Burning Mountain Festival

At four o’clock on a Friday afternoon in September, the food and craft vendors open their booths in Burning Mountain Park, on Main Street in downtown New Castle, and the Burning Mountain Festival begins. The Town of New Castle runs it, and admission is free. The 2026 festival fell on September 11 and 12. A festival listing counts more than 2,000 people through the park over the course of the event.

Friday night in Burning Mountain Park

The beer garden opens at five and pours until half past nine. In 2026 the town gave its citizen awards from the park stage between 5:00 and 5:30. In 2025 the honorees included local volunteers and, for the first time, the library. After the awards came the music: The Queen Bees from 5:30 to 7:30, then Whiskey Stomp from eight until ten. Whiskey Stomp played the Friday-night slot in 2021 and 2023 as well. In 2021 the town reported the park “packed” to hear them.

Parade morning on Main Street

Saturday starts at 7:15 a.m. with the Fire-in-the-Hole 5K, which the River Center hosts. The vendors reopen at nine and stay all day. In 2025 the car show on Kamm Avenue opened at the same hour, and in 2023 it showed sports cars, classic cars, and bikes. At 9:45 Main Street closes to all traffic from Elk Creek Elementary School to Burning Mountain Avenue, with a detour by way of Castle Valley Boulevard. The parade starts at ten. In 2023 it opened with a Classic Air Medical helicopter flying down Main Street, followed by floats built to the theme “If You Can Dream It.” That year the Post Independent told spectators to bring chairs and bags for candy. After the parade the New Castle Recreation Department moves its foam machine into the park, where children slide around in the bubbles.

The rest of the 2026 day ran on the clock. The Strider race for small children on balance bikes went at 11:30. In 2023 it was open to ages five and under and started at the old schoolhouse by the park. The pie-eating contest followed at 12:30 and the log-splitting contest at two. In 2025 the tug o’ war, which the town calls a crowd favorite, went at noon with the pies. That year there was also a 4H petting farm at the community center. The beer garden reopened at 2:30. The community drummers played at 3:30, The Goodman Band at 4:30, and Mitt Spicy & the Blues Bandits closed the night from 7:30 to ten.

Kudzu BBQ, Mama’s Pierogi, BadAss Brisket Tacos, and the Rolling Fork Truck sold the food in 2026. Lions Club Pies, Colorado Snow, the Club Scout Pepsi Wagon, and Rifle Creek Kettle Corn sold the sweets. Festival shirts sold for $25 in 2025, in tee, long-sleeve, racer-back, and youth cuts. That year the festival ran into a third day, closing with a bilingual community church service in Burning Mountain Park at 10:30 Sunday morning. Joe and Lorraine McNeal led the 2025 parade as grand marshals. For many years the couple has managed the New Castle Museum, greeting visitors and telling the town’s stories.

The fire in the Hogback

The festival takes its name from Burning Mountain, where a coal seam still burns, and the Post Independent describes it as highlighting the town’s mining history. The coal lies in the Grand Hogback. According to the town’s history, New Castle grew from Jasper Ward’s homestead cabin of 1883 to more than 1,000 residents by 1887, and it was incorporated on February 2, 1888. Its coal was converted to coke for smelting silver from the mines near Leadville and Aspen. Five mines worked the seam: the Consolidated, the Keystone, the Coryell, the B&M, and the largest, the Vulcan.

Methane exploded in the Vulcan on February 18, 1896, and killed forty-nine miners, many of whom are buried in Highland Cemetery. In 1910 the Consolidated, in Ward’s Peak, caught fire. That peak is Burning Mountain. Attempts to put the fire out failed, and the mine was closed. The Vulcan exploded again on December 16, 1913, killing 37. Another explosion on November 3, 1918, killed three men, and after it the Vulcan was permanently closed. Both fires are still burning, the Vulcan’s in Coal Ridge south of the Colorado River and the Consolidated’s in Burning Mountain. The heat kills the vegetation and melts the snow along long scars in the Hogback.

The third weekend of July

The New Castle branch library started the festival in 1973. For 34 years it was held on the third weekend of July, and the chamber of commerce later took it over. In early 2007 the chamber’s festival organizer, Patti Reich, proposed moving it to September. She cited July heat that had passed 100 degrees the summer before and had made vendors and volunteers hard to find. She also said that the heat had not kept people away, and that the 2006 festival was one of the best attended, with about 1,000 people. Reich then resigned as chairman, because she would be in Hawaii for two weeks that July to celebrate her birthday.

The proposal divided the town. “Moving Burning Mountain Festival from July because of the heat is like moving Christmas from December because of the cold,” longtime resident Becky Rippy wrote to the Post Independent. “When it comes to a parade and an outdoor festival, it’s better to be too hot in July than too cold in September.” Mayor Frank Breslin said people came “from all over the country for things such as high school reunions because they always know it’s the third weekend in July,” and the town council declined to approve the change. Chamber vice-president Maureen Maznio said that without a new chair the chamber would have to hold “a festival of some type in September. Maybe we’ll call it something else.” Chamber president Bill Pugh wrote, “It’s not about having BMF in September or July, it is more about being able to have BMF at all.”

The festival was held in September for the first time in 2011. Krista DeHerrera, the event coordinator through Valley Events Inc., gave heat and competition with other events as the reasons. That year a Kids of New Castle presentation, open to boys and girls of all ages, replaced the Miss Burning Mountain Pageant. Reich, then the owner of Patti’s Main Street Cafe, coordinated a new Spirits of New Castle Ghostwalk at Highland Cemetery, built around Burning Mountain and the mines. Breslin was to open it with a patriotic song at the cemetery flagpole. The figures portrayed included Doc Marshall, a Civil War veteran and the town’s first pharmacist, and Mary Ritter, its first female mayor. Another was Matt Mattivi, who had owned the Texaco station and driven the bus. The walk also told of Billy Griffith, who shot Marshal John M. Rennix in a downtown shootout. The proceeds were meant for a memorial at the cemetery, for which the caretaker, Mike Miller, a veteran and American Legion member, was seeking military-service plaques.

Saved in 2014

By 2014 the chamber was no longer involved, and town officials feared the festival would not happen. Town officials and volunteers took it on instead. “We took it over,” said Ed Nichols, who coordinated that year’s event. “It’s too important to the town. It’s been around too long and too many people love it to let that happen. But we were very worried at one point that it would disappear after 42 years.” Asked whether he was ready, Nichols laughed: “I’m as ready as I am right now.”

The 2020 festival was canceled. When it returned in September 2021, with the Recreation Department organizing it, the Saturday parade drew 38 entries, more than ever before, with the Olympian Alice McKennis as grand marshal. Ines Baquero was named Volunteer of the Year, Hogback Pizza Business of the Year, and the New Castle Lions Organization of the Year.

The 2014 festival opened on Friday afternoon with the burial of a time capsule in Ritter Plaza. Leah Feeley, the town administrative assistant, filled it with old photographs, pictures of the town in the 1800s, a 100th-anniversary mug, and the baseball uniforms the recreation department wore at the town’s 125th-anniversary celebration in 2013. It is to be dug up in 2064.