Routt County Fair

The way in is the only signal light in Hayden. Turn south off Highway 40 onto Poplar Street, go three blocks, and the road runs into the Routt County Fairgrounds. The site covers 37 acres. It holds an exhibition hall of 9,625 square feet with a full kitchen, an indoor arena set up for roping and rough stock, and an oversized outdoor arena with two crow’s nests, bucking chutes, roping boxes, lights, and grandstands. A historic half-mile race track runs around the grounds. Horse stalls, wash racks, small barns, an RV park, and a regulation sand volleyball court complete the place. The restroom and shower building stays open around the clock, all year. Elizabeth Wood manages the grounds and coordinates the fair. Between fairs the county rents the place for everything from weddings to rodeos and from beach volleyball to Buck Brannaman clinics.

Ten days in August on Poplar Street

The 112th Routt County Fair ran August 7 through 16, 2026, under the theme “Celebrating the Bounty of Routt County.” It opened with an open horse show and a 4-H and FFA ranch horse versatility class. The second day brought a performance horse show and, after dark, an ATV, UTV and motocross rodeo. A kickoff parade followed on Sunday, August 9. A ranch rodeo and a power wheels derby filled the first weekend, and the fair’s office later noted that the champion ranch-rodeo team went home with custom stirrups. On Tuesday, local musicians played and the Taste of Fair was set out. Midweek came goat roping, mini donkey and horse races, steer shows, and Cams Ag Academy.

Friday, August 14, was the Junior National Finals Rodeo qualifier, a night of bucking horse and mini bull riding. The fair said the riders had come from eight states. Broncs, bulls, barrel racing, and a trick rider filled the evening, which started at 6:00 p.m. with free admission and a beer garden. On Saturday the fair held a ticketed concert: an opening act at 7:00, a tribute to veterans at 8:00, and the country singer Austin Williams at 8:30. Williams was born near Nashville in the small town of Pleasant View. Hay results were posted on the last day.

Fair campers park in areas the office lists as Full, Primitive, Dry Creek, Choke Cherry, and Lean-to. There is no water for filling RVs on the grounds, campfires are not allowed during the fair, and quiet hours run from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Families have long stayed the whole week. “We come down and camp here for a week,” Linda Long said in 2014. Marsha Daughenbaugh remembered summers when her family and the Mongers, co-leaders with her of the Fairplay 4-H Club, parked their horse trailers side by side. “We would set up a barbecue grill and a picnic table in between them, and we would feed as many kids as we could during the fair,” she said.

Once the 2026 fair closed, the outdoor arena reopened for use on August 31. The indoor arena and multi-purpose building stayed closed until further notice.

Steers before the auctioneer

The Junior Livestock Sale came on Saturday, August 15, 2026. Members of the Yampa Valley’s 4-H chapters brought their cows, sheep, goats, pigs, turkeys, chickens, and rabbits before the auctioneer and local bidders. “This is the pinnacle and showcase of hard work,” said Adonna Allen, president of the Junior Livestock Sale Committee. “The kids have been raising the steers since November, and other animals since the spring, so this event is something they’ve waited a long time for.”

The grand champion steer was a 1,329-pound black steer shown by Kimberly Gray, 17. Round Mountain Ranch bought it for $11,000. Gray also won the market swine division. The winter before, her bull had died after a heifer made it sick. “This means a lot because this is my last year competing,” she said. “I was going for it all and I worked my butt off for this.” Part of the money was expected to go toward her studies in animal science at Purdue University. The reserve champion, a 1,316-pound steer raised by Makinley Long, also 17, brought $12,500 from Steamboat Motors. Long also raised the grand champion market lamb.

In all, 104 animals crossed the block that day: 30 cows, 12 sheep, 4 goats, 39 pigs, 15 chickens and turkeys, and 4 rabbits. The year before, sales and add-on donations together came to $648,945. Committee member Renee May said that 4-H members who sell in their last three years of high school become eligible for 4-H scholarships covering four years of college and two of graduate school.

The sale is an old part of the fair. A photograph in the Tread of Pioneers Museum, dated September 12, 1981, shows Shannen Yeager with an animal called “Raspberry,” and the record names the buyer as Doc Utterback. In 2014, former county extension agent C.J. Mucklow described the barbecue held the Saturday night before the livestock show. He said about 900 people came, and that “they have a secret sauce, which includes a lot of whiskey and beer.”

Railroad Days and a bird man

The fair grew out of Hayden’s Railroad Days of 1913, a celebration of train cars full of the best steers and hogs. Afterward, as the Steamboat Pilot tells it, a “bunch of fellows” met at the old Furlong store to talk about holding an event every year. The fair’s own history puts that meeting in the back of a local store. Hayden sat at the western end of Routt County but at the center of Northwest Colorado, which then included the newly formed Moffat County. State Senator John Cary of Hayden wanted a fair to promote the region’s farm products. He proposed that land south of town, where there were ball fields and a crude race track, become a permanent fair and racing ground.

