Strawberry Days (Glenwood Springs)

On the Saturday of Strawberry Days, once the parade has come down Pitkin Avenue, a line forms in front of the bandshell at Two Rivers Park in Glenwood Springs. Kiwanis members serve free strawberries and ice cream there. In 2026 the serving began at 11 a.m. and ran, in the Glenwood Springs Chamber Resort Association’s words, “until out of product,” with City Market and Sundae supplying it. The Chamber counts the giveaway as a tradition as old as the festival, which started in 1898. Strawberries are no longer grown in large quantities around Glenwood Springs, the Chamber notes, so the berries now arrive by other means, and many food vendors work them into their menus.

The park is the city’s largest developed park: 22 acres at the confluence of the Colorado and Roaring Fork rivers. A sloping grass field lies in front of the bandshell, and a baseball diamond fills the northwest corner. A concrete boat ramp runs from a roundabout down to the water, and raft trailers use it through the festival weekend. Along the gravel river path stand bronze figures of firefighters carrying wildfire gear, with a plaque commemorating the firefighters of the Storm King Fire of July 6, 1994. For the festival the park is closed to general use and secured, and bags and coolers are checked at every entrance. The Glenwood Springs Chamber Foundation runs the event, and admission is free. It falls on the third Friday, Saturday and Sunday of June, which in 2026 were June 19 through 21.

The Arts Village and the outfield

A six-foot sidewalk runs throughout the park, and the Arts Village booths sit on the grass about two feet off it. The makers work in ceramics, fiber, glass, jewelry, metal, wood, photography and packaged food, and the Chamber’s list marks the local ones with an asterisk. At the 2026 festival the Post Independent photographed several of them. The Pottery Bunker sold strawberry ceramic tumblers. Yumi Jewelry + Plants set real flowers into bracelets, rings and earrings. Cloudy Constellations offered berets made to look like cherry and blueberry pies. Vintage Box Guitars displayed cigar box guitars. Austin Cole of Solar Neighbors sold Skillipeas, creatures of clay and shell that he also uses in stop-motion films.

The food court and the main stage audience share the outfield of the ball diamond. Parks and Recreation mows the grass there as low as it is allowed, so wheelchairs can move across it. The Chamber describes street tacos, BBQ ribs, and turkey legs from Hillbilly Grill or Woody’s. The 2026 vendors included Armando’s Tacos, Mama’s Pierogi, Korean Corn Dogs, Sushi Torakku, Slow Groovin BBQ, Señor Mango, an Old Tyme Lemonade Stand and Glenwood Springs Youth Hockey. Beside them is a beer garden where IDs are checked at the gate. It pours Michelob Ultra, Odell IPA and Stella Artois, along with Cutwater lime and strawberry margaritas and Nutrl strawberry seltzer.

The beer cups are compostable. Strawberry Days has worked toward zero waste since 2011, and volunteers at the sorting stations steer plates and utensils into green compost bins. In 2024 the festival recovered 22,461 pounds of material through recycling and composting, 93 percent of everything thrown out. Bottled water is no longer sold, and visitors fill their own bottles at stations around the park. In 2024, 905 people arrived by bicycle and left their bikes at a corral by the east entrance.

The main stage offers three days of free music. On the Saturday of the 2026 festival, the 101st Hot Seven Jazz Band, the 101st Army Mountain Brass Band and the 101st Army Country Band played back to back from noon to 3 p.m. A Post Independent photographer caught a mother and daughter dancing to the brass band. Nearby, Family Fest runs the weekend for children. The Rocky Mountain Mini Train circles the Arts Village and the main stage. Salida Circus, touring since 2007, brings jugglers, aerialists and 10-foot stilt walkers. The Defiance Community Players, first founded in 1973, put on interactive skits. Vertical Amusements runs a Dragon Bounce House, a Quad Bungee, and a pool where riders sealed inside giant inflatable balls roll across the water.

Parade, pie and a ball race

The parade steps off at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Entrants line up on School Street, turn onto Eighth Street, and start near City Hall at Eighth and Pitkin. From there the parade travels south on Pitkin toward Glenwood Springs High School. The 2026 theme was “Through the Eyes of Locals: Celebrating 140 Years of Glenwood Springs,” with artwork by Tempest Manthei, a local.

That night brought something new. About 9:10 p.m., 500 drones rose over Two Rivers Park for a show of roughly 15 minutes. The Chamber had won the show through the Colorado Tourism Office. “There will be 500 drones lighting up the sky with a variety of pictures and things like that,” said Tara Harman, the Chamber’s director of operations and special events. “The best place to see it will be from Two Rivers Park.”

The service clubs fill the edges of the weekend. On Friday morning the Rotary Club serves pie at First United Methodist Church on Cooper Avenue to fund local scholarships, and the year before the 2026 festival it met its $10,000 goal. Early Sunday, the Strawberry Shortcut races start and finish at Bethel Plaza under the Grand Avenue Bridge, hosted by Bank of Colorado. The races are a 10K, a 5K and a 1-mile run, with cash prizes for the top three men and women in each. Rotary members then flip pancakes from 8 to 11 a.m. on 7th Street beside the Riviera Supper Club. At 2 p.m. Sunday the Kiwanis Ball Race, in its 21st year in 2026, runs in front of the bandshell for a $2,000 first prize. Its proceeds go to community projects in Glenwood Springs and the Roaring Fork Valley.

