Part 1: Paradise without a PR Agent

The West Less Traveled: San Luis Valley

By

Ted Alvarez

, 12-28-05

	Photos by Ted Alvarez

In the storied valleys of the Rocky Mountains, Aspen has the glitz and glam, Vail has an unparalleled ski valley, and Jackson has rugged class.

The San Luis Valley has an intergalactic spaceport inside of Mt. Blanca.

Or so claim a few locals, who have either concocted a genius plan to scare outsiders away, or might be drinking too much of the region’s rich Kool Aid of myth and urban legend.

If it’s the former, no one can blame them: south-central Colorado’s San Luis Valley is a perennial best-kept secret. Despite the Great Sand Dunes National Park, a rugged and majestic mountain backcountry, and the occasional national write-up (The New York Times profiled the Valley in Oct. 2004), it has thus far escaped a major tourism boom and the accompanying kudzu-like sprawl afflicting many of the Rocky Mountain West’s other scenic valleys.

Lacking any major tourist infrastructure, the Valley remains largely undeveloped, and the real estate signs are mostly hand-painted relics advertising “low prices, great for farming or ranching.�? It’s a marketing-free, unspoiled, high-arid valley fenced in by the toothy Sangre de Christos on the eastern edge and the jagged San Juans on the western -- paradise without a PR agent.

But that could change: on the western fringes, Texas billionaire Red McCombs seeks to turn the mom-and-pop ski resort Wolf Creek into a Vail-dwarfing behemoth. So far, the project has stalled in court, but the David-and-Goliath nature of the conflict and environmental worries concerning the reintroduced Canadian lynx have turned this battle over the snowiest stretch of Colorado into one of the highest-profile land development controversies in the West. If McCombs’s plans come to full fruition, it stands to reason that the entire 122-mile long, 74-mile wide alpine valley will experience an exponential increase in tourist traffic. The secret will be out.

But Mr. McCombs will have more to contend with than courts, should he or anyone else decide to take on the whole valley. Alligators, extraterrestrials, and Eastern mystics of all doctrines lie in wait, ready to spring on the unsuspecting traveler. You can find the most potent Mexican food for hundreds of miles here, as well as stellar sport climbing in an eerie canyon once frequented by a shadowy religious sect. I barely survived --what chance does a billionaire have?

There’s Gators in Them Thar…Mountains?

Upon our first entrance, even the weather seemed to be making a concerted effort to scare us off from the hidden charms of the San Luis Valley. After an evening of youthful indiscretions and thus a late start out of the Front Range foothills outside of Denver, clouds and sprinkling rain dogged us all the way down the death corridor of I-25 (total wrecks seen: 4). As we drove up toward the eastern gateway into the valley, the 9,242 ft. La Veta Pass, thick fingers of clouds closed in, and car traffic disappeared into the fog. My newly minted research partner/skilled driver/Subaru owner/little brother Jeff noted astutely that visibility was “crap;�? the Valley might let us in, but it certainly wasn’t going to make an easy time of it.

Once we started the decline into the valley, the fog relented a bit and we could make out vast swaths of aspens dotting the mountainsides, their leaves quivering like green coins in the wind. The further we descended, the better the view became: the aspens and ponderosa pines melted into dusty groves of willows and cottonwoods, and eventually the clouds broke altogether to reveal an expanse of rusty earth and brushy, yellow-topped chamiso flanked by parallel chains of peaks.

Towering above it all was the Sierra Blanca massif, the southern spur of the Sangres made of several 14,000 and 13,000 foot peaks, including 14,345 ft. Blanca Peak, the 4th tallest in Colorado. In pictures, Blanca looked like a white shark tooth tearing a hole in the sky, but today it wore a wicked crown of dark weather. Since an ascent of Blanca was on the trip itinerary, for us it might as well have been Mt. Doom, minus the lava.

