By admin 
Editor’s note: Welcome to the sixth installment of our 15-week series Colorado 150, marking 150 years of statehood with our favorite Colorado things.
Read more Colorado lunar rover picked by NASA to provide transport for Artemis moon missions
When it comes to having a good time in Colorado, from our tiny towns to our big cities, we know how to throw a party. And we’re really good at finding unique reasons to shut down a few blocks and welcome folks to stroll the closed streets to find a few goodies or support a cause.
We celebrate a frozen dead guy in the mountains, a headless chicken on the Western Slope and masses of tarantulas on the Eastern Plains. Suffice to say, Coloradans will pounce on almost any excuse to bring the festive to a festival.
During the summer weekends, it seems like there’s something going on in any town you roll through, but the other seasons also bring us the conviviality of beer, snow and prehistoric-looking birds passing through.
But with all these unique bashes, Colorado still holds onto its roots. Powwow gatherings honor those who were connected to the land before statehood. And in arenas large and small across the state, rodeo gives a hat tip to Colorado’s Western heritage.
While some celebrations are about honoring tradition and others are about marveling at the absurd, the throughline for it all is connection. And fun, lots of fun.
David Krause | Editor
Monte Vista Crane Festival
March
Nearly 30,000 cranes pass through the San Luis Valley during their twice-annual migration between their summer range around Yellowstone National Park and winter breeding grounds in Bosque del Apache in New Mexico and farther south. Alamosa and Monte Vista national wildlife refuges are famous stopping points for the cranes, and hundreds of bird watchers gather each March for the Monte Vista Crane Festival. The festival typically includes photography workshops, tours of the refuges, guided bird walks and guest speakers. Beyond the site of thousands of cranes circling overhead is the sound that comes with the massive flock. Truly an experience.
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National Western Stock Show
January
Denver has worked pretty hard to shed its “cow town” image, but there’s one Old West tradition that endures: the National Western Stock Show. The show starts when a few dozen longhorn cattle are driven up 17th Street, accompanied by cowpokes, marching bands, tractors and floats, often in below-freezing temps and during snowstorms. The 16-day extravaganza that follows is full of rodeos, fairs, art shows, dog shows, live music and food — pulling triple-duty as a tourist attraction, an actual stock show, and an educational window into ranching and ag traditions of the West.
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Mike the Headless Chicken Festival
May
It started out like any other day in 1945 at the Olsen family farm. Lloyd was beheading chickens while his wife, Clara, was plucking, cleaning and preparing them for market. When the family woke up the next day, one of the beheaded chickens was still walking about. Word spread and soon an article about “Mike the Headless Chicken” was featured in Life magazine. Mike became a popular side show that toured around the Western states while he lived another 18 months without a head. Today the bizarre fowl phenom is celebrated at an annual street festival in Fruita, with live music, car shows and a wing-eating contest.
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Frozen Dead Guy Days
March
The story of Grandpa Bredo begins with his death. In 1989, Bredo Morstoel’s corpse was shipped to a cryonics facility in California, where bodies are preserved in hopes of a future resurrection, and later to Nederland, where his grandson had fashioned a custom cryonics facility out of a Tuff Shed and some ice. When the odd body was discovered a few years later, a city ordinance was passed banning the “keeping of bodies,” but the residents of Nederland rallied to maintain it, then started a party in its honor. Frozen Dead Guy Days has since outgrown its Nederland roots and in 2023 moved to Estes Park, along with Grandpa Bredo’s body, which is now stored at the world’s first cryogenics museum at the Stanley Hotel.
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La Junta Tarantula Festival
September
Every year in early fall, thousands of male tarantulas emerge from their burrows in southeastern Colorado and set out in search of a mate. While some towns might shy away from this wildlife ritual, the town of La Junta celebrates it during the annual Tarantula Festival, started in 2022 as a way to draw visitors and educate the public about tarantulas’ important role in the Eastern Plains ecosystem. Even though the spiders are the festival’s headliners, you won’t see many hanging around La Junta. Instead, they spend most of their time roaming the undisturbed prairies near the border with Oklahoma.
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Great American Beer Festival
October
GABF, as it’s affectionately known, has been going strong in Denver since well before the city developed its (mostly true) reputation for attracting outdoorsy dudes obsessed with craft brews. Since the early 1980s, when craft brewing was still a small and emerging world, GABF aimed for both breadth and depth, bringing brewers together and introducing the public to an array of hoppy flavors. While the festival is going strong at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver is home to more than 80 breweries and taprooms, so naturally the festival spills into the streets. You can find interesting linkups and collaborations all over the city throughout the week.
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Telluride Film Festival
August/September
Sundance arrives in Colorado in 2027 and is sure to have a big impact — but the homecooked Telluride Film Festival has been here since 1974 (four years before Sundance started) and over that time has grown into one of the premier U.S. festivals for award-seeking industry folks to see and be seen. Part of what sets the festival apart is the blind trust that moviegoers put in the festival’s curation: The program isn’t revealed until the festival begins. But another part of its allure is the setting, in a small town at the end of a box canyon beneath the rugged San Juans.
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Aspen Gay Ski Week
January
Aspen Gay Ski Week is often credited as the O.G. “gay ski week.” Once a lowkey meetup in Aspen of a few queer clubs for some skiing and après in the 1970s, gay ski weeks are now a loose category of weeklong, slopeside gatherings that happen all over the world. Aspen Gay Ski Week attracts the LGBTQ+ community for a packed, and often sold-out, program of pool parties, drag shows, comedy nights, live music and special multicourse meals, along with some skiing on world-class terrain. There are events at all four area mountains, but the main event is Friday’s pride celebration at the base of Aspen Mountain.
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Greeley Stampede
June/July
This community celebration started in the late 1800s to honor local potato farmers — it was known for about 50 years as the Greeley Spud Rodeo. It has sprouted into a summertime staple on the Eastern Plains. The Stampede has evolved into a nearly two-week celebration buoyed by rodeos, concerts and carnival rides, culminating with one of the state’s largest Fourth of July parades. The concert lineup announcement each year is one of the most anticipated in northern Colorado. And the rodeo go-rounds typically attract the top talents on the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association circuit.
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Denver March Powwow
March
Ceremonial gatherings have always played a role in Native life, but the intertribal powwows networked all over North America now are a more contemporary type of celebration, a way to keep traditions alive after tribes were dislocated and assimilated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The annual Denver March Powwow has drawn Natives and visitors since the 1970s, run for over a decade by the Denver Indian Center before becoming a freestanding organization. Thousands gather in the spring for three days of food, music and dance.
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