Goldfield Days

On the Saturday morning of Goldfield Days, the county road department closes U.S. Highway 95 where it runs through town as Crook Avenue, and the crowd moves onto the sidewalks to wait. “Since this is on a public highway, we have to get permission in advance to close the road,” Sharon Artlip, lead organizer of the 2026 celebration, told the Pahrump Valley Times. Carl Shrider of the road department saw to the closing and the reopening.

The 2026 parade went down the highway on August 1 behind its grand marshal, Esmeralda County District Attorney Robert Glennen III. Behind him came the Hasana Dance Troupe, Goldfield Youth Athletics, the Range Bums, the Vegas Valley Vettes, the Goldfield Volunteer Fire Department, Radio Goldfield, a Centerra Gold vehicle, the Blue Canyon Gang, Great Basin College, several candidates for office, and Honey the Burro. A family restoring an adobe house in town posted that Honey, “Goldfield’s donkey mascot, decided mid-parade she was over it. I don’t think the gun shots were helping.” At the 2024 parade, a Las Vegas Review-Journal photographer caught children running to pick up candy along the route.

Three days on Crook Avenue

Goldfield sits in Esmeralda County on U.S. 95, 26 miles south of Tonopah and 180 miles north of Las Vegas. The Goldfield Chamber of Commerce runs the celebration on the first weekend in August. In 2026 that was Friday, July 31, through Sunday, August 2. About 450 people came, locals and visitors together, and about 25 vendors set up selling handmade crafts, goods and food. “We had more vendors than we did last year, we probably had more people than we did last year, and we had more events,” said chamber president Richard Dizmang.

Each year carries a theme. In 2026 it was “Miners of the New Century,” for the county’s modern mining and solar industries. “We have a lot of miners coming in and we wanted to say thank you for their participation and thank you for the companies that are investing in our county,” Artlip said.

The program runs to a raffle, horseshoe and mucking contests, a car show, a poker walk, music and a street dance, and tours of historic buildings. In 2026 the horseshoe tournament was pitched next to Firehouse No. 1, across from the courthouse. The grand prize of the raffle is a one-ounce gold bar; earlier years added a mountain bike, hotel stays and meals, at a dollar a ticket. In 2017 the chamber paid more than $1,200 for the bar and took in more than $2,000 in tickets.

One booth in 2026 belonged to the Burro Express, a local newsletter of humor, history and town happenings, then in its twenty-fifth year. “We have people coming from other states to visit Goldfield, on Goldfield Days, to come and visit the Burro Express booth,” said co-founder and publisher Peggy Carrasco. “They’re as surprised as I am that it lasted 25 years.”

Bidding at the courthouse

The celebration grew up around a county proceeding. The Pahrump Valley Times wrote in 2017 that “the annual festivities surround Esmeralda County’s land auction for properties delinquent on their tax payments.” The auction is held Saturday afternoon at the Esmeralda County Courthouse, 233 Crook Avenue. In 2026 six parcels went up: two in Goldfield, one near Coaldale Junction and three in Fish Lake Valley. Together they brought $133,155. In 2019 more than 20 properties and mining claims brought more than $111,000. In 2021 the county listed 27 parcels and five mining claims, and KGFN 89.1 FM broadcast the bidding live.

The 2017 auction was reported in detail. At 1 p.m. on August 5, dozens of bidders lined the parking lot on the north side of the courthouse. Some held paper signs with a number drawn on them and flipped the number up to enter the bidding. Seventeen properties and one mining claim were offered, and they sold for about $1,700 up to $13,000. The biggest bidder was Red Roberts of Carson City, owner of the Goldfield Hotel and grand marshal of that year’s parade. He paid nearly $16,000 for the two parcels beside his hotel at U.S. 95 and Columbia Avenue. Three properties drew no bid and were held over for the next year.

Around 2 p.m., a second crowd formed across Columbia Avenue from the hotel. Roberts had donated the hotel’s original interior doors to the local radio station and the historical society, and Carl Brownfield, program director at Radio Goldfield, auctioned off roughly 100 to 125 of them. Some went for upward of $75. “There are hundreds of people out there that would like a piece of Nevada’s history, and this is authentic Nevada history,” Brownfield said.

Other years have put county vehicles on the block after the land. Three fire trucks and an ambulance were offered in 2021. In 2019 the sheriff’s office sold more than a dozen vehicles and other items for more than $10,000. “We accumulate them. Then when we get enough of them, we have a sale,” said Sheriff Kenneth Elgan.

