Bronc Day

Bronc Day begins with pancakes. The breakfast at Church in the Wildwood opens at 7:30 in the morning. By ten, people have carried folding chairs out to the curbs of Ute Pass Avenue to wait for the parade. Green Mountain Falls lies just off U.S. Highway 24, about 15 miles west of Colorado Springs, and the festival is held there on the last Saturday in July. The 2026 festival, the 88th, fell on July 25. Admission is free, and so is every children’s activity, from the races to the town pool.

Pancakes, then the parade on Ute Pass Avenue

The breakfast is a fundraiser cooked and served by the Friends of Ute Pass Trails. “The festival traditionally has had a pancake breakfast, which is a huge favorite,” Lisa Bonwell, then chair of the festival committee, told The Gazette in 2024. “And it’s a way the community gathers — lots of people are back in town, and they see each other and so that is a huge thing.”

At ten the parade starts down Ute Pass Avenue, which is closed to traffic from Joyland Church to Hotel Street at Gazebo Lake Park. The route was lengthened in 2025 to give spectators more room. The line holds floats, horses, costumed performers, classic cars and fire engines, and leashed dogs may walk with the entrants. A grand marshal greets the people along the avenue. Some figures come back year after year: Dennis the Emu, Pikes Peak Bigfoot, and Isaiah Stonecreek, the Banjo Mountain Man. The Green Mountain Falls–Chipita Park Fire Department brings Smokey Bear, and in 2024 the crowd sang him happy 80th birthday.

The 2026 parade was called “Let Freedom Ring,” for the America 250 – Colorado 150 commemoration, and had 37 entries under parade coordinator Nancy Dixon:

• First place: the Teller County Regional Animal Shelter.
• Second place: the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office Mounted Unit, riding the horses Guapo and Vader.
• Third place: “Our Flocks Rocks,” the family float of Don and Linda Brown, who have lived in town about 30 years. Their daughters, Hannah and Megan, marched in the parade with their Girl Scout troop in the 1990s and early 2000s, and both worked at the town pool.
• Judge’s Choice awards: bagpiper John Smalls; the Colorado Cowboys, an Old West reenactment group; and Colorado Horse Hay, whose award was judged by Dennis the Emu.

Pie and gunny sacks at Gazebo Park

After the parade the crowd moves to Gazebo Park, at 100 Lake Street, which stays busy until 3 p.m. The park holds food trucks and the booths of local artisans, about 40 in 2024 and more than 50 the year before. The Mountain Banjo Man plays throughout the grounds, and a band performs from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Green Box Farm Stand.

Children run gunny-sack and stick-horse races and egg tosses. They also race rubber ducks, an event hosted in 2026 by wild & kind coffee. Other attractions have included Cool Science, the Dinosaur Resource Center, Touch-a-Truck, Fairy Tale Princesses and Professor Higgins Magic. In July the town expects temperatures in the mid-70s to high 80s and a brief rain shower.

The pie contest decides who bakes the best pie in Green Mountain Falls, and the pies are sold once judging ends. In 2026 Bradley Davis, a KRDO morning reporter, judged and announced, and Sondra Hochhalter judged the finals. Dr T took first with “Rhuby Rose.” Second went to “It’s a Cake Pie,” baked by the brothers Beck and Briar Emcott, who decided to enter that year while their mother served as kitchen clean-up crew. Tobi Steinberg’s “S’mores Pie” took third, and Jan Gregg-Kelm’s “Avocado Dream” was named fan favorite.

Bronc Day added a beer and wine garden in 2024, but the organizers’ FAQ now says no alcohol is sold at the festival. A town dance returned in 2025 for the first time in decades, with music from Tenderfoot Bluegrass.

Saddle relays and a parade queen, 1939

The first Bronc Day was held July 1, 1939. Notes left by Jan Pettit, a Ute Pass historian, record it as the “Official Opening of the Tourist Season.” It also honored the Vertical Mile Marathon racers, who were staying in Green Mountain Falls while they trained for the race up Pikes Peak. A parade with horses, a clown and a parade queen met the racers in Cascade and escorted them to town. The day went on with saddle relay races, trick riding, sack races, ceremonial Indian dances and evening fireworks.

Other accounts give other reasons for the first Bronc Day:

• Welcoming summer residents: Bonwell says it began as a way to welcome summer residents back to town. “Now there’s a lot more people that live here full time, but our town at that time, nothing was winterized, so everybody came for the summer,” she said.
• Cowhands and summer workers: a 2023 KRDO report describes a tradition for cowhands, tourists and families who came to Ute Pass to rodeo, vacation or work summer trades.

The Gazette reports that the name is an ode to the town’s former horse stables.

From 149 horses to about thirty

Over the years, Pettit’s notes say, the day added Gymkhana riding contests, gun battle shows, a King and Queen contest, barbecues, and jitterbug and square dancing. Many parades had more than 100 horses, and 149 rode in 1948. The Pikes Peak Bulletin gives the early high mark as 148. A 1948 photograph, courtesy of Katie Gardner, shows Jack Quinn riding Lazarus in that year’s parade. Later, construction of four-lane U.S. 24 took the ground that had been used for the riding events.

By 2024 Bonwell expected about 30 horses in the parade. “You can just have a vision of how fun that was with all the horses,” she said. “So we try to keep our horse legacy alive as well.”

Later years brought other changes:

• New events: radio-controlled boat races and arts and crafts booths.
• New honors: a grand marshal, chosen to honor a prominent citizen, replaced the King and Queen, along with a Princess & Court contest for young girls.
• New organizers: Margaret Peterson chaired the committee for several years. In 2023 Bonwell and Ania Milo co-chaired the festival, with input from Katharine Guthrie, for the Ute Pass Chamber of Commerce. By 2024 it was coordinated by the nonprofit Building Ute Pass Community, with Bonwell as its president.
• Themes: the 2024 theme, “All Aboard for Ute Pass,” honored the Midland Railway, the first standard gauge railroad built over the Continental Divide in Colorado, which brought summer visitors to Green Mountain Falls. That year the Pikes Peak N’Gineers set up a model train display at the Green Box Arts Studio.

The grand marshal of 2025

In 1939 Ann Esch was two years old and attended the first Bronc Day. She was a Kansas native whose family spent summers at a cabin her great-grandfather built in Green Mountain Falls in 1914. Eighty-six years later, when the festival marked the town’s 135th anniversary, she rode as grand marshal. She is a retired attorney and has become a resident of the town. “She attends every board meeting, she’s down at El Paso County trying to represent us,” Bonwell said. Esch lives in her great-grandfather’s cabin.