Tarantula Fest

At nine on the Saturday morning of the 2026 Tarantula Fest, the 8 Legs & 4 Paws pet parade went first through downtown La Junta. An hour later the Tarantula Parade followed from its lineup at Fifth and Santa Fe. For the weekend the city closed Santa Fe Avenue from Fourth to Second, and Second and Third Streets from Colorado to San Juan. It also allowed low-speed utility vehicles on city streets, which Visit La Junta called “a big privilege.” The office’s photographs of the 2025 festival show what the crowd wears: costumes, hats, decorated cars, and pets dressed for the parade.

A Saturday on Santa Fe Avenue

After the parade, the day spreads across downtown. Rocky Mountain PBS counted more than 100 food, merchant and nonprofit vendors for the 2026 festival. Booths ran from nine to five, and a classic car show filled the north side of the Otero County Courthouse. The Education Pavilion opened at Thyme Square, 302 Colorado, and a kids zone was sponsored by the Knights of Columbus and Tiger Trades Academy 4H. Through the afternoon the program listed the La Junta FFA cornhole tournament, a Hairy Leg Contest, eight-legged races, a break dancing crew from Ruiz Arts, and the US Army 4th Infantry Division Rock Band. Visit La Junta posted video of the Hairy Leg Contest in two parts.

Some visitors arrived by bicycle. The 2nd Annual Tour de Santa Fe Trail ride started at 7:30 that morning at Arkansas Valley Regional Medical Center and covered a flat 50-mile course to finish downtown. At two o’clock the Koshare Dancers performed at the Koshare Museum, 18th and Colorado. From five to seven a Chuck Wagon Dinner was served at the Otero Museum. These two, with the guided tours, are the only events that charge admission.

The Friday before is given mostly to learning. In 2026 Dr. Cara Shillington, a biology professor at Eastern Michigan University, read at story time in the Woodruff Memorial Library. Children in kindergarten through sixth grade made beaded tarantulas there in the afternoon. At Otero College’s Ed Stafford Theatre, Shillington and Dr. Paula Cushing gave a two-hour tarantula talk. Then the Fox Theatre on East Third Street showed Arachnophobia. Cushing opened the screening with a talk titled “An Arachnophiliac discusses Arachnophobia.” After the film came a question-and-answer session with Steven Kutcher, billed as “The Bugman of Hollywood.” The program warned that anyone holding a tour ticket would have to leave the movie early. That evening The ART Project hung its show in the Plaza Block Building on East First Street. The Martini Shot played a beer garden at Live Well Park, which in 2026 extended into the street, and patrons were asked to bring their own chairs.

The 2026 festival ended Saturday night at La Junta Tiger Stadium, 18th and Smithland, after an Otero College women’s soccer game. The LJHS Cheerleaders and Marching Band opened the program. At nine o’clock drones rose for “Stories in the Sky,” a light show for America’s 250th anniversary and Colorado’s 150th. Rocky Mountain PBS reported that History Colorado hosted it, and the commemoration’s own account called it the last drone show of September. Visit La Junta said the show would paint “our community’s history, Colorado’s legacy, and America’s story across the night sky.”

La Junta Tourism runs the festival. The day after it closed, the office announced that its director, Pamela Denahy, had received the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Colorado Tourism Champion. The festival falls on the last Friday and Saturday in September. The 2027 edition is set for September 24 and 25.

Six city buses at dusk

The tarantula tours leave Thyme Square between five and eight on both evenings. In 2026, Denahy told Rocky Mountain PBS, tickets sold out in three minutes, bought by people from Seattle, Utah, Texas, Atlanta and New York. The tours are capped at six city buses. “We don’t anticipate adding a lot of buses in the future because we want to remain authentic to our community and who we are,” she said. The Denver Gazette’s 2025 account describes volunteers, tour guides and researchers riding along to help spot the spiders and explain the grassland.

