When people ask what I do, I tell them I breed geckos and sell them for money. Here is how that happened.
Video · 16 min watchWritten by Brian
My history with reptiles started long before crested geckos.
Snakes first
When I was five I caught a tiny garter snake at a local lake, and my mom let me take it home. It rode home in the lidded trash can of her station wagon and lived in a bucket in the backyard for about two weeks before it escaped.
The family that babysat my brother and me lived next to a big open field, and I spent most of my childhood there catching garter snakes. A friend's older sister, terrified of snakes, paid 25 cents apiece to have them cleared from her backyard. I also had a box turtle for years, and frogs in a tank in my bedroom in high school.
My first gecko
In 2005 a bandmate called to say his girlfriend didn't want her gecko. I paid $20 for a wild-type leopard gecko and its cage, named it Toby before I knew she was female, and kept her for seven years.
The first crested gecko
In 2007, at about 8:30 one night, my girlfriend at the time wanted to stop at a Petco. I started work around 3:00 in the morning and wanted to go to bed, but I gave in. She asked to hold a gecko and put it in my hand. It was a crested gecko, and I couldn't believe how soft it was or how exotic it looked.
In 2008 I bought my first two from a Craigslist seller, driving over during my workday in my carpet-cleaning uniform.
Learning breeding existed
A high school friend mentioned she was getting a female to breed with her male. I didn't know people did that. Searching online, I found a professional breeder website selling geckos for $300 to $400, then the breeder's MySpace page. He was just a guy, four years older than me. I could do this, and from then on it was all I wanted to do.
Altitude Exotics
I bought every gecko I could and pinned project spreadsheets on my wall. In 2010 I moved into a three-bedroom apartment, and the master bedroom became the gecko room, at one point holding about 400 geckos.
I named the company while watching the Avalanche on Altitude Sports and Entertainment; I was born and raised in Denver. The gecko head in my logo is Merlin, a gecko I owned. I mirrored the right side of his crest to make it symmetrical.
Lean years
I started breeding in 2009. My first eggs all died. Then I hatched twenty-something, then 63, then 236 in 2011. I was still buying a new gecko with every sale, and at 23 I was $15,000 in credit card debt. My parents thought it was outrageous. I had to push or quit, and I knew a desk or warehouse job wouldn't make me happy.
At 24, my brother and I bought a house through a first-time buyers program in February 2012, chosen for the business. The whole bottom floor is geckos. I moved from buying nice geckos to producing them and refining my own bloodlines, and 2017 was the first year I made a profit I could live on. It has grown every year since.