The group organized the Routt County Fair and Racing Association in November 1913 and incorporated it in August 1914. Marshall Starr was appointed its first president. The land came from Wilson Cary at $50 an acre, and he took half the payment in Association stock. The fair’s history says the Association bought 40 acres. The Pilot, citing several histories including Faster Horses, Younger Women, Older Whiskey by Sureva Towler and Jim Stanko, gives 37 acres. Before the first fair, volunteers graded a sloping oval racetrack and fenced it with wooden planks. They also built a wire fence around the grounds, a ticket office at the main gate, and a temporary grandstand. A verse by George Watts gives the track to two men by name:

I didn’t know Si Dawson, But I knew Coke Roberds well. They built our famous race track So I’ve heard people tell.

The first fair ran September 9 to 11, 1914, and drew 2,000 people. Many rode special trains at railroad fares. Schools in Oak Creek, Craig, and Yampa closed so families could attend. One of the main draws was an airplane, which many in Northwest Colorado had never seen. W.B. Cooke, billed as the “famous bird man of the Pacific Coast,” made aerial flights in his “flying machine” on two of the three days. The program also included a four-round boxing match between Fred L. Beck of Steamboat Springs and Percy Peacock of Williams Fork, and a fancy shooting exhibition by Capt. A.H. Hardy of the Peters Cartridge Co. The horse races ran for the first time. Carpenter & White swept the Hereford awards, Coke Roberds swept grade cattle, and the best pickle prize went to Mrs. L. Kimsey. The weather held fair for all three days, and it snowed the day after the fair closed. “Taken all in all, never was a first fair more successful,” the Steamboat Pilot reported on September 16, 1914.

Grandstands, barns, and a $2 deed

Gate receipts covered every premium and race purse. The Association then put $1,500 from stock sales into permanent buildings. By the 1915 fair, according to the fair’s history and the Pilot, the grounds had a 1,000-seat grandstand, a livestock shed, a large corral, and a two-story Exhibit Hall with a balcony for agricultural displays. A small restroom building was added just before opening. The fair’s own list of improvements dates the grandstands to 1916. Tuffy Wren, a local rodeo cowboy, rode in the bronc contest at the 1915 fair.

The Depression stopped the fair in 1932, 1933, and 1934. On March 13, 1934, the Association tried to save it by deeding the fairgrounds to Routt County for $2. The deed carried a condition: the land would go back to the original owners if neither a fair nor a rodeo was held for two years. The fair has met on the same ground ever since.

The buildings have changed around it. In 1938 came a grandstand addition, a judge’s tower, a livestock barn, and stalls for racehorses. In 1965 an L-shaped livestock barn and an announcer’s tower went up, and the old Exhibit Hall was torn down. The Lockhart Barn, a metal sales and horse barn, was built in 1974. The county’s old Road and Bridge shop became the Exhibit Hall in 1985 by the fair’s account, and in spring 1984 by the Pilot’s. Metal grandstands replaced the 1916 stands in 1993, and a barbecue area was added. On March 20, 1995, the county listed the fairgrounds on the Routt County Register of Historic Properties under resolution 95-014-16.

In 2002, 4-H and FFA members led a fundraising drive for the indoor arena, which was built with help from an Energy Impact Grant. The L-shaped barn came down in 2005. Kenny’s Crows Nest was added in 2013. In 2016 a memorial flagpole for Sam Haslem went up, and in the same year the Quonset hut collapsed. The RV park opened in 2018, and the volleyball court followed in 2019.

Pickles, quilts, and a cookbook

The exhibit hall has always held the fair’s ribbons for livestock, grain, baked goods, tatting, quilting, and stitching. For the centennial in 2014, past Fair Board members served as grand marshals of the parade through downtown Hayden. The fair held a luncheon for former fair royalty and added contest categories for historic entries, including the best old photograph. The record for exhibit entries then stood at 1,350. Linda Long had worked at the fair for 42 years, first as crops and building superintendent and then, from 1991, on the Fair Board. “We don’t turn exhibits away,” she said. “We try to find a place for them in the building.” Past entries have included a handmade coffin and a 20-foot metal horse sculpture. The horse was too big for the hall and now stands at the corner of Routt County Roads 44 and 56. Karen Massey, the county extension director, put it this way: “There are women who have been competing with one another for years to win the best quilt or best pickle.”

In 2010 a group of women connected to the fair proposed a cookbook to mark the hundredth year. Over three years they gathered more than 700 recipes from 400 contributors for Fair Family Favorites, released at the 2013 fair. Each recipe carries a note from the person who sent it, along with tips for young cooks and directions for canning. The women who made it, the Cookbook Queens, rode a float in the 2013 parade. Sales of the book benefited the Exhibit Hall.

Daughenbaugh’s earliest fair memory goes back to that first hall. “I vividly remember the old two-story exhibit hall and looking down at the displays,” she said. Frances M. Wheeler wrote a poem, reproduced from an anniversary book of the Hayden Heritage Center, that records the noise of the barns:

Pigs a squealin’, lambs a bleatin’ Steers a gruntin’ with their cud.

Later in the poem she notes what eighty years had brought: “4-H has brought the youngsters, / Sale of pets sometimes brings tears.”