Buffalo Bill Days

Rain over Parfet Park

Buffalo Bill Days fills Parfet Park, at 10th Street and Washington Avenue in downtown Golden, for three days at the end of July. The 2026 festival, counted as the 80th annual, opened at 5 p.m. on Friday, July 24, with remarks from Coors and the National Anthem on the Parfet Park Stage. The setting sun lit South Table Mountain to the east while the stage and the vendor booths stood in shadow. Jeff Goodwin and his band had played about 30 minutes when rain and lightning forced an intermission, the Golden Transcript reported, and many people went home. When the Hillbilly Demons started, the crowd came back. Callie Jo and others line-danced to “Copperhead Road,” and Jolene Terry danced with her father, Jubal. A second rain came around 8 p.m., shorter and lighter, and most people waited it out under umbrellas, rain jackets, tents and trees.

The booths ring the park. The Transcript counted about 80 vendors in 2026 and reported every booth sold. Visit Golden puts the arts and crafts festival at more than 100 vendors. They sell jewelry, home décor, artwork and other locally made goods. The food runs to barbecue, tacos, lemonade and sweets. The 2026 roster included Riot BBQ, GB Fish and Chips, Radical Sasquatch Dumpling Company, Sweet Action Ice Cream, Repicci’s Real Italian Ice, Björn’s Colorado Honey and Travelin’ Tom’s Coffee. Adults have a beer garden. Children have a Kids Zone of bounce houses, slides, games and shade. Admission is free, and the Transcript gives attendance in recent years as 20,000 to 30,000.

Some regulars keep fixed stations. Todd Grover, who has come for 28 years, and his friend Todd Blackmon told the Transcript that their group meets every year under the same tree on the far west side of the park, by the Coors beer truck. “It’s our anchor for the year,” Grover said. One year his son ran a lemonade stand in the weeks before the festival, then spent the earnings on the games, rides and food. Renée Marcellis has worked the information booth every year since 2008. “You always get a seat,” she said, “out of the sun and out of the rain.” Lynae Douthit, a regular for about 25 years, turned down an invitation to Seattle for the 2026 weekend. “You see everybody you know — it’s like a reunion for the kids and adults,” she said. “It’s the last hoorah for the summer.”

Pancakes on Tenth Street and the Best of the West

Saturday begins at 6:30 a.m. at Golden Fire Department Station One, 911 10th Street, where Golden Fire-Rescue Local 5080 held its 52nd annual all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast in 2026. Fire trucks stand on display and the firefighters serve. The suggested donation was $10 for adults and $5 for children 12 and under, and Visit Golden says it goes to the Golden Fire Foundation. An older Golden Visitors Bureau page promised “as many pancakes as you can eat, and more politicians than you can greet,” and showed a Buffalo Bill heading in for breakfast. Todd and Karen Blackmon, whose children have outgrown the parade, now call the breakfast their favorite part of the weekend.

At 9:50 a.m. in 2026, Mayor Laura Weinberg cut a ribbon on Washington Avenue. The anthem followed, and at 10:00 the Best of the West Parade started up the avenue, between 9th and 13th Streets by Visit Golden’s account. The organizers list more than 70 horses, vintage and collectible cars, fire engines, the Buffalo Bill Saddle Club, community performance groups and reenactors. Local businesses enter floats in a competition for the most creative display; in 2026 Stacy, president of the Rotary Club of Golden, judged them. Finalists from Golden’s Got Talent marched too. The older Visitors Bureau page described precision horse teams, Buffalo Bill look-alikes, wagons, rescue dogs, and a parade that took two hours to pass the reviewing stand.

After the parade the program moves back to the park. Reenactors playing Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley posed for photographs from 11 a.m. to noon. The parade awards were given from the stage at noon, followed by an Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill skit with the Golden’s Got Talent winners. The pair had already been working the week before: the festival’s Facebook page reported them checking guests into hotel rooms and “slinging cold Coors Banquets for the Coors executives.” Saturday’s music ran through Renee Nicole Maxwell, Joe Wren and Eric Golden to the Red Rock Vixens, who played until 10 p.m.

Sunday opens at 9 a.m. with “Where the West Worships,” a service led by Together Church on the Parfet Park Stage. Sugar Britches played at 11 a.m. The Long Run, an Eagles tribute band that the Transcript calls a festival staple, closed the 2026 festival from 2 to 5 p.m.

The volunteers and the month before

An all-volunteer committee runs the festival as a nonprofit. It puts its proceeds back into Golden through programs such as a Golden High School scholarship, and it draws on sponsors and on grants from the Golden Civic Foundation and the City of Golden. Sondra Welsh, president of the board, told the Transcript that sponsorship doubled from 2025 to 2026 and that the 80-year mark weighed “heavy on our shoulders … to make it the best we could for the anniversary.” “We had 129 volunteer slots for the weekend, and we filled all but five,” she said. “Without the community, we couldn’t do this.”