Cards from twelve stops

The Goldfield Historical Society runs a Poker Walk from its booth. Each entrant antes $15 and walks the town collecting cards at local businesses and historic sites. Then they bring the sealed envelopes back to the booth, where volunteer card sharks Brenda Gleffe and Ernie Ganem, called “Texas,” open them and help each player pick the best five. The Best in the Desert Racing Association puts up the prize money: $300, $150 and $50.

In 2019 there were 44 walkers and ten cards apiece. The walk was canceled in 2020, along with the society’s quilt drawing, which is ordinarily held during Goldfield Days. In 2021, 48 walkers played, and the society added a rule: the worst hand got its ante back. The first to collect was Goldfielder Bret Lingenfelter. In 2022 Friday brought torrential rain, and only thirteen signed up that day. By the end of the weekend the count was 59. Goldfield resident Penny Hicks won with five 5’s. A Tonopah boy, Tristen Fitch, took second with a straight flush made with the only joker among 1,600 cards. His mother, Elizabeth Fitch, took third with four queens.

The 2023 walk had twelve stops and drew 75 players, the most the society had seen, and it raised $1,125. Delia Brown of Goldfield won with a straight flush, ace through five of hearts. “I’ve never done this before,” she said at the booth. “It was a blast!” Tristan Fitch of Tonopah was second again, the society noted, and a foot taller. The worst hand belonged to Jim Price, a longtime member, two pair with a king high. He took his $15 back and handed it over as a donation.

Price is also the society’s railroad man. In 2009 he and Joan Sieber, both part-time residents, debuted a drawing at Goldfield Days. Railroad artist H.L. Scott of Georgetown, Colorado, drew the Tonopah & Goldfield yard as it would have looked around 1915. Prints of it are still sold for the society. Sieber makes the society’s raffle quilts. In 2022 she and Andrea Lane rode as “candy ladies” on the society’s first parade float, a salute to the prospectors and their animals. Doug Hooper, a mine owner, walked as a prospector. The tow vehicle was driven by a member named Wyatt Ehrp.

Tours of the hotel and the high school

The weekend opens two of the town’s oldest buildings. Heather Ingalls has led tours of the Goldfield Hotel for almost eight years. “I do talk a little bit about some of the paranormal stuff that goes on in the hotel, but I center mostly on the history,” she said in 2026, “because without the history, the paranormal is kind of non-existent.”

Steve Foutz, vice president of the historical society, leads tours of Goldfield High School on Euclid Avenue. “The purpose of the tours are to share the magnificence of the building inside and sort of expand the fan club of the high school,” he said. The school was built in 1907. In 2005 its south wall fell three floors to the foundation. Society president John Ekman told the Review-Journal that while residents made bets on which wall would fall next, he went after grants. Since then the society has repaired the south and east walls and restored the front stairs. It finished the roof in May 2024. Photographs from that August show the inside of the school: old classrooms, old dolls, and a former student’s graffiti on a wall.

Other doors stand open that weekend too. In 2024 there was the Lyric Theatre, which Ronnie Raffaniello’s family is reviving and which her great-grandmother once bought. There was also the John S. Cook bank with its old safe, and The Palace, where a mannequin dressed as a cowboy faces the window. Standing in the Lyric, Ekman said: “History is a renewable resource. Things are constantly getting old, and becoming more and more interesting.”

A count that starts in the 2000s

The pages do not name the celebration’s founders. They do keep count. The Pahrump Valley Times called the August 4–6, 2017, celebration the seventeenth annual. That year Mark Stezaker was chamber president. A Friday thunderstorm brought hail and cut power to the Hoist House Tavern on Columbia, where Corvettes, Monte Carlos and El Caminos were lined up out front for the car show. Owner Jeremy Daeseleer fired up a generator and kept the music going. The Beatty Cowboys rode the parade route, and a gunfight was reenacted. In 2018 John Ekman was grand marshal, and people in period clothing moved through the crowd. In 2019 the nineteenth edition added a pet parade and a beer garden. The 2020 celebration and auction were canceled for the pandemic. They returned in 2021 as the twentieth annual, with a chili cook-off.

The town being celebrated dates from gold found in 1902. By the historical society’s account, the mines turned a cluster of tents into a city of 20,000 by 1907. The chamber writes that from 1905 to 1910 Goldfield was the largest city in Nevada. In 2023 the society retired the slogan “World’s Greatest Gold Camp,” having learned that it belonged to Cripple Creek, Colorado. In its place the society took “Greatest Gold Camp Ever Known,” the phrase Goldfield’s newspapers used from at least 1904 through the boom years. The Goldfield Days page still opens with the old one.