Colorado, Day 2: Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Seven Falls

Side note for today - Is it really necessary to have a Chipotle restaurant located every 15 feet throughout the entire state? I mean, I like a good burrito and all, but daaaaaamn, there's a lot of them here.

All right, now that I've finished that, let's move on to one of the top things I was looking forward to on this trip: Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. Located on the side of a mountain in Colorado Springs, this zoo is insanely attractive and would be worth the trip, even if it didn't have it's main attraction, which is ... giraffe feeding.


I mean, how cool is that? $1 for three giraffe crackers, which I have a sneaking suspicion are just the high-fiber crackers I used to eat when I was doing the Adkin's diet a few years ago. I could have dropped some serious coin there, had Jason not held my purse hostage in the stroller. Spoilsport.

They have like 20 giraffes in the herd, too, so every morning there's a stampede of spindly legs as they leave their pens and head for the exhibit. It's too cute for words, so I won't even bother.

The rest of the exhibits are really nice, especially for a zoo that's in a somewhat remote location (and that I had never heard of before getting the Colorado tourism catalog). And with the mountainside location (which makes every single exhibit uphill from wherever you are), both the visitors and the inhabitants have a pretty good view.

We got lucky that the animals were very active on the day we visited, and pretty much everything was open except for the carousel (Liza was heartbroken). We discovered that after feeding the giraffes, spending $1 for a popsicle stick with a blob of birdseed glued on to feed to the budgies just wasn't that exciting.

Also discovered why you don't want to get on the bad side of a baboon.

We also decided that Liza's wordless howling every evening is eerily close to the howling of certain gibbons, which has provided us with endless opportunities for mocking her quietly in a way she doesn't quite understand yet.

After we had visited pretty much everything at the zoo, we headed for Seven Falls, a privately owned attraction that lets you see a waterfall that has seven rather unimpressive stages. There's an elevator up to a viewing platform that's across the way and about halfway up the falls, which is where I found this shot:

There's also a set of stairs that goes up to the top of the falls, where there's some hiking trails and a lookout point. Liza and I made it halfway up, and I was game to go up to the top, but she wussed out on us (read: started wailing at the top of her lungs), so she and I headed back down the stairs. They weren't steep at all ... yeah, right.

One of my proudest accomplishments on this vacation was getting her to walk down that entire flight of stairs (holding my hand and the railing - I'm not stupid, just lazy and somewhat reckless). Then we fed the (stocked) trout in the stream while Jason poked around up top, taking shots of a bewildering variety of warning signs. Falling rocks, lightning, bears, pointed sticks - you name it.