Boom Days

On the first full weekend in August, Leadville closes its main street. For the 2025 festival Harrison Avenue was shut from Third Street to Eighth, Friday morning through Sunday evening. More than 100 food and craft booths ran down the avenue and onto the side streets. On the lawn of the Lake County Courthouse, at 505 Harrison, the hospitality tent goes up. It sells Boom Days gear, tickets in a raffle on the burro race, and the year’s belt buckle. A display of the whole collection of past buckles stands beside them.

The Herald Democrat counted the 2026 edition, August 7 to 9, as the 77th. Its theme was “Doc Holliday – Back in the Day,” and its official colors, silver and turquoise, went into parade entries, costumes and storefronts. Local artist Bill Harrington designed that year’s buckle with Holliday on it. The light-finish buckles were stamped with numbers 1 through 200, and some numbers are reserved and bought by the same people every year. The dentist turned gambler came to Colorado in 1882, after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and made his way to Leadville, where, the paper notes, he kept gambling while struggling with tuberculosis.

The festival is run entirely by volunteers of the Leadville Boom Days Committee. No dogs are allowed in the downtown festival area, on leash or off, because burros take dogs for predators. Unmanned aircraft are also barred.

Friday and Saturday on Harrison Avenue

The fair opens at noon Friday, and the opening ceremony comes at five. Then volunteers carry the Lions Club tent down the avenue, as they do each year. The motorcycle games follow in front of the announcer stand, a string of mini-games testing riders’ skill. In 2026 the Tabor Opera House, 308 Harrison, screened Tombstone on the Friday evening. On both Friday and Saturday nights there is a dance at the Elks Lodge, 123 West Fifth Street. The 2026 Saturday dance featured the Smelted Hearts, billed by the committee as “Leadville’s finest classic country cover band.”

Breakfast is served on the courthouse lawn from seven on Saturday and Sunday mornings. At nine the mining events begin in the Elks Lodge parking lot on the 100 block of West Fourth Street. These are contests in jackleg drilling, hand mucking and the double jack, the daily work of miners. Team jackleg drilling opened the Sunday program in 2026, and children have mining events of their own on Sunday.

The parade starts at ten. In 2025 an airplane flew over Harrison Avenue to begin it, and the line formed on West Ninth Street. The 2026 grand marshal was Loretta McEllhiney, called the “Queen of the Fourteeners.” She used the honor to point elsewhere: “The people I want to honor are the many colleagues at the forest service who dedicate their lives to the protection of our beautiful public lands and rarely get recognized outside of the agency.”

After the parade, buckles number 1 and number 100 are auctioned at the hospitality tent, and the auto show lines the avenue. The Lions Club beer garden opens on the PB&T Bank lot at East Sixth Street, and bands play next to it in Zaitz Park. The 2025 lineup ran from the Smelted Hearts and the Climax Crows on Saturday to the Oro City String Band and the Hut Trippers on Sunday. A boardwalk competition is held on the avenue in mid-afternoon. In 2025 gunfighters staged reenactments through the day at East Fifth and Poplar.

Pick, shovel and gold pan

On Sunday at ten the burro teams start in front of the courthouse and head north up Harrison toward Seventh Street. The 2026 field numbered more than 85 teams. Dave TenEyck has raced 26 times and now announces Boom Days. “You’re taking an animal noted for its lack of cooperation and trying to get them to cooperate,” he told the Herald Democrat in 2025. “There’s nothing quite like watching all these animals waiting at the starting line to go and the gun goes off and they all go roaring down the street.”

The long course climbs more than 4,000 feet through the historic East Side mining district, on old mining roads and trails toward Mosquito Pass. Teams must go around the Mosquito Pass sign at the top before turning back to town. The race page gives the 2026 long course as 18.5 miles; the Herald Democrat’s 2025 account gave 21. Each long-course burro carries a regulation pack saddle, a pick, a shovel and a gold pan. All of it must be functional, with no toys, and losing any part of the pack or tools disqualifies the team. The burro is led on a rope no longer than 15 feet. The runner may lead, drive, push, pull or carry the animal but may never ride it. The win goes to the burro’s nose across the line.

The rules also define the animal. A burro, they explain, is a donkey, which has chestnuts on its forelegs only, and its tail is bare except for a brush at the lower end.

The 2026 race changed in two ways. The “short” course, which the organizers admitted had been “anything but short” at 15 miles, was replaced with a 6.5-mile loop through the lower East Side district. Finishing teams also stopped coming down South Toledo Street to Highway 24. They now return the way they went out, by Fifth Street (County Road 1), and enter Harrison from Seventh to finish downtown. Spectators who want to see the long course drive up Seventh Street, County Road 3, to the aid station at the Resurrection Mine. Racers camp Saturday night at the Lake County Fairgrounds, and pizza from High Mountain Pies is served at the courthouse after the race.

