Paonia Cherry Days

On the morning of the Fourth of July, Paonia’s Cherry Days begins at Town Hall. Volunteers from the Rotary Club of the North Fork Valley serve buttermilk, blueberry and gluten-free pancakes there, with link sausages, orange juice and coffee. Runners are out early too: the 2026 Cherry Days 5K started at 7:30 a.m., hosted by the North Fork High School cross country team, with proceeds going to the team. By 9:00, spectators are lining the street for the parade.

The Cherry Days Parade starts at the south end of Grand Avenue, turns east on 3rd Street, then north on Oak Street, and finishes at the Town Park. The festival’s descriptions list tractor contraptions, horse teams, the Cherry Days royalty, and floats for local businesses, sports teams and class reunions. All of them pass the judges, and candy is thrown from the floats to children along the curb. Entries carry cherry-themed decorations, and some classic cars are dressed in blossoms. The Ute Trails Car Club brings a line of classic cars into the parade and then parks them in the Town Park, where people can look at them up close. Several machines from an antique tractor collection also join the parade. Many of them still run, and most date to the early 1900s. The rest of the collection is set out in the corner lot at Samuel Wade Road and Niagra, next to Berg Harvest Mercantile. The High Country Spotlight & Shopper calls the Clown Band “perhaps the longest running participants in the parade.” The band’s original outfits were made from dyed World War II parachutes.

The Town Park after the parade

The parade ends at the Town Park, which runs along North Fork Avenue from 4th to 5th Street. The crowd follows it in. A 2018 Spotlight account described generations of families coming back to sit in the shade of the same trees year after year, and class reunions are held there every summer. Opening ceremonies take place on the Gazebo Stage. In 2023, Paonia American Legion Post 97 presented the colors and the North Fork Choir sang the National Anthem. In 2019 the anthem was sung by the Tuin family.

After the opening ceremonies, the king and queen are crowned. Each year four North Fork High School graduates are chosen as finalists, two young women and two young men. The winners each receive a $1,000 scholarship from Paonia Cherry Days, and the runners-up receive $500. The 2023 queen and king were Autumn Kiefer and Malachi Deck, with Tegan Oetker and Milo Chavez as runners-up. The 2026 queen candidates were Sky Rikes and Jaylen Monroy-Mendoza, and the king candidates were Joseph Hollembeak and Caden Pfeifer, a lifelong resident of Crawford.

Craft vendors set up under the park shelters, and food vendors serve from 11 a.m. until dusk. Admission is free. The rides cost extra: they belong to the Adventure Zone midway in the football field, run by WOW Factor Amusements, which in 2019 brought a giant water slide. The festival committee asks visitors to leave dogs at home because there have been several dog fights in past years.

The contests run through both days:

• Cherry Pit Spit. Recent festivals have kept the cherry pit spit, the baking contest and the wood splitting contest, along with a cornhole tournament. A Delta County Independent photograph from the 2023 festival carries a caption crediting a man from Utah with a spit of 38 feet, 9 inches.
• Cherry Days Skate Contest. Put on by the Paonia Skatepark, it reached its third annual edition on Friday, July 3, 2026.
• Dunk tank. In 2026 it raised money for the fire department. The festival’s own posts that afternoon logged Matt Van Fleet, Blake and Riley taking turns in the tank.
• Bike safety. Paonia Police officers spent part of the 2026 Fourth teaching children bicycle regulations in the park.

Music on the Gazebo Stage and the wine tent

The stage runs both days. The 2026 lineup included Cryin’ Shame, Stray Grass (fronted by mandolin player Garry Tullio), Charles Wecker, Dave Jordan, Scrapper Jacks, Crystal Creek Band and Hard Pressed. Van Zeppelin, a Led Zeppelin and Van Halen tribute act, played the evening of Saturday, July 4. Lee-Ann Wright taught country dance. The North Fork Valley Community Band, which has about 40 members spanning seven decades, also played. The Paonia Zumba dancers performed first and then brought the audience in to dance with them. In 2025 the stage was called the Red, White & Blues Stage, and that year’s Saturday headliner was Phillip Lamar and Paizley Park, a Prince tribute that went on at 7 p.m.

Near the stage is the Beer and Wine Garden. Chrysalis Brewing and the PUB have poured barrel-aged beers there. Big B’s sells canned hard ciders named Cherry Daze, Lazy Daze, Orchard Original and Harvest Apple. Eames Cellars, Stone Cottage Cellars, Qutori and Black Bridge Winery bring red and white wines, and there is cherry wine as well. Drinkers wear ID wristbands, and alcohol has to stay inside the white park fence or on the football field. Glass is not allowed in the park.

