his persona and gator park are Tiger King-esque,\u201d she says. \u201cNot something you would expect to experience in Colorado.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of the alligators Young has adopted, about 150, were illegal pets. They start cute, he says, but they outgrow that phase pretty quickly. Same with Young\u2019s 29 tortoises, which can live more than 100 years and grow to 200 pounds.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd they can be very destructive,\u201d Young says as he sidesteps a tortoise shuffling through a muggy corridor of glowing glass tanks filled with snakes and lizards basking under bulbs.<\/p>\n

\"This
This pig-nosed turtle was recently adopted by Jay Young and the Colorado Gator Reptile Park in Mosca. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span>Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

One of the tanks has some alligator eggs. In more than 30 years of operation, Young has never nurtured gator eggs. The flow of rescues is so great, there\u2019s no need to breed, he says. The gators try, but there\u2019s \u201czero chance\u201d gator eggs will last in Colorado\u2019s climate. This is just an experiment, he says.<\/p>\n

Exotic pet stores also provide a steady stream of new arrivals. Like the pig-nosed \u2013 or Fly River \u2013 turtle Young recently adopted when the owner of an exotic pet store in Texas passed away and his collection was dissolved.<\/p>\n

\u201cCheck out these flippers,\u201d he says, plucking the trembling turtle from a pond in the shadow of a fig tree planted in 1887.<\/p>\n

Young merely points to a 135-pound alligator snapping turtle perched on a rock in a weedy indoor marsh. You don\u2019t pick up Kong, he says.<\/p>\n

Outsider, the gators are stacked up on the banks of lukewarm ponds, a dense, dangerous carpet that could feature prominently in any respectable nightmare. Young is still working on his plans to build a scuba lagoon, where divers can swim separated from gators by a plexiglass wall.<\/p>\n

\"There
There are 270 alligators spread across 80 acres at the gator park in San Luis Valley. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span>Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Just about everything that happens at the gator park fits well into the region\u2019s \u201cMystic San Luis Valley\u201d tourism marketing campaign. The Great Sand Dunes draw visitors, but the valley\u2019s Colorado gator park and UFO Watchtower on Colorado 17 \u2013 the \u201cCosmic Highway\u201d \u2013 keep tourists entertained and maybe around for a bit longer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are full of unique little spots that people really enjoy,\u201d Mortensen says.<\/p>\n

Read more at The Colorado Sun<\/div>\n

The Colorado Sun is a reader-supported, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to covering Colorado issues. To learn more, go to coloradosun.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jay Young\u2019s San Luis Valley oasis offers tourists close-up encounters with gators, snakes, turtles and lizards<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43065,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-43064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85557,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43064\/revisions\/85557"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43064"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=43064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}