Burro Days

On the Sunday of Burro Days, runners and burros gather at the starting line on Front Street near the Hand Hotel, 531 Front Street. Fairplay sits at 9,953 feet. The long course of the World Championship Pack Burro Race climbs from town to the top of Mosquito Pass, at 13,185 feet, and comes back down. The festival gives the distance as 29-plus miles, with an elevation change of 3,232 feet. In 2012 The Flume reported that each burro carries 33 pounds of mining equipment. A runner may push the animal, pull it, drag it, or run beside it, but may not ride it. The official rules, as the paper quoted them in 2019, say that “the burro’s nose crossing the finish line first constitutes the winner.”

Most teams take the short course. In 2025 the town shortened it from 15 miles to about 12.3, and the new route leaves the old outbound path for steep climbs and descents on wooded dirt roads. Racers pass a high alpine pond at the halfway point and return along the traditional inbound trail. For the 77th Burro Days, held July 24 to 26, 2026, the long course started at 10:15 Sunday morning and the short course at 10:30. Ten teams ran the long course and 94 ran the short course. Marvin Sandoval and Butter Cup won the long course in 5:53:37. The first three short-course teams finished within two seconds of one another: Quinn McConnell and Cash in 2:03:14, Brian Condon and Yucon in 2:03:15, and Emily Keener and Sugar Ray in 2:03:16. The town gave an Honorary Sportsmanship Award to Alexis Knight and Figaro, who stopped on the long course to check on other teams and encourage them. Neighbors along the route set up their own aid stations. Spectators who stay in town buy “Guess the Winning Time” tickets for the long course, and the closest guess wins $500.

The prize money for the race itself goes deep into the field. The Flume reported in 2021 that the long-course winner takes $1,000, second place $800, and so on down to $50 for eighth, and that the short-course winner takes $500. In 2019 the paper noted that the rules say nothing about how a winning runner and burro should divide the money.

Llamas, pack dogs, and outhouses on Front Street

The Town of Fairplay runs Burro Days on the last full weekend of July. The Flume has reported crowds of more than 10,000. The town uses more than 100 volunteers, and the event raises money for the Park County School District’s Fairplay campus. Information starts at the Burro Booth, at the corner of Main and 5th Street, where visitors pick up the official T-shirt, the music schedule, and anything turned in to lost and found.

The weekend opens on Friday night with a free concert in the entertainment tent on 5th Street. In 2026 Hazel Miller & the Collective played from 6 to 9. On Saturday and Sunday, music alternates between that tent and the gazebo on the courthouse lawn. Little Moses Jones, who describes the band’s sound as R&B, funk, and soul, played from 4 to 6 on the 2026 Saturday. The beer and wine tent stands on 5th Street between Front and Main. It pours Highside Brewing beer and Continental Divide Winery wine under a covered area with picnic tables. The town’s Facebook page counts more than 140 arts, craft, and food booths. They sell jewelry, pottery, soaps, wood, leather, fabric, and fine art, and the food runs from southern barbecue, Mexican food, Philly cheese steaks, and brats to fresh lemonade and ice cream. The Gold Prospectors of Colorado teach traditional gold panning all weekend at no charge, and a kids’ adventure zone has rides and games.

Saturday belongs to smaller racers. At Fairplay Beach, children from 7 to 12 run the Kid’s Pack Dog Race, which reached its 49th running in 2026. The course is just under a quarter mile along the Middle Fork of the South Platte River. The race was held in Alma in 2019. The entry flyer reminds children to bring “your pack, your pick, (toothpicks available on site) and your peanut butter sandwich!” Later in the morning, teams of four, each paired with a llama and most of them in costume, run a 2-mile course through town for the Great Llama Race. The Flume called it the Llama Rama in 2021. In 2026 the race was in its 27th year and was run entirely by High Rockies Community School, a tuition-free public charter school that receives all of the proceeds. The previous year’s fundraising helped build a barn at Sacramento Creek Ranch for the school’s students.

Sunday starts at 9 a.m. with Cowboy Church at the gazebo on the Old Courthouse lawn, led by Cowboy Preacher Jack Blease. The service has been part of Burro Days for more than 30 years, and those who come bring lawn chairs. The parade lines up at 10:45 and steps off at 11:30. Anyone may enter it without a fee, and first place in each category pays $100. At 1 p.m. comes the outhouse race. Teams push, pull, and steer their outhouses (“outhouses don’t steer,” the festival notes) two blocks downhill to the finish line on Front Street. The winners receive prize money and a golden toilet seat.

The Burro Days Museum began in 2019 as a pop-up, paid for in part by a grant from the South Park National Heritage Area. Each summer its artifacts, photographs, and memorabilia were unpacked into the old Park County Jailhouse on the courthouse lawn and then packed away again after the festival. The collection now has a permanent home at 501 Main Street, in the town’s Visitor Center, where it shows articles, T-shirts, and posters from past races year-round.