“Every year that we do this, we try to create a better community experience, because at the end of the day, this event is all about our community first and foremost,” Harman told the Post Independent. “We value that time that we all get to hang out under the sun, listen to live music and be together.”

Berries from Canyon Creek, cream from Cattle Creek

The festival began as a marketing scheme. In 1898, G. William Hoover, a farmer at Silt, wrote in Farm, Garden and Orchard: “The western slope and especially Garfield County is already becoming noted for the fine berries it raises, and all that is lacking to make the raising of strawberries both delightful and profitable is to create a market for the fruit, by stimulating the consumption of them as much as possible.” Locals had already been holding strawberry picnics. Hoover and the Tri-County Farmers Union proposed something larger, an annual Strawberry Day. On March 21, 1898, the Avalanche Echo ran the headline “Strawberry Day Assured” and reported that “the large meeting at the courthouse Saturday night decided to push the arrangement, committee appointed.”

The sources disagree on the date of the first one. The Chamber gives June 18, 1898. A 2022 history in the Post Independent gives June 20. According to the Post Independent, the strawberries came from farms on Canyon Creek and the cream from Cattle Creek dairy farmers, and the town’s women baked hundreds of cakes. Special trains on the Midland and Denver & Rio Grande lines carried people in from Aspen and Denver. The Chamber puts the crowd at nearly 2,000.

The second year added a parade, baseball games, a rifle shoot, free swimming at the pool, and a ball at the opera house. By June 19, 1916, the Daily Avalanche was reporting “Five thousand rollicking, jolly, boisterous, good natured people.” The paper added that saying each had the time of his or her life “would be as adequate a way of putting it as to say that Walter Johnson is well liked in Coffeyville, Kansas. They came. They saw. They conquered.”

The Human Fly and Diamond Jack

The Chamber dates the first Strawberry Days Queen to 1915. That contest had beauty, talent and evening gown competitions, and the Post Independent adds that for a few years a king was chosen too. The contest later became Miss Strawberry Days, a scholarship program that has since ended. In 1917 an entertainer billed as “The Human Fly” climbed the outside of the Hotel Colorado without safety gear. During World War I, food was scarce and the strawberries and cream were interrupted, though the festival went on with a rodeo and horse racing. The 1926 program, printed on the front page of the June 17 Glenwood Post, promised airplane stunts, a world-record parachute leap, fireworks and bombs. Tom Mix, in town to film The Great K & A Train Robbery, was guest of honor that year.

In 1927 the Chicago gangster Diamond Jack Alterie announced, on his own authority, that he would be grand marshal of the parade. Parade participants began dropping out. The festival chairman, Carl Fulghum, then gave official notice that Diamond Jack would not lead the parade after all.

Rodeos, fires and empty Junes

The Post Independent says the festival was briefly suspended after the 1929 stock market crash and again from 1943 to 1946. A 2020 KDNK report, citing the Frontier Historical Society, counts five straight lost years, 1942 through 1946. By that account the first was lost to a reported shortage of cake, ice cream and good entertainment, and the rest to World War II. The 1946 edition fell to something else. “Strawberry Day Canceled,” the Glenwood Post announced on May 23 of that year: “The unsettled situation caused by the present strike situation prompted the action.” The festival came back in 1947. By KDNK’s account, the Spanish influenza that crossed the area in late 1918 and early 1919 apparently left the celebration untouched.

The 49th Strawberry Day, in 1951, closed with a powerboat race at the Shoshone Dam in Glenwood Canyon. The Glenwood Post estimated the crowd at 3,500 and counted about 680 parked automobiles. The rodeo was a two-day show of trick riding, steer riding and bulldogging. It returned in 1953 after the war, and in 1961 it moved from what would become Vogelaar Park to an arena near Cardiff, where it stayed until 2008. “The Strawberry Days Rodeo has run a hard trail since formulating in 1897,” Rod Harwood wrote in the Glenwood Post in 1999.

The Strawberry Shortcut began in 1978 as a 5K and 10K. In early June 2002 the Coal Seam Fire burned 12,000 acres on Red Mountain and into the Flat Tops above West Glenwood. “It takes more than a fire to keep people from celebrating Strawberry Days,” the Post Independent wrote that June 23. In 2003 the grand marshals were Lance Cpl. Brian Chee and Petty Officer 2nd Class Marc Sigmon, home from Operation Iraqi Freedom. Families of service members still overseas rode a float holding their pictures. The 2008 festival marked the town’s 125th anniversary and drew an estimated 40,000 visitors over three days.

On April 10, 2020, the Chamber announced that the year’s festival would be skipped because of the COVID-19 pandemic. KDNK, broadcasting that June, quoted the festival’s billing as “the oldest continuously held civic celebration west of the Mississippi” and counted the cancellation as the sixth in 123 years. The 2021 festival was suspended as well. Strawberry Days returned in June 2022, its 125th year.