Three things you can only do in Colorado

Watch cliff divers over dinner

Casa Bonita is a 52,000 square foot pink stucco palace on a Lakewood strip mall, built in 1974. Inside are an indoor cliff, a thirty-foot waterfall, a lagoon, a cave, a puppet theatre and a haunted mine shaft, and you eat sopapillas while divers in costume throw themselves off the rocks every few minutes. The building was designed around the show.

It is the last survivor of a small chain of themed restaurants built in the 1970s. Reservations open publicly and fill within hours, so this is not somewhere you turn up. When you book, ask for a table with sightlines to the falls, because a good portion of the dining room cannot see them.

Stand on the mile-high step

The west steps of the Colorado State Capitol carry a marker for exactly one mile above sea level. Resurveying moved the line more than once, so there is more than one marker, and they disagree with each other. The brass one and the engraved one are not in the same place, and the story of why is better than the photograph.

The interior is finished in a pink stone, Colorado Rose Onyx, quarried from a single deposit that was entirely consumed finishing this one building. No further supply has ever been found. Free guided tours run on weekdays and include the climb to the dome, 99 steps up, with the best free view in the city at the top.

Walk above rescued big carnivores

A very large sanctuary on the plains northeast of Denver holds more than six hundred rescued lions, tigers, bears, wolves and other big carnivores in open natural habitats, and you see them from a walkway running above. Guinness certified that walkway in 2016 as the world's longest footbridge, at 7,974 feet.

Big carnivores read anything above them as non-threatening, so with visitors overhead the animals largely ignore the people. You are looking down into habitat rather than through bars. The animals are rescues from circuses, roadside zoos and private ownership, and the signage tells you where each came from.

It is a mile and a half of exposed walkway on open plains, with no shade and considerable wind. Dress for it and allow three hours.