Ask a scuba diver for directions to Colorado’s best diving and they will likely show you to the airport.

For a state that ranks among the top in the nation for divers per capita, Colorado has a dearth of quality scuba diving water. The lakes are cold and the ponds are murky. Most divers travel out of state for underwater adventure.

The owner of Colorado Gators Reptile Park in the San Luis Valley wants to change that.

Jay Young is building a 30-foot deep, goethermal spring-fed lagoon and stocking it with warm-water critters.

“When it’s done I won’t have to go to Cozumel to scuba,” said Young, an avid diver whose parents started 80-acre fish farm near Mosca in 1977. “For all the divers we have in Colorado, there’s really no place to go. People may not have $5,000 to take off for a week of diving but they might have $500 for a weekend.”

The Young clan has always been big on adapting. When dead fish and the carcasses of filleted tilapia began to pile up at the fish farm west of Great Sand Dunes National Park, they bought 100 baby alligators to eat the remains. When those alligators thrived in the farm’s 87-degree water, they opened to the public and Colorado Gators Reptile Park was born.

Today, Young’s park is home to hundreds of alligators and rescued reptiles, from pythons, tortoises, snapping turtles, iguanas and exotic fish. He’s collected six pacu, a freshwater fish from the Amazon River that are related to piranha and can grow to 55 pounds. He’s also got several redtail catfish, another large fish that thrives in the Amazon basin but often outgrows home aquariums.

Young dreamed up the idea for a warm water lagoon for the tilapia and his growing collection of wildlife a decade ago. Four years ago he started digging.

The hole now is 30 feet deep and 200 feet across. He’s planning to line it with concrete and rocks, shaping caves and grottoes as underwater features for both fish and divers. The geothermal spring flows at about 500 gallons per minute and about half that will be diverted to the lagoon.

Young hopes to be open to divers in July.

If divers flock as planned, he will build changing rooms and restroom facilities, and perhaps, an inflatable dome that could help keep the lagoon warm in the winter months.

Young also would like to develop an alligator habitat adjacent to the lagoon, where divers would be separated from gators by an underwater Plexiglass wall, he said, “so you can actually scuba next to a 10-foot alligator and not get eaten.”

Young started an online fundraising campaign to help off-set the $20,000 cost of digging, lining and plumbing the lagoon. He’s offering $100 donors a year pass to the lagoon.

“So awesome. I will definitely go check it out,” said Adam Knudson, a scuba instructor at Denver Dives, one of the city’s many thriving dive shops.

Most dive instruction in Colorado begins in a swimming pool and more advanced open-water training typically requires travel out-of-state, often to the famed Blue Hole in Santa Rosa, N.M. It, too, is a

former fish hatchery that now is known as the scuba capital of the Southwest.

“We are all looking for places that are a little different,” Knudson said. “There is a lot of opportunity there, especially if he can maintain good water quality.”

Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or @jasonblevins