Gold Rush Days (Buena Vista)

At ten o’clock on the first Sunday in August, pack burros and their runners start from East Main Street in front of the Buena Vista Heritage Museum, at 506 East Main, while spectators line the street. That start is the center of Gold Rush Days, a three-day festival in Buena Vista, Chaffee County, Colorado, held the first weekend of August. The 2026 festival ran Friday, July 31, through Sunday, August 2, under the theme “Worth Its Weight in Gold.” High Country Bank presented it, and the Buena Vista Chamber of Commerce organized it with the Buena Vista Event Cooperative, Buena Vista Heritage, and the Buena Vista Pack Burro Race. Admission to scheduled events was free. The exceptions were the pancake breakfast and the entry fees for races and contests.

Burros on a patio, pancakes in the park

The weekend opens Friday evening in South Main, on the patio of Coyote Mezcalería at 801 Front Loop. In 2026, visitors could meet the burros entered in Sunday’s race from 5 p.m., and the musician Thom LaFond played from 6 to 8. “We did want to incorporate South Main, which always kind of gets left out,” said Jen Cousins, the Chamber’s vice president.

Saturday starts with the Optimist Club Pancake Breakfast at Columbine Park, 7 to 10 a.m. The festival then moves to McPhelemy Park, on U.S. Highway 24 North, for a day of vendors, a beer garden, and music from Banjo Joe and Danielle, Blue Recluse, and Mark’s Midnight Carnival Show. In the afternoon the Heritage Museum holds an hour-long talk, “Historical Look at the High Mountain Burro Race.” In the evening it hosts a jazz concert. The Chaffee County Times named the band as the Jazz Merchants and reported that it might begin near the park and march into town, though that plan was not settled. Saturday closes with a Community Country Hoedown from 7 to 9 p.m. at the BV Backyard, 324 East Main, hosted by Moonlighter Mobile Entertainment. The Ark Valley Voice told guests to put on boots and cowboy hats.

Shovels, plungers, and a mechanical bull

Sunday belongs to East Main Street. After the racers leave on the course, games fill the street until they come back. In the Poop Drop Pick Up, teams of two race down the street to fetch a shovel. One partner holds the bag while the other scoops what the four-legged racers left behind. The 2026 winners collected fifteen pounds and took a cash prize.

The toilet seat races follow. Children sit on toilet seats mounted on wheels and pull themselves down Main Street with plungers. In 2026 one seat went flat. Some riders finished alone and some with help; April Pishna gave one struggling racer a hand to the line. Next come the mini burro races, open to newcomers of any age, which run down the block with a burro, around a cone, and back. Henry Boza won the 2026 minis in 29.9 seconds.

Vendors set up on the museum lawn, where a mechanical bull was new in 2026. At the 2025 festival a tintype photographer worked on the same lawn and processed each image in a black tent that served as a darkroom.

Poppie and the long course

The race has four divisions: a 13.1-mile long course and a 7.3-mile short course, each run either with a burro or, in the Running With the Burros divisions, without one. Burro teams have the right of way. At Water Station No. 2, where County Roads 371 and 375 meet, a long-course entrant having a bad day may continue straight on 371 and finish the short course without being disqualified.

The Western Pack Burro Ass-ociation’s listing calls Buena Vista the official third leg of the Triple Crown of Pack Burro Racing, held annually since 1979, though the heading on the same page names it the 2026 second leg. On that calendar it fell between Fairplay Burro Days on July 26 and the Leadville Boom Days race on August 9. Buena Vista Pack Burro Race LLC organizes the race, and the 2026 running was called Curtis Imrie Day.

Race director Brad Wann counted 119 participants in 2026, 100 of them racing with burros. Short-course runners returned first. Peter Salazar, running without a burro, was the first racer of any kind to finish, in 0:58:53. Jeff Bennett and Macho Man won the short course with a burro in 1:11:39, two seconds ahead of Carsen Hobson and Lola. The winner is decided by which burro crosses the line first. Holly Hassett and Kayla Hughes, both fourteen, ran the final stretch holding hands and crossed together, tied for third.

Kevin McNamee and his burro Poppie won the long course in 1:48:38. The pair had finished third at Buena Vista in 2025. McNamee told the Ark Valley Voice it was their eleventh race of the year, with more than 100 competition miles behind them and Leadville the following weekend. He runs 30 to 40 miles a week with Poppie, mostly apart from his other donkeys, and said he first chose her because she was the slowest of them. At the finish he led the crowd in a chant of her name.

Emily Keener and Sugar Ray were the first women’s team, in 1:52:23. The long course also recognized Aidan Malherbe, 16, as youngest competitor, Dave Edwards as first finisher over 70, and Jack Lohmann as “Last Ass.” Every 2026 finisher received a belt buckle marking Colorado’s 150th year as a state. The top three in each division received antique lanterns more than a hundred years old. Wann gave one of his goals as race director: “to honor Colorado’s mining heritage while continuing to grow the sport in a fun, family-friendly way.”

A street dance on a flatbed

When the races end, East Main becomes a street dance and beer garden from 1 to 5 p.m. In 2026, artists from the Coletrain Music Academy played first, followed by Chris Daniels & The Kings with Freddi Gowdy. “We’ve hired Chris Daniels and the Kings and they’re going to play on a flatbed truck out in the street,” Cousins said beforehand.

The dance was part of a deliberate effort. “We’re hoping to kind of revive it back to some of its glory days,” Cousins told the Chaffee County Times. She said the partner groups worked more closely in 2026 so that Gold Rush Days and the burro race, long run as largely separate events, would make one celebration. The toilet seat races, a popular feature of earlier Gold Rush Days (the Ark Valley Voice photographed a first-place finish in 2023), returned among several revived traditions. Spreading events across South Main, McPhelemy Park, and East Main was meant to send visitors through the town’s restaurants, breweries, and shops. “Really our goal, especially with the Sunday night street dance, is that hopefully locals come out and we bring back that sort of sense of community that I think Gold Rush Days always had,” she said.

The theme was chosen to tie the festival back to the town’s history and its long association with pack burro racing. The Western Pack Burro Ass-ociation notes that miners used burros during the Gold Rush era.

According to the travel site Get Lost in America, the town’s story began in 1864, when gold was found in the nearby mountains and miners and prospectors rushed in. The same site says the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad platted and named the town in 1879. It places the forming of the community at a settlers’ meeting at the confluence of Cottonwood Creek and the Arkansas River. The name is Spanish for “good view,” and the site says the settlers changed its pronunciation that day to “bewnie vista.”

In those years miners hauled ore to the smelters from the Leadville silver mines and gold from the St. Elmo mines, and Buena Vista was mostly a tent city with 86 drinking establishments. By 1880, by the same account, it was a railroad and stagecoach stop with telephone service, electricity, and street lights. That year disgruntled miners known as the “Buena Vista Shootists” fought a shootout with local police, and several people were killed or injured.