Hayden Daze

Hayden Daze fills Dry Creek Park, at 513 S. Poplar Street in Hayden, for a Friday evening and a Saturday each July. The 2026 festival ran July 17 and 18 and was free to anyone who came. The Town of Hayden’s Parks and Recreation Department and its Arts Commission put it on, and planning begins in January with meetings between the Hayden Parks and Recreation Board and the Arts Commission. Three town staff carry most of the work. Rhonda Sweetser is the recreation director, Sarah Stinson is the arts and events director, and Nash Welch is the program and events coordinator. “It’s our biggest event of the year and people get excited for it months in advance,” Stinson told the Craig Press in 2025.

Friday night and the beer garden

The weekend opens at 6 p.m. Friday with a beer garden and live music that runs until 10. In 2026 the stage went to Constant Change, a Hayden band, from 7 o’clock on. Sweetser told the Steamboat Pilot she was glad to include them because the event had not featured a local band in a long time. The year before, the Andy Straus Duo played from 6 to 7:30 and the Warden Jilson Band carried the evening to 10.

Saturday, from yoga to the regatta

Saturday begins at 8 a.m. with yoga on the green. At the same hour registration opens for the Josh Webster Memorial Disc Golf Tournament, which goes off with a shotgun start at 8:30 and benefits the Hayden recreation program. Both take sign-ups on the day. Teams of four check in for the volleyball tournament at 9.

At 10:30 the parade steps off. Entries line up by 10 at Third Street and Washington Avenue, and the parade runs on Highway 40. Businesses, nonprofits, clubs, and residents enter vehicles, floats on trailers, or walking groups, and an announcer reads out a few lines each entry has written about itself.

From 11 to 3 the park is given over to the festival proper. It has food trucks, the beer garden again, artisan and maker booths, face painters, a touch-a-truck display where children climb aboard working vehicles, and bounce houses. The town’s food-vendor rules hold the food booths to four, and the program lists a DJ along with the live music. In 2025 Welch said of the inflatables, “We went big,” and promised more of them than the festival had ever had. Hayden police patrol the park through the weekend.

The contests run through the afternoon. Cornhole teams check in at 11:30 and the bags fly at noon, in a double-elimination bracket with cash for the top three teams. The Home Run Derby follows at 12:30. It was new in 2026 and carried no official prize, and Sweetser said she hoped to expand it if it proved popular. The Cardboard Regatta closes the program at 1:30. It was also new in 2026 and is organized by the arts council as Hayden’s version of the Cardboard Classic, which traditionally ends the winter season at Steamboat Resort. Stinson explained that crews design and decorate cardboard boats, put together a group costume, and float the boats in the pond at Dry Creek Park. The town newsletter billed it as the Hayden Daze Cardboard Classic, free and open to all ages. In August the town congratulated the winners of the disc golf, cornhole, regatta, and home run derby and said it hoped to see them back “to defend your titles.”

Sweetser has said that every event is open to visitors and to anyone who wants to celebrate with Hayden locals. “You’ll see grandparents, parents and grandkids all enjoying the same event together,” she told the Craig Press. “You’ll hear someone say, ‘I’ve seen you before, but we’ve never really talked.’”

A paint-by-number for the Hayden Center

The community mural was added in 2025. Stinson commissioned a local artist to lay out what she called a “giant paint-by-number,” eight feet by eight, and festivalgoers fill it in through the afternoon. Each finished mural is mounted in the Hayden Center. Stinson calls it her favorite event and a way to add more color to the Hayden Center building. “It’s a beautiful way to reflect who we are as a community,” she said when the first one was made.

From the Pioneer Picnic to Appreciation Day

The Craig Press traces the festival back to the 1920s and ‘30s, when Routt and Moffat County residents gathered each year for the Pioneer Picnic. The modern version took shape in 1978, when Bobby Robinson Sr. and the Hayden Chamber of Commerce founded Hayden Appreciation Day. It was held to honor the community’s workers and industries, with barbecue, games, parades, and once a flyover by the Colorado Air National Guard. A clipping from the 1979 event states the day’s purpose: “to honor and appreciate the individuals and companies who have invested in West Routt County and tried to make it a better place to live.” By the Steamboat Pilot’s account in 2026, the events have shifted and multiplied since 1978, but the core has stayed mostly unchanged: recognizing the local craftsmanship and businesses that keep Hayden going.

2007: a new name and a centennial

The name Hayden Daze first appeared in July 2007. The Steamboat Pilot reported then that the town was combining two festivals, the Colorado Days festival sponsored by the Hayden Chamber of Commerce and the town’s own Summer Fest, because the chamber was in the middle of a reorganization. The 2025 Craig Press account says only that Appreciation Day evolved into Hayden Daze.

The 2007 festival also closed out Hayden’s centennial year. Kathy Hockett, then director of parks and recreation, ran it with help from the American Legion, the Lions Club, and the Shriners. “It’s mostly about celebrating our Hayden town heritage and getting together with our neighbors, which includes Craig and Steamboat neighbors,” she said. The weekend began Friday morning with a four-person golf scramble at the Yampa Valley Golf Course in Craig, where sign-ups ran short enough that the deadline was extended. Friday evening brought an American Legion barbecue and a street dance to the Hot Posse Band in Hayden Town Park. On Saturday the Lions served pancakes, and the Shrine Parade went down Jefferson Avenue under the theme “Hayden’s Historical Happenings.” The Shrine barbecue that followed offered Washboard Annie and the Blue Rooster Band, a dunk tank, a rock-climbing wall, and Stretch the nine-foot clown. Friends of the Zabel family held a yard sale, a silent auction, a live auction, and a dunk tank for seven-year-old Taylen Zabel. He had been diagnosed in April with medulloblastoma, a malignant brain tumor, had finished radiation, and was due to begin chemotherapy later that month.

That Saturday evening a potluck at the Routt County Fairgrounds exhibit hall honored Hayden’s past and present mayors and Town Board members. Hayden elementary and middle school students then performed “A Journey Down Walker Lane,” a play by Kathy Deepe about the men and women who shaped the town in the early 1900s. Deepe wrote it as a spoof of a reality television show. “History can be pretty ding-dang dry,” she said. “This might add some humor to it.” The Bob Robinson Memorial Pancake Breakfast was set for Sunday morning in Town Park.

Wildfire conditions were ripe that summer, and the town still planned fireworks for 9 p.m. Saturday, to be watched from the fairgrounds grandstand. West Routt Fire cleared the plan. The shells were to go up from the future site of Dry Creek Park, then under construction and mostly a dirt field with no grass or anything else to burn.