I shook flashbacks from Touching the Void out of my head, though, and focused on our first stop to Colorado Gators, where we could presumably lose fingers to reptiles instead of frostbite. Mosca residents Erwin and Lynne Young originally established this gator farm in 1977 for the purpose of raising tilapia, which they still ship around Colorado. In 1987, they got the bright idea to bring in a few live gators as living “garbage disposals�? for the fish that died or didn’t make the cut. Overwhelmed pet owners dropped off more gators, caimans, pythons, and other critters in the intervening years, and rumor of these Rocky Mountain reptiles spread. Colorado Gator reps estimate 150 -- 200 people visit daily during high season to take a gander at their over 400-strong gator population during the summer.

From the gravel parking lot, the farm sure doesn’t look like much more than an overhauled junkyard. After passing a few stagnant, reeking ponds, we come to a hand-painted sign announcing the entrance to Colorado Gators. A few dusty yards later, we arrive in the tchochke-ridden gift shop; we pay the $6 entrance fee and the cashier gives us a complimentary bucket of "gator chow"—grape-sized nuggets of dried fishmeal. Jeff wrinkled his nose at them, and we pushed through the glass doors into the park.

The layout of the farm resembles a low-budget horror film crossed with a DIY-animal preserve: wooden plank paths lead you past steaming moats filled with gators of escalating sizes, and sometimes these paths lead into enclosed greenhouses that lodge a rogue’s gallery of snakes, monitor lizards, turtles, and other unwanted creepy crawlies. When we step into the first greenhouse, farm employee Lance Bressman, 19, accosts me with a two-foot gator and thrusts it into my hands. He looks like an older Elijah Wood, purged of the Hobbit niavete and adorned with tattoos and a six-inch Mohawk. He snaps my picture, hands me an official “Certificate of Bravery�? and tells Jeff, “Now you’ve got a hero!�? I decide to break cover and ask him a few questions. “Oh, you don’t want to talk to me,�? he says. “Let me go get Jay.�?

	Jay Young, displaying his gator wrestling talent.

Jay Young, 27, the son of Colorado Gators founders Erwin and Lynne, holds several gator wrestling titles and has spent his entire life wrangling the massive reptiles. The city of Los Angeles recently hired him to attempt to remove a released pet gator from a public lake, and rumors abound that he’s taken a few "meetings" with Hollywood since his celebrated visit made local and national news. When I finally catch this wiry, muddy bayou man sauntering towards me, with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip and stringy hair in his face, it’s easy to see why.

"I learned to handle ‘em when I was small and they were small," he drawls sleepily. "I mean, I got bit a few times, and each time I learned not to what I did again." When prodded, he proceeds to name off his injuries nonchalantly, as if ticking off items on his Thursday grocery list. "A 6-footer—Tinkerbell—got my arm," he says, pointing to a lengthy scar on his ropy forearm. “I let my arms get to far out to the side. Three fingers got crushed and held in a big one’s jaws…teething, I guess.�?

Before I can finish the interview, a burly fellow covered in foul-smelling mud yells Jay’s name from an enclosure. "Excuse, me," he mumbles. "Gotta take care o’ something." I walk back over to Punk-Rock Frodo, who is assisting a button-cute little blonde girl holding the same gator I held. As he hands every member of Denver’s Culhane family certificates of bravery, my masculine accomplishment gets severely diminished. No points from the ladies for holding a thrashing gator if 7-year-old Molly Culhane can do it too, I figure. Like most visitors to Colorado Gators, Dan and Lisa Culhane had heard rumors of the place before, but they only stopped when they saw the signs from the highway as they were passing through. “Seemed interesting, and the kids were pretty excited,�? said Lisa.

Jeff and I pass snapping turtles, reticulated pythons, and piranhas on our way out to the big gator moats. Somewhere out here is Sasquatch, an 11-foot-plus monstrosity, and I’ll be damned if leave without seeing him. We’re only separated from the brackish pools by a chain link fence, and while most of the dusty grayish gators sit sunning themselves motionless, as soon as you toss pellets of fishmeal into the water, they slowly creep into motion. Watching them silently drift over and then suddenly snap up a nugget is a lot more exhilarating than it sounds, especially when several get aroused and start competing for your nuggets.

