State of the State: Montezuma County’s Dotty Wampus opens whimsical chocolate factory tour in June

This article appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of ColoradoBiz titled “State of the State: Dotty Wampus.”

After running Lost Spirits, a Las Vegas distillery with an immersive circus show, for more than a decade, Bryan Davis and Joanne Haruta decided it was time for a change.

“We went, ‘Let’s do something small,’” says Davis. “I missed interacting with the customers and being one-on-one with people. It was so much fun. When [Lost Spirits] got to be 100 employees and millions of dollars in revenue, it turned into endless legal and HR.”

A cross-country road trip led them to Cortez, and they found a 2,000-square-foot house in the country to realize a new vision in spring 2024.

By October, Dotty Wampus opened its doors as a “magical chocolate factory tour and tasting.” The fast-paced buildout involved “painting, building out the animatronics, making the talking clocks, figuring out all the different strategies for how you can get chocolate into people’s hands,” laughs Davis.

Instead of booze, the duo targeted chocolate this time around. “We thought it’d be fun to try something new,” says Davis. “It basically became the process of trying to dream up all the different ways you could conjure chocolate, make chocolate appear, have chocolate drive itself to you, then trying to figure out how to build the absurd, whimsical chocolate delivery systems.”

That kind of creativity extends to the chocolates as well. “It’s all Criollo,” says Davis, noting that Colorado’s Cottage Foods Act made Dotty Wampus possible. “Criollo chocolates are weird chocolate strains that people find hiking in the Amazon. They’re old chocolates that used to be grown by the Mayans or Aztecs or Incas and are still self-propagating out in the wild.”

“You get a lot of interesting, subtle flavors and characteristics going on in there. So that’s our base, and then we make all of our own fillings and pyrotechnics to go with the exploding bonbons.”

The attraction had about 3,000 customers in 2025, and the tours’ capacity is about 4,000. “The customers have had a great time,” says Davis. We get lots of people who come back over and over again and bring back everyone who’s coming to visit them in town.”

Local resident and owner of Cortez Tours, Helen West, plans to bring out-of-towners to Dotty Wampus and recommend it to clients after her first visit in summer 2025. “You arrive at this strange cabin, having driven down this weird road,” says West. “It sets you up for this really surreal, magical experience.”

“Oftentimes, people in this area are looking for a two-hour thing to do in the morning or the evening or maybe an afternoon before they head out of town or go to Mesa Verde. And Dotty Wampus is just perfect for that.”

The 2026 season runs from June to December, allowing for plenty of time to add new details to the house and R&D new chocolate. Davis says he wants to build it into a roadside attraction with a national reputation. “I’m really interested in staying here and just adding and adding and adding and layering on until it’s somewhere between the Winchester Mystery House and the House on the Rock.”

The name, Dotty Wampus, is a nod to the six-legged Wampus Cat of Cherokee legend. “If I get two mountain lion taxidermies, a pair of scissors, and needle and thread, I can prove it existed. That may be on this year’s agenda.”

Online: www.dottywampus.com