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AURORA • The background is fit for Colorado: Longs Peaks and other snowy mountains of the Front Range skyline.

The foreground, however, seems fit for a place far, far away.

Lindsay Beebe’s kids are among the dozen people slipping into wetsuits, stepping into flippers and strapping on goggles and oxygen tanks.

Scuba diving in Colorado? You bet.

It’s no surprise to Beebe. She shrugs and states the obvious: “People in Colorado are adventurous and like to travel.”

Her family is traveling to the Caribbean this fall. That’s why the kids are getting certified to dive here at Aurora Reservoir, one of Colorado’s few available waters for necessary training.

One World Dive & Travel is among the state’s learning hubs — one of nine in the state listed by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, not counting several others under other certifying agencies. The Denver-area shop is leading the dive at the reservoir’s dedicated scuba beach this day.

One World Dive & Travel’s owner is Michelle Courington, who previously lived and dived around the Cayman Islands and Costa Rica. Life eventually took her to Colorado, where she wasn’t about to abandon her oceanic hobby.

“When we started the dive shop in Colorado, my whole family was like, What, you’re doing a dive shop in land-locked Colorado?” Courington recalls. “And I was like, ‘Hell yeah, it’s one of the best markets in the country.’”

It’s one of the top three states for the most certified divers per capita, according to the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. The other two states perennially topping the list seem more likely: Florida and California.

But Colorado? It makes sense if you think about it, says Troy Juth.

He was born and raised in Colorado Springs, filled with Jacques Cousteau-inspired imagination. Juth went on to open Underwater Connections. Three decades later, he claims the shop is among the nation’s largest producers of certified divers, educating about 2,000 every year who go from classroom lessons, to pool dives, to open-water dives in reservoirs such as Aurora.

And indeed, the demand makes sense, Juth says. Think about the ski slopes, he says.

“Outside people living in Colorado, it’s people coming from Florida and Texas — places by the ocean,” he says. “They have the water. They don’t have the mountains.”

We want what we can’t have, suggests Rich Wilson here at Aurora Reservoir. He’s with a local troop of Boy Scouts getting certified for dives off the Florida Keys.

“I think part of it is not having water in Colorado,” Wilson says. “Beaches, oceans — it’s kind of a novelty for us.”

A novelty, or a passion.

Also here at the reservoir is Sven Hybinette, who is diving for a certification above the most popular beginner level. In Colorado, he might be called a fish out of water — a young man constantly dreaming of Technicolor coral and shiny fish and larger marine creatures. The sharks, octopus and stingrays around the Bahamas were a highlight.

Today at Aurora Reservoir, he might spot smallmouth bass, walleye or trout. That’s if he’s lucky; Colorado waters are murky, not the clear blue that Hybinette and fellow enthusiasts seek.

Coral in Colorado? Try rocks.

“Yeah, you don’t come here to dive for fun,” Hybinette says.

You dive for adventures abroad. If not Aurora Reservoir on the Front Range, you might get certified at Littleton’s Chatfield Reservoir or Carter Lake near Loveland.

You probably won’t see much, unless your instructors shuttle you to rare clarity at New Mexico’s Blue Hole. Also unlike your future vacation destination, you will feel cold — unless you’re being certified at another rare diving oasis in the West: Utah’s geothermal Homestead Crater.

Diving out here is about training and skill-building. It’s about diving elsewhere, about the unexpected nature that adventurous Coloradans desire.

The sell at Fort Collins-based Colorado Scuba Diving Academy: “If you love nature, you can see more wildlife in 10 minutes on a coral reef than in 10 hours in a forest.”

The sell continues with videos of up-close encounters with friendly sharks.

“It’s right in your face,” says shop owner Samuel Bachar. “You can’t get that with a mountain lion. If a mountain lion is that close to you, you’re probably already dead.”

In the forest, you won’t feel the weightlessness of the water. You won’t quite feel the way that time seems to fade away under water.

“I remember the very first time I went under water with a regulator in my mouth,” says instructor Kim Canatsey. “I stayed there for 15 seconds or more, and I didn’t have to come back up to get air, and I thought: ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m in heaven.’”

It can be scary at first, breathing underwater. Getting face-to-face with unfamiliar animals can also be scary.

It’s all part of the experience, says the mother watching her kids learn at Aurora Reservoir this day.

With scuba diving, “you get to explore new things,” Beebe says. “And whenever you explore new things, you’re opening your mind and getting excited about life.”

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