When I get to the far end of the park, Jeff spots a massive gator floating motionless like a log from a felled oak tree. He starts pelting it with pellets, but it remains unresponsive. “Wake up!�? he yells, tossing handfuls with zest. I tell him to take it easy, clearly the beast already ate a baby or something, but as I’m yapping, its eyes roll back and it goes under. After a couple tension-filled seconds it rises at the shore, a mere two feet from our dirt path. When the trashcan-sized head clomps down on a wayward gator pellet, it sends waves across the pond, and the dinky fence seems like scant protection. After it eats its fill it dives away from view, and doesn’t come back up. Could this have been Sasquatch? One thing is certain: We’re not waiting around to find out.

	What could be Sasquatch.

As we make our way around the moats and back to the front of the park, the burly gator wrangler from before starts marching his way toward us. He’s bald, and he’s got a pack of ciggies rolled up in the sleeve of his mud-stained t-shirt, James Dean style. “You the reporter?" he yells. Worried that we angered Sasquatch into eating a visitor, I nervously respond in the affirmative. "C’mere," he commands. "I wanna show you something."

I learn that this wrangler is Noah Mather, an Alamosa native and childhood friend of Jay Young. He’s been training with gators nearly as long, and is in charge of Colorado Gators’ instruction program. No fooling: Colorado Gators is certainly the only place in the U.S.—and Mather claims the world—where you can take lessons in gator wrestling. All you need is to be of sound physical condition, a stout heart, and $50 to qualify for 3+ hrs. of one-on-one training. Oh, and there’s the little matter of the legal waiver wherein the signer waives legal rights to sue and declares, “I, ____, do hereby admit that if I’m crazy enough to willingly put my hands on an alligator, I deserve to get bit. Furthermore, I promise not to whine too much if I do get a few bumps and scrapes or even a flesh wound."

While we wend our way through the back corridors and off-limits sections of Colorado Gators, Mather explains the training process. “We start at the little ones and move up to the two and three-year olds; by the end, you’ll catch a big gator, sit on him, and ride off into the water,�? he says. “You’ll probably handle 60 [gators] from beginning to the end.�? The biggest trick is positioning your hands behind the neck of the gator—an alligator, no matter how big or strong, can’t twist its neck to bite you any better than you can. “Most of the bites happen with the little ones,�? he says. Even with these assurances, my writerly instinct to protect my fingers trumps my desire to enter the fray.

My instinct gets confirmed when Mather opens a wooden gate and we enter a muddy, stinking pen of 30 or so gators. These are mid-sized buggers, between four and seven feet, and when he moves close to them they begin thrashing and spewing guttural hisses. In this pen, Mather introduces me to recent gator school graduate Jason McDonald, a twentysomething Denverite who came down specifically for gator wrestling lessons. “I own a caiman, and I thought I’d do this in case there’s a problem," he says. “Now, after tackling a full-size gator, I feel like I can handle it. I can’t wait to come back and do it again."

Mather strides out into the muck (barefoot!) and grabs the largest one by the tail. Since he keeps talking away, he seems as if he’s on autopilot, but whenever the gator moves, even just a twitch, he instantly snaps to attention and adjusts his body position. He gets silent for a moment, and then quickly jumps forward to straddle the gator. When he does this, the gator launches forward into the pen with Mather on its back, spraying a chocolate-milk colored wake across the enclosure. It stops in the middle, and Mather grabs the gator’s stubby forearms and pulls the animal into an upright position. For a second, the gator stops resisting, seeming to acknowledge submission. Then, as fast as it all began, he leaps off and dashes back to shore, barely dodging a ferocious lashing from the animal’s tail toward his legs.

It would be easy to dismiss Noah Mather as an irresponsible thrillseeker, and his tough-guy exterior would fit the description, but his words often betray his tender feelings for the animals. After all, part of the stated mission of Colorado gators is to educate the public on the dangers of keeping exotic pets. “You know, 90% of America doesn’t need to have a crocodilian as a pet -- I understand the allure, they’re such beautiful, beautiful animals -- but we get so many unwanted pets here from all over the country, and they’re usually in terrible condition,�? he laments. “The other day we got this gorgeous caiman, and you know what the owner had been feeding it? Hot dogs! HOT DOGS! It’s entire life! That’s just disgraceful.�?

Click here for the second installment of "The West Less Traveled" by Ted Alvarez.

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