Road Trip 2010: Day 67: Saturday in Colorado Springs (Part 1)

First the good news: We slept in! All the way to 7 AM! Then we ate breakfast at the KOA Campground's Wagon Wheel Cafe. All you can eat blueberry pancakes which translated into two pancakes the size of a dinner plate and half inch thick...each. (Terry got the biscuits and gravy: two biscuits split and pan seared in butter and then smothered in sausage gravy.)

We decided we needed to do some walking after that breakfast so headed off to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in southeast Colorado Springs. What a great place! The entire zoo is built into the side of the mountain making it a tiered gardens. It was sunny and warm so many of the animals were a little on the lethargic side but the giraffes--one of the largest collections of such animals in any zoo--were up to a little entertainment...for the price of a snack cracker...or ten.

Giraffes at the Zoo

A boardwalk around the enclosure gets you up close and personal...and at an eye level...to the giraffes. Makes slipping them a cracker...or twenty...nice and easy.

Giraffe at the Zoo

We took the tram ride to the top of the zoo and got a real birds-eye view of the place as well as the Colorado plains east of I-25. Heck, we might have been able to see Kansas if anything stuck up far enough.

Looking east from the top of the tramway.
There's a reason this is called "The Front Range."

There's a monument to Will Rodgers up on the side of the Cheyenne Mountain, too. Privately constructed by a man who thought highly of Mr. Rogers who was born in Oklahoma and died in a plane crash in the Arctic. Why here? Who knows.

Monument to Will Rogers.

It was pretty easy to get up close and personal with many of the animals. They were either directly below you on the slope or just above you. Some shared the tier with you.

Crowned Crane

Meerkat

Zebra

Okapi

Fat little western chipmunks roamed the zoo looking for gullible (or sloppy) kids upon which to prey. They also could be seen in many of the larger animal enclosures. But I do not think there were any in with the Okapi because the okapi, while not carnivores, shared their pen with some guys who were:

Ground Hornbill

Wallaby

Tiger

Grizzly Bear (or, perhaps, a Brown?)

Porcupine

Peacock

While most of the animals (excluding the birds and the chipmunks) were content to lay back and take it easy, the hippos seemed to have the best idea for how to spend a sunny, warm afternoon.

Hippos

We left the zoo to roam around town a bit before going to dinner at Joyce's house.