Lochbuie Fall Festival

For five hours on a Saturday in September, Bonanza Blvd in Lochbuie is given over to the Fall Festival. The Town of Lochbuie runs it from 3:30 to 8:30 p.m. on the stretch at 201 Bonanza Blvd, near Lochbuie Elementary, and admission is free. The town puts the crowd at more than 2,000 residents each year. Food trucks work the street, drinks are served, and the 2025 edition had a beer garden. Children head for the Kid Zone, where face painting and activities cost nothing.

Swingtown on Bonanza Blvd

Live music and dancing run through the afternoon and evening. The 2026 festival, held Saturday, September 19, 2026, had Swingtown: Tribute to Steve Miller as its headliner. Before that festival the town’s notice on the food trucks said “this year’s line up is out of this world.”

Between the trucks and the bandstand is the marketplace of small businesses, artisans, and crafters. The town’s list for 2026 ran to handmade goods, books, jewelry, home décor, clothing, gifts, toys, treats, plants, pottery, and accessories. The evening closes along Bonanza Blvd with a drone light show, which one 2025 listing billed as the “Drone Show Finale!”

A 5K and fireworks at 201 Bonanza

The same address held a larger party in 2014. On Saturday, May 17, 2014, the town marked its 40th year with a celebration at 201 Bonanza Boulevard that ran from 4 p.m. to dusk. It had live music, a kids zone, food vendors, and a beer and wine tent. Flatliner Rod Shop sponsored a car show. Brad Lee Schroeder performed, a Nashville recording artist and Independent Music Award nominee. Also on the program were an Air Life Denver helicopter, the High Plains Library District bookmobile, the Weld County SWAT team, and presentations from the Wildlife Animal Sanctuary. Two hours before the gates opened, at 2 p.m., runners started the town’s first annual “Running of the Scots” 5K. A fireworks show was tentatively planned for about 8 p.m. at County Road 2 and Bonanza Boulevard. Candy Veldhuizen was event coordinator, and Monica Mendoza took questions for the town.

By 2018 the Fall Festival had its own race. The Future of Yesterday Foundation, a nonprofit at 318 Lilac Dr in Lochbuie, described it that year as a day-long festival full of events, among them a 5K run in the morning followed by breakfast.

From Space City to Lochbuie

The forty years counted from 1974. Before that, Gordon McClain owned land along the Weld-Adams county line next to Interstate 80 South. In 1961 he developed a 12-acre mobile home subdivision there and named it Spacious Living. It was nicknamed Space City. In 1974 the residents voted to incorporate so they could improve their water and sewer systems. The town’s own page gives the month as May. The town lies in both Weld and Adams counties, and the residents named it for the ancestral home of McClain’s grandparents: Lochbuie, on the Isle of Mull, Scotland.

The highway beside the old subdivision was officially renumbered Interstate 76 in July 1976. The town has grown around it into both counties, and the 2020 Census counted 8,771 residents at an elevation of 5,020 feet. In Scottish Gaelic the name would be spelled Locha Buidhe, meaning Lake of the Fair-haired Clan.