Tarantulas bring tourism to rural La Junta
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LA JUNTA, Colo. — In downtown La Junta, a rural town with a population of about 7,100 people, businesses painted their front windows with spiderwebs and adorned their buildings with super-sized tarantulas.
The decorations came ahead of the town’s Tarantula Festival, an annual event that started in 2022 to celebrate the yearly mating season of thousands of tarantulas in southeastern Colorado.
“It's something that's unique. Much of the community has gotten behind it and thought [that] this is great. Not everybody, but a large percentage have realized that this is something to be proud of,” said Steve Keefer, a tour guide for the city’s tarantula bus tours. Keefer previously held the roles of biologist and peace officer as the district wildlife manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
“We had a lot of safety issues with people laying down and roads and everything else, and I want to keep people safe, and I also want them to enjoy it and to appreciate what we've got out here and learn something about it,” Keefer said.
Every year since the start of the festival, the La Junta tourism board has recorded an increase in tourists from around the country. In the first year, an estimated 50 people boarded the city’s tarantula bus tours; this year, about 150 participated in the bus tours, said Pamela Denahy, the director of tourism and economic development. The festival nearly doubled its number of vendors since last year, she said.
Video: Chelsea Casabona, Rocky Mountain PBS
The weekend kicked off with a tarantula storytime at the local library where about 80 people participated. Then, tarantula researchers and scientists Paula Cushing and Cara Shillington gave a presentation to nearly 200 people at Otero College to talk about their work in the field.
“You're going to hear me say a lot… I don't know. We don't know a lot,” said Shillington, a biology professor at Eastern Michigan University who researches tarantulas in the grasslands of southeastern Colorado.
There was not much prior research on tarantulas, said Dallas Haselhuhn, who worked in Shillington’s lab and first started his tarantula research in 2022 in La Junta.
“There was no foundation to build off,” Haselhuhn said. “So what I realized is that I could come out here and start building that foundation for others.”
During the Tarantula Festival, Haselhuhn waited in the grasslands for people on bus tours. Once the tourists arrived, Haselhuhn pointed out where the tarantulas were in the area while telling the tourists facts he learned about tarantulas from his research, and fielded their questions.
“I think the Tarantula Festival is one of those festivals that has a really broad appeal that can bring people down from Vancouver that are interested in it, " Haselhuhn said.
“I think it's really important for a festival like La Junta or like the festival to exist in a town like La Junta because of the amount of people it brings and how much it puts the town in people's minds outside of this region.”
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.