Another Roadside Distraction

Inside the chess-piece castles are small rooms decorated from floor to ceiling with an aluminum quilt of more than 100,000 beer and soda cans. Cano used to go out on Saturday nights to collect the cans, but now he just waits until Sunday morning. "My mom used to tell me, 'I don't know of anyone who can hold a bottle in one hand and a hammer in the other,'" he says. "If only I had another hand."

Most of his construction materials were either donated or scrounged. "I cleaned Antonito up," he explains. The Palace, where he resides, is lined with old bottles; the floor is covered with hand-me-down rugs. More donations adorn the rest of the property, which features a cross made of Keystone Light cans and a prophetic cement cookstove studded with marbles that predict events, Cano says, including 9/11. "This one has yet to happen," he adds, pointing at one group of marbles. "Maybe the Santana will come, or maybe something might happen in Iraq. This is a long path, but it's supposed to be something positive, kinda."

Now that his four castles are constructed, he plans to keep sprucing them up. He wants to add a deck to the Palace in hopes of attracting "princesses and princes" and maybe more tourists -- and their wallets. Mary Jane and God willing, that is. "It was God that made them," he says of his masterpieces. "He already proved to me two or three times that he was making them, not me."

Swetsville Zoo

It all started with Buzzard George. During a break from farming and firefighting back in 1985, Bill Swets started building an exotic creature out of a mower guard, a bike fork and an old shovel. "It took an hour or so," he remembers, "and I thought, 'There ain't nothing to this.'"

Swets went on to build the other 170 sculptures that now inhabit his Swetsville Zoo, on Harmony Road just south of Fort Collins. "I was a fireman for 22 years," he says. "That's how a lot of them got built. I'd come home in the middle of the night, and after a suicide or something, you can't sleep."

His favorite is the dinosaur band called "Two and One Half," which plays what he calls "heavy-metal junk." But he's also partial to "Eggy," a hatching dinosaur, and a two-headed dragon known as "Puff." Gazing at Puff, Swets outlines one of his artistic predicaments: Theoretically, the dragon's wings aren't big enough to hold up the weight of its body. "I did a lot of research," he says. "Dragons breathe fire; everyone knows that. Well, since they breathe fire, their whole belly is full of hot air, so they float. They just use their wings for propulsion."

"There's a little bit of hot air that goes on around here," he notes, walking off.

Swets's sculptures have gone through several phases during the past two decades. He spent a few years creating musical instruments, built something for each of his grandsons, and is now concentrating on vehicles. Autosaurus, a thirty-foot-long violet dinosaur/automobile with power steering, power brakes and a Ford V8 engine, is his latest. Sitting in its mouth, a driver can rev the work up to 90 mph. But Swets, a stickler for safety, says he never takes it over 30.

Other vehicles include the Dinocruiser, which Swets says is for moving dinosaurs, and Cinderella's Carriage, which is pulled by an 8-horsepower mouse. "I thought I'd cover him with indoor/outdoor carpet because it looks like fur," he explains. "But it's all compound curves. I'll tell you, I had more trouble with him! The mechanical part was easy compared to the upholstering!"

Before he began creating sculptures, Swets built bicycles, including a ten-person unit that local firemen brought out for parades, and unicycles that his sons used to make pick-up basketball games particularly challenging. One inventive bike has two parallel seats, a huge set of handlebars and no way to turn. "If you pedal backwards," he points out, "that sucker'll cut doughnuts."

Wonder View Tower

"Guess what this is?" Jerry Chubbuck asks, holding what looks like an oddly shaped rock. "Here's a hint: A dinosaur is heading south; this comes out his north end."

The petrified poo is the first item in Chubbuck's "Guess What" game. If you get all of the answers right, he'll give you back your one-dollar admission. But since the rest of the questions involve a nasal douche, a chicken-killing tool, glove stretchers, a whip holder and Chubbuck's favorite, a magician's knife, he usually gets to keep his money.

Chubbuck's complete collection of odd items is housed in the Wonder View Tower, a sixty-foot-tall structure that was the highest point between Denver and New York City in 1934. At the time, Ripley's Believe It or Not also confirmed that from the top of the tower on clear days, you could see six states: Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, New Mexico and South Dakota.