Swetsville Zoo – Timnath, Colorado
Here is a zoo that doesn’t have to worry about the food budget or cleaning up the messes made by the animals, this zoo is a sculpture park comprised of over 150 dinosaurs and other real and imaginary animals, flowers, and windmills. Each of these were constructed from car parts, farm machinery and other scrap metal.
The zoo was created by Bill Swets when he retired from farming. His town is only 230 in population and he grew up here. He married his high school sweetheart, Sandy, and then carried on with the dairy operation and farming as well as serving as a volunteer firefighter for 22 years.
He said that he would come home after pulling a guy out of a wreck and wouldn’t be able to sleep so he would go to the shop and work. He had never taken an art of welding lesson but that didn’t stop him. He copied a bird ornament on a friends lawn for his first sculpture. That was in 1985. For the next decade he churned out more than 15 pieces a year.
The Chinese twins, Yin and Yang, guard the entrance to the zoo, and Puff, a two-headed winged dragon, overlooks the Poudre River. Swets sculpts spaceships, robots, aliens, insects, and zoo animals, but dinosaurs are his specialty. The largest, Ali Senior, a 20-foot-tall, one-ton Allosaurus, was built in sections over two months.
The ex-dairy farmer regularly turns down offers to buy his work, although several are on permanent loan to the communities of Loveland and Fort Collins, Colo.
Location: 4801 E. Harmony Road Fort Collins CO 80528
Phone: 970-484-9509
Hours: Daily, dawn to dusk
Cost: Free; Donations appreciated
Ages: All Ages
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