Best New Playground
The four-acre Nature Play, which opened at the Museum of Nature & Science last September, is designed for immersive play and education, with a purposely unstructured design for creativity and problem-solving. Suitable for all ages, the grounds are designed around the museum’s third-floor dioramas of all eight of Colorado’s ecosystems, and also include water features like a mountain stream and beaver dam. The water makes it to the playground via the underground “big ditch,” which began operating in 1867 and is Denver’s oldest infrastructure. There are also tunnels, ropes, swings, slides and hiding places. And where else will you find a twenty-foot climbable bighorn sheep, or wooden benches carved by local artist “Chainsaw Mama”?