Downtown Day and the side events

The day before the Fourth is Downtown Day on Grand Avenue, which fell on Friday, July 3, in 2026. Shops put out sidewalk sales and displays. In past years the local banks handed out free food. More recently:

• The Learning Council’s TLC Kitchen has sold ice cream at the corner of Grand and 2nd Street.
• Dependable Lumber, just off Grand on 2nd, has given away free hot dogs while they lasted.
• The Friends of the Paonia Library hold the Cherry Days Book Sale at the Paonia Public Library, and all proceeds go to the library.
• The galleries on Grand Avenue, its side streets and its back alleys stay open, among them the Cirque, Grapevine and Blue Sage.
• Shops have moved into the remodeled Kennedy Building, which was formerly Hays Drugstore.

On the Fourth, the Paonia Museum opens to the public and serves ice cream and root beer floats on the lawn of the museum and the old schoolhouse. Both buildings hold displays on the early days of Paonia and the North Fork. Outside town, Big B’s Delicious Orchards and Pickin’ Productions hold an evening of live music at the orchard. A Bulls & Broncs Challenge appears on the festival’s community events list. In 2018 the Spotlight described it as the 13th annual Bull N’ Broncos Rodeo War, held on Saturday evening under the lights at the North Fork Horse Patrol arena.

Lights for the Dan Lawrence field

The festival was started to pay for lights on the football field. Accounts agree that the Paonia Lions Club planned the first Cherry Day as a fundraiser for those lights. They disagree on the year. The festival’s own site, the High Country Spotlight & Shopper and the North Fork Valley visitor guide all give 1947. A historical marker titled “Grand Ave. – A Look Back,” erected in 2016 by the Blue Sage Center for the Arts, the North Fork Historic Society and the Hotchkiss-Crawford Historical Society, gives 1946. The marker also names the field: the Dan Lawrence football field. The edition numbers are no more settled. The Spotlight called 2018 the 72nd year, 2019 the 73rd, and 2023 the 77th. It then announced both the 2025 and the 2026 festivals as the 79th.

The first event went well, and organizers added more to the schedule each year. The Spotlight’s Stu Carlson wrote that “Cherry Day eventually became Cherry Days.” The organizers have changed several times:

1. For several years a Cherry Day Association planned it. 2. The Chamber of Commerce ran it for a time. 3. It is now run by the all-volunteer Cherry Days 4-Ever Committee.

The committee’s Facebook page calls Cherry Days “the longest standing community festival in Colorado.” The newspaper accounts are more cautious and call it one of the longest-running.

For many years, the best-known feature of Cherry Day was the free bags of cherries packed by the local fruit houses. They held dark red Bing and Lambert cherries and yellow Royal Anne cherries. People still buy cherries at the festival. At the 2023 festival, the Delta County Independent photographed five-year-old Branson of Paonia holding a bag of cherries his grandmother had bought and trying one himself.

Some of the money has always come from buttons, a practice the Spotlight traces to the festival’s beginnings. A new button design is chosen each year from student artwork. In 2019 the design was by Audra Niermann, under the theme “Small Town Living.” In 2025 it was by Kayli Dagnan, for the theme “Cherry Days… Starry Nights,” and the buttons sold for $2. Each June, Paonia Volunteer Fire Department trucks drive through town with their sirens on while volunteers and schoolchildren sell buttons at the curb. The fire department also once cooked the Fourth of July pancake breakfast, before the Rotary Club took it over. Other events have been dropped over the years, including the coal shoveling contest, the Paonia Has Talent show, and a mud volleyball tournament at the horse patrol arena.

In 2018 Paonia had just over 1,400 residents, and the Spotlight wrote that the town “swells to nearly bursting” for the festival. In 2023 the Independent reported the Town Park “full to capacity.” A few days after the 2026 festival, Skip, who books the festival’s music, posted on its Facebook page. He thanked the Paonia Police, the Fire Department and the North Fork Ambulance crew, who had responded to emergencies during the weekend, and wrote: “It was a really fun weekend and I feel honored to be a part of it!”

The 2016 marker stands beside the sidewalk on Grand Avenue, just north of 2nd Street. Its photograph, taken in the 1950s, shows the parade passing down Grand Avenue.