Ault Fall Festival

Pulled pork and fireworks at Wagon Wheel Park

The 2026 Ault Fall Festival opened on Friday, August 7, at Wagon Wheel Park, a neighborhood park at Conestoga Drive and Pawnee Trail with playground equipment and a single shelter. It was a new ground for the festival, which had spent earlier editions at Liberty Park and Highland High School. The Ault Business Alliance began serving pulled-pork fundraiser plates at 6 p.m., and at dusk the Ault-Pierce Fire Department shot the fireworks over the park. The organizers asked people to bring lawn chairs.

The theme for 2026 was “Harvest on the High Plains.” Saturday brought a parade down Main Street, a lineup of food trucks parked at Wagon Wheel Park, vendor booths with arts and crafts, a classic car show, antique engines and machinery, free games for children, and a mud volleyball tournament at the firehouse. On the evening of August 8, the festival posted about what had happened that afternoon: “In the middle of the chaos, something beautiful happened. Neighbors checked on neighbors. Local groups organized quickly to clear debris, comfort those hurt, and make sure no one was left alone.” The post went on, “while we can’t control the weather, we can control how we show up for each other,” and thanked the Ault-Pierce Fire Department and the Ault Police Department. Two days later the organizers singled out Grant Ruff, the town’s public works manager, who “got his team together to help with a lot of the background planning and set up that most do not see.”

Ault, incorporated on April 4, 1904, as the Town of Bergdorf, sits at 4,938 feet in Weld County and calls itself “A Unique Little Town.” The festival is held in August, and the Greeley Tribune put it plainly in 2019: the town was “ringing in fall early.”

Engines in the high school lot

Before the move, the festival spread across Liberty Park and the grounds of Highland High School at 208 1st St. The 2019 edition, themed “Hometown Heroes,” had the town’s firefighters and police officers serving as parade marshals. “The people always look forward to it,” Mayor Rob Piotroski told the Tribune. “It’s a thing about our heritage and celebrating the harvest.” That year Friday began at 9 a.m. with the antique engine and machinery show and a watermelon feed, and the fireworks went up at dusk southwest of the high school. On Saturday the parade stepped off at 10 a.m. at 3rd Street and Highway 14, between Alpine and 2nd Avenue. Afterward came the Police and Fire Department mud volleyball tournament at the Ault Fire Station on Colo. 14. Any team could enter, though Assistant Chief Misty Wood of the Ault-Pierce Fire Department said each team had to keep at least two women on the court at all times. From 8 p.m. to midnight there was live music and dancing in Liberty Park. By 2024 the Saturday listing had grown to include a craft fair, a pig catch, and a beer garden open from noon to midnight.

The engine show has long been the job of the Front Range Antique Power Association. On a Saturday morning in 2017, Tribune photographers found Bob Hoelscher in the high school parking lot tuning up an early 1920s Hercules engine while he talked with Don Blender and Pat Traurig, fellow members who had all come from Arvada. Cody Warner of Ault, whose family was showing engines, worked a water pump while Codi and Garrett Van Why of Pierce watched. Dozens of cars lined up outside the school for the car show, and Ricky Hurlich of Ault held his daughter Lena, 3, as she stared at a 1957 Ford Skyliner. Outside the school, Rianna Weirich, 14, looked over a booth run by Connie Risoli of Thornton with her mother, Christine.

Sunday in Liberty Park

The festival closes on Sunday morning. Ault firefighters and community members host a pancake breakfast, and donations are accepted. In 2019 the breakfast ran from 7 to 10 a.m. at the fire station. In 2024 Church in the Park followed at 10:30.

According to the Tribune, the Sunday part of the festival has always had religious roots. In 2015 Living Hope Community Church and High Plains Harvest Church had been running it for four years. When they took it over, the tone changed to include the wider community and not only their own congregations. People arriving at Liberty Park that Sunday could hear faint praise music behind a handful of bouncy houses. The churches offered face painting, a dunk tank, free lunch, optional baptism, and a water balloon fight with more than 1,000 balloons. Pastor Tim Falk of Living Hope gave the children the cue to start it. A rock, paper, scissors tournament brought everyone together for lunch, and church members spoke about their faith and prayed over the meal before the games resumed. Falk said they had worked to keep the day from seeming “too church-y.” “We’re more focused on who Jesus was than trying to grow (our churches),” he said. Brian Gray, a High Plains deacon, said, “It’s one of the few places where families can come that’s totally free.”

Caitlen Hathcock of Ault helped her 2-year-old daughter, Kai, over the top hill of a bouncy house. Bailey Davis, 4½, went down one slide for more than 20 minutes, her mother said, and found many of her preschool classmates there. Her mother, Alicia Davis, was new to town. “We want to be in northern Colorado and like the small-town community,” she said. Danielle Duvall had moved to Ault a month earlier. “I love it,” she said. “People are really friendly out here.”

The money that went missing

In 2017 the festival came close to being canceled. According to the Greeley Tribune, former festival president Robert Swanson was arrested on suspicion of felony theft and was accused of stealing between $9,600 and $19,000 from the festival. Denver7 reported that the committee president was arrested in June for stealing at least $9,000 meant to pay for the event. “To see it all gone was a punch in the gut,” said Mayor Butch White, who at first thought the festival would have to be called off. Then, he said, “the town hall was getting phone calls on what people could do.” Donna Druyff called it “very hard for the community,” and added, “Everybody started pitching in and sending donations.” Within a month, businesses and individuals had given more than $12,000, volunteers had come forward, and the festival, which Denver7 described as decades old, went on as scheduled.

Five years later, in August 2022, the Ault Area Historical Museum held its first open house during the festival. It had been finished with a grant from the Colorado Historic Society and private donations, and it was open to the public from 11 to 1.