Welsh’s committee also added run-up events, billed as Western Celebration Month. In 2026 they included Golden’s Got Talent at Gnarly’s Theater from June 20 to July 16, the crowning of a King and Queen at Lions Park on July 4, a Wild West Pin Tournament at The Gallery Range, and line-dancing lessons from Country Dance Co. at The Buffalo Rose on July 15.

A stage driver, a stranded show, a grave on Lookout Mountain

The festival’s own history begins in 1860, when William F. Cody, 14 years old and large for his age, worked through Golden as a junior driver for the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company. His father had died in 1857, and the boy was earning money for the family. The route ran through Golden and up Mt. Vernon Canyon, which is how, the account says, he would first have come to know Lookout Mountain. He worked the route for a few weeks or perhaps a couple of months, possibly starting October 12, 1860, when the firm’s mountain line opened. The company’s local office was in the Miners Hotel, at what is now the northeast corner of 11th and Washington. People called the firm “C.O.C. & P.P.” and some said the initials stood for Clear Outta Cash & Poor Pay.

The Wild West Show never played Golden, which the committee’s history calls too small a town for it. It did advertise there, with a wall-sized sign on the side of Standley Hall, across from the Astor House. A photograph of the sign is held at the Golden History Museum. On December 8, 1907, Cody came back driving an automobile, retracing his old route up to Idaho Springs. He stopped for an hour to eat at the Avenue Hotel, which still stands at 1211 Washington. The visit drew little publicity, and the committee’s history notes that he does not seem to have sought any.

After the show was stranded in Denver in 1912, its workers were hired by the city to help build the Lookout Mountain Road for the Denver Mountain Parks, likely the stretch up Mt. Zion and across Windy Saddle. The committee suggests Cody may have arranged the hiring behind the scenes. When he died in 1917, Castle Rock and Lookout Mountain were both proposed for his grave. His wife, his sisters, his daughter Irma and finally Johnny Baker said he had wanted Lookout, and his sister Mary Decker chose the site. Cody was a Mason, and he was buried there under the auspices of the Golden Masonic Lodge on June 3, 1917. The committee says the crowd of 25,000 remains the second largest in Jefferson County history. In 1919 the first airplane to fly over Golden dropped flowers on the grave.

Barbecued buffalo in 1946

The first Buffalo Bill Days marked the 100th anniversary of Cody’s birth. The committee dates it August 15 to 18, 1946, a four-day event it calls larger than the present one, with a parade, contests, fireworks, bingo and aerobatics. The Golden Transcript gives the dates as August 16 to 18 and lists a carnival, parade, air show, beauty contest, soap box derby, fraternity tug-of-war, fireworks, square-dancing and a baseball game. GoldenToday, drawing on the Colorado Transcript of August 15, 1946, adds barbecued buffalo, window displays in the downtown stores, a tug-of-war among the Mines fraternities, races, a dance and a bazaar. GoldenToday also notes that the war was over: Japan had surrendered on August 15, and the town was in what it calls a wildly celebratory mood.

Accounts of what came first differ. The committee’s history says that after a hiatus the festival returned in smaller form, and that the trail ride up Lookout Mountain began in 1947. The Transcript and Visit Golden say the tradition started with the Buffalo Bill Saddle Club’s trail rides to the grave. The older Visitors Bureau page says it began as the club’s ride through town on the way back from an annual trek to the grave, adding “So the story goes,” and places the same club at the head of the parade. For a time a separate Golden Days was held alongside Buffalo Bill Days. Buffalo Bill Days eventually took its place as the town’s main event of the year.

The program has changed over the decades. The fireworks and the dance are gone. The pancake breakfast, the food and craft vendors, and the music have been added. A Wild West Show of gunfighters, sharpshooters and Native American dancers once played the Lions Park ball fields after the parade. On Sunday afternoons, hundreds of yellow rubber ducks once raced down Clear Creek from the Billy Drew Bridge to Vanover Park. Both had dropped away by 2023, according to GoldenToday. Mutton bustin’ for children was still on that 2023 list, but the Transcript in 2026 counted it, along with the car show, among events that had come and gone.

Charlene Pazar kept the program from the 2009 festival. Its cover shows Tom Young and his family leading a Buffalo Bill Days parade, and Chris Daniels and the Kings headlined that year. Bill Pazar, who had led Buffalo Bill Days for many years, died in 2009. The Wild West Show participants honored him with the traditional riderless horse. Murray Martinez of the Buffalo Rose led it up the avenue, with Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley walking alongside and a pair of boots set backward in the stirrups.