Whitey, Prunes IV, and a weak pop

The festival’s own account says Burro Days began in 1949 with a challenge to anyone willing to race alongside a burro from Leadville to Fairplay for a $500 prize. In 2012 The Flume cited an Aug. 3, 2008, editorial by Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen, and the paper added its own hedge: “According to legend.” In that version, pack burro racing began in Fairplay on July 30, 1949, because local merchants wanted more spectators for the town’s annual Gold Days celebration. The paper also reported that the start alternated between Fairplay and Leadville for a few years. Whichever town held the finish drew the crowds and the tourist dollars. Today each town runs its own race up to the pass and back.

According to the festival’s history page, every mountain town in the Rockies spent the weeks after the challenge recruiting racers to represent it. Mosquito Pass became a training ground. Local bars reported that the runners who drank more beer were turning in faster practice times. The Fairplay Flume reported more burros escaping their pastures than anyone could remember. Fairplay’s own entry was Ed Knizely and his burro Prunes IV, and the paper carried weekly reports on both. A good deal of local money was riding on the pair, and the town stayed on alert for any escape attempt by Prunes.

The Park County Republican and Fairplay Flume told the race in detail on August 4, 1949. Twenty-one contestants lined up before the old Leadville courthouse for the 22.9-mile First Annual Rocky Mountain Pack Burro Championship Race. The starting gun gave only a weak “pop,” and it took a moment for the line of “whiskered men and pack-saddled burros” to realize the race had begun. Some racers whipped their burros into a gallop. Melville Sutton of Como held back on purpose. The teams turned the corner by the Hotel Vendome, climbed Leadville’s Seventh Street past the Matchless Mine, “where Baby Doe Tabor died,” and continued past the Resurrection Mine. Sutton reached the summit in two hours. On the descent Knizely’s “game knee” gave out, but at Park City he drew even with Sutton and his burro Whitey before Sutton pulled away again.

At the corner by the Park County Republican office, Sutton broke into a run on his 15-foot lead rope toward the Prunes monument and the finish line a block away. He finished stripped to the waist. Whitey, the paper wrote, “stood with unconcern and received his admirers and plaudits with full dignity.” Knizely finished second and had to be helped away from the line, still convinced that Prunes IV was the best burro. He took $250. Curtis Moran, sponsored by “the leasors and fleecers of Alma,” took third and $150. Jack Burton of the Buckskin Joe Committee of Alma took fourth and $100. Only eight of the 21 starters finished. The others were Clyde Hinman of Kokomo, Curley Simmons of Breckenridge, John Blamey of Leadville, Leo Lake of Twin Lakes, John Otten of Buena Vista, and Bernard Smith of Malta.

Miners, marathoners, and a math professor

Starr Yelland of KOA came back to cover the race every year, and before long it was appearing on the Dave Garroway show and on national sports programs. Forty racers started in 1955. That same year Joe Glavinick of Leadville won for the first time. According to the festival’s history, he had “some kind of special rapport with his burros” that kept him in first place for more than 20 years and brought him nine wins. Marathoners began entering in the 1960s, and Glavinick’s battles with Steve Matthews became legend. He was the last of the true miners to win the race.

Mining in the district declined quickly in the 1970s, but the race went on. Lee Courkamp, a cross-country coach from Arvada, won it twice with his own string of trained burros and had his high school teams train with them. One of his runners, the Olympian Jon Sinclair, won in 1977. Ardel Boes, a math professor at the School of Mines in Golden, won eight times and was the first to break four hours. In 2002 Tom Sobal took his 10th win and broke Glavinick’s record. The Flume gives Sobal’s course record, set in 1989 with the burro Maynard, as 3:44:18. In 2011 Karen Thorpe of Salida and her burro Kokomo ran the fastest time of the year, 5:41:50. George Zack and his burro Jack won the long course in 2015, their third win. Two years earlier they had finished second by two seconds.

A heritage sport by resolution

In 2007, students at Edith Teter Elementary in Fairplay began collecting signatures to make pack burro racing Colorado’s official state sport. Linda Balough, director of the Park County Office of Historic Preservation, said the town’s children “see it (history) every day.” The petition failed. In 2008 the legislature named skiing and snowboarding as the state’s winter sports instead. On May 4, 2012, House Joint Resolution HJR12-1021 designated pack burro racing a Colorado summer heritage sport. Julie Bullock, then president of the Burro Days committee, said the designation “will certainly boost our attendance this summer.” Brad Wann of the Western Pack Burro Ass-ociation said a race lets visitors “peek at what they have only read in books.” Representative Millie Hamner, a sponsor of the resolution, explained the title: “There are no other heritage sports in Colorado. Nor is there any intent to create additional heritage sports.”