Colorado Gators Reptile Park

I wrestled alligators this weekend; what’d you do?

No, seriously: the Colorado Gators Reptile Park in Mosca offers an alligator wrestling class for anyone who’s stupid enough to do it – obviously G and I had to sign up. The price is 100 bucks a head, and it’s well worth it. We were taken under the wing of Jay, a man with a ponytail and a cowboy hat who kept making these dry morbid asides that I’m still not entirely sure were jokes; he started us off with the babies, which were swimming around in a big metal tub with red-eared sliders. After he showed us the technique and while everyone was standing around looking unsure, I hopped right in and caught one; according to Jay, the number one rule in gator wrasslin’ is don’t hesitate.

Alligators are surprisingly squishy; I thought that lovely texture of their skin would be bony and hard, but it’s not. After the babies, as a bonus, we got in the tank with the farm’s 100-pound alligator snapping turtle. Kong is truly a dinosaur. I couldn’t lift him by myself, so I got a pic with his smaller cousin.

The insides of turtles are very sandy and wet. We moved onto teenage alligators next. This required a more elaborate technique than just snatching them up by the back of the neck. We had to drag them in from the water by the tail, swinging and dancing around them while they tried to snap at our legs and hands, yank their tails backward towards us and then jump on their backs and push all of our weight down on their necks. Usually at this point, they’d go nuts and somebody else would have to hold the tail or it would drag you back into the water on its back.

Before you feel too bad for the poor little guys, there was a purpose to this that wasn’t purely sadistic. Alligators are nasty creatures, particularly to each other, so what we were doing was catching the gators and holding them down so Jay could put Neosporin on their cuts or give them shots of antibiotics. It’s something that has to be done around the farm, and the gators just swam back out to their sunning areas when you let them go.

Lastly we got to do a photo shoot of sorts with the biggest gator on the farm, a gigantic nine-foot female. This was actually probably the safest of all of our encounters, as Jay put her on a rope leash while we got to sit on her.

I got to kiss her nose, too, but I couldn't hold her head up long enough for a picture.

For completing the class, we each got a certificate of insanity, er, I mean completion.

Very cool weekend trip, and an excellent workout. I have an alligator head souvenir on my desk at work now; I’m telling everyone that I twisted it off with my bare hands.