Chatfield Denver Botanic Gardens’ website is like hedge maze to nowhere

No Botanic Gardens for you!. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. My East Coast folks in for the weekend, we decided to take a jaunt down to Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield, a place we’d never been but about which we'd heard many a tantalizing tidbit. Nature...

By Joel Warner

November 13, 2008

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No Botanic Gardens for you!.

It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.

My East Coast folks in for the weekend, we decided to take a jaunt down to Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield, a place we’d never been but about which we'd heard many a tantalizing tidbit. Nature walks! A historic farm! A one-room schoolhouse!

To make sure we weren’t on a fools’ errand, I checked out the gardens’ hours on its website. Sure enough, the site noted the operation was open 9-to-5 year round, all week long, save for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Or so we thought.

Off we went, on a long, half-hour drive from our northwest Denver abode all the way down to Chatfield Reservoir – only to come face to face with the gated-off entrance to the gardens. "Closed on weekends," read a sign.

Talk about big whammy! Thankfully, nearby Chatfield State Park was blissfully open – but the damage had been done. The next exciting thing the Botanic Gardens should grow is a website update. -- Joel Warner

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Joel Warner is a former staff writer for Westword and International Business Times. He's also written for WIRED, Men's Journal, Men's Health, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science, Slate, Grantland and many other publications. He's co-author of the 2014 book The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny, published by Simon & Schuster.

Contact: Joel Warner