The top long-course finisher wins $1,000, and the top five men and women receive engraved shovels. Every long-course finisher gets a medal and a belt buckle. The first man and the first woman to the top of the pass take $200 each. The raffle sold at the hospitality tent, one ticket for a dollar or six for five, pays $800 to whoever comes nearest the fastest long-course time.

In 2026 Marvin Sandoval and Buttercup were fastest, in 4:15:04. Alexis Knight and Legend led the women in 5:06:19, one second ahead of Quinn McConnell and Lola. On the new short course Harrison Walter and Yukon won in 1:11:29. That weekend a new monument to the race was unveiled, listing every winner since 1949.

From Tabor Days to Boom Days

The Boom Days program for 1973 carried a history of the celebration, which the Herald Democrat summarized in 2018. Before the Second World War, it said, Leadville’s summer celebrations were known as Tabor Days. In 1949 Leadville and Fairplay held their first joint burro race, and for 20 years the start alternated between the two towns. In 1969 and 1970 the celebration was called Bur-Rodeo. In 1970 Leadville decided to run its own race, apart from Fairplay. After that year’s celebration the first Boom Days Committee was formed, and the name has held since. The Herald Democrat’s 2026 preview, for its part, described the committee as a volunteer-based Lake County nonprofit of more than 76 years.

Burros tied to parking meters, 1971

The Herald Democrat of Monday, August 9, 1971, reported a weekend of clear skies with a high of 71 and “not a drop of rain.” That year the race began in a new way. The racers drew numbers for position, and the burros were tied to parking meters farther up the avenue, odd numbers on one side and even on the other. At the gun the runners sprinted from the courthouse to their animals, untied the ropes and took off up East Seventh Street. The starter was a visitor from Davenport, Iowa, who was passing through, stopped by the Leadville Raiders and asked to fire the gun.

Steve Mathews of Denver, a distance runner, won with his burro Charley Brown in an unofficial 2 hours, 25 minutes, 27.4 seconds. He finished about seven minutes clear and took back the title he had lost to Joe Glavinick the year before. Glavinick finished fourth after trouble with Ringo. Mathews collected $800, and his sponsor, Dr. Allen Watts, received $100. Watts also raced and placed sixth with Jack.

The youngest entrant was 16-year-old Susan Forbes of Poncha Springs with Grasshopper. Walt Stack of San Francisco, 63, came in twelfth and last after his burro gave him trouble and he lost the trail. Rudy Fahl, 73, had started on a swollen, taped foot from a pulled Achilles tendon and dropped out. He said he would be back the next year. Larry Lewis, a 104-year-old San Franciscan, had planned to enter but stayed away because his 78-year-old wife was seriously ill.

The checks were handed out that evening at the Cloud City, at the first awards dinner the race had held. The racers agreed the 21.1-mile route was the best course yet. They also discussed rejoining Fairplay for a race over Mosquito Pass and decided to leave things as they were.

Fort Koors, the outhouse race, and the Army

In 2018 six people retired from the committee: Joann and John Cirullo, Don and Bev Ferrie, and Ann Marie and Frank Bradach. Don Ferrie had once run the burro race. Before they left, they shared their memories with the Herald Democrat.

There had been the Leadville Raiders, men dressed as cowboys and women as saloon girls, with badges and guns loaded with blanks. They worked from a set of scripts and performed at A Taste of Colorado, Cheyenne Frontier Days and the Fairplay burro race. Food vendors were fewer in those years. Until the early 1990s the committee held a barbecue on the courthouse lawn, with the meat cooked all night beforehand in a pit at the rodeo grounds. The first Lions beer tent, Fort Koors, was made from two army tents on poles the Lions cut themselves. It measured about 20 by 30 feet, was hard to raise, and was used for many years.

Until about a decade before 2018, the Boom Days queen was chosen by talent audition at the Old Church, and she helped promote the festival. The bed race ended after someone broke an arm. The outhouse race was judged too dangerous because of the outhouse’s weight. A street dance on Harrison Avenue turned ugly, with open containers and thrown bottles. A snow fence put up to hold back the parade crowd was torn apart by that crowd, and no fence has been used at the parade since.

Before the Climax Mine closed in the mid-1980s, it gave employees time off to volunteer and compete, and it lent equipment when asked. Public Service Company of Colorado strung a banner across Harrison Avenue and let the festival tap a power line. The local radio station broadcast from the grandstand over an AT&T phone line. The Army came to town with tanks and machine guns, and military jets flew over until people in Aspen complained.

“If we needed something, we’d ask. No paperwork was needed,” John Cirullo said.