Steve Keefer guides tours. He is a former Colorado Parks and Wildlife district wildlife manager and has sat on the festival’s planning board since it began in 2021. His first rule is short: “Don’t pick ‘em up.” He recalls a past festival when someone lay down in the middle of the road for a photograph. Anyone who does that, he says, needs a second person as a spotter to watch for traffic. He also tells visitors to wear bright colors, because it is hunting season, and to mind the cattle grazing on public land, especially when they bring dogs.

Visitors without a seat on a bus can drive the loop the town recommends. It runs from La Junta to Timpas on Highway 350, east on County Road N, south on County Road 25, and east on Forest Service Road 2200. It then turns north on Highway 109 back to town. Visit La Junta advises going out around 5:45 or 6 p.m. on a warm day with little wind, since peak viewing lasts about an hour before sunset. It also suggests looking where tarantula hawks fly, the wasps that hunt the spiders. Vogel Canyon, 15 miles out, is another regular stop. The town asks viewers to stay on public land and public roads and to watch for rattlesnakes. Its guide warns against wearing tan and white, the colors of pronghorn. The Colorado State Patrol says troopers work Highways 10, 350 and 109 through the season, and that hazard lights do not make it legal to stop in a driving lane.

Sources differ on how many spiders a viewer can expect. Rocky Mountain PBS writes of thousands coming out en masse from late September through October. The town’s own viewing page answers headlines about “waves of tarantulas” this way: “you might see one, two, or ten crawl across the prairie at a time. Or, you might see none.”

Males in search of a burrow

The walkers are all males. Visit La Junta describes the event as a mating ritual performed across the 443,000-plus acres of the Comanche National Grassland, which it calls the fourth largest grassland in the nation. The older name, migration, is still common. Cushing, senior curator of invertebrate zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, calls that word a misnomer because only males travel, though she told National Wildlife it does not bother her much.

The town names the spider the “Colorado” Brown Tarantula, a dark brown to black member of the genus Aphonopelma. National Wildlife identifies it as Aphonopelma hentzi, also known as the Texas brown, Oklahoma brown or Missouri tarantula. Females dig into undisturbed native prairie and stay near their burrows for life. The town gives that life as up to 25 years; the magazine says around 30. Males leave their burrows at maturity, which the town puts at eight to 10 years and the magazine at five to 10. They may travel a mile or more, eating and drinking less as they go. When a male finds a burrow, he drums on its silk lining with his pedipalps, and a female may come up. Within months he is dead, whether killed by a female, a predator, a car, or the cold.

Shillington’s lab group has done field research around La Junta since 2022. Her colleague Dallas Haselhuhn has gathered more than 50,000 readings of temperature and humidity while trying to learn what triggers the season. “So often when we’re doing our work… the question is why do you work with tarantulas,” Shillington told Rocky Mountain PBS. “And I feel like when we come here, people are always excited.” Cushing’s case for the spiders is plainer: “Without [them], we’d be up to our eyeballs in insects.”

A committee at Live Well Park

The festival took shape in the summer of 2022. On July 11 the La Junta Tarantula Festival Committee met, and SECO News interviewed organizer Angela Ayala at Live Well Park. Colleen Oquist laid out the bus routes to the grassland for Rick Wallner and Pam Denahy. Ayala proposed wrapping the former Uptown Building in canvas painted with a tarantula mural for photographs, along with a window decorating contest for downtown businesses. The partners included La Junta Tourism, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the Comanche National Grassland, Otero College, Canyons and Plains of Southeast Colorado, the La Junta Chamber of Commerce, Clean Valley Recycling and SECO News.

The first festival was held October 7 and 8, 2022. On the Saturday the parade went down Santa Fe Avenue, and a float on Colorado Avenue carried a sign reading “Respect the Trek!” The education pavilion was set up in the senior center. There volunteer Warren McClure let a Colorado Brown Tarantula rest on his hand, and Kelley Stevenson of the Colorado Arachnid Club told visitors that arachnids eat an estimated 56,000 bugs per day per square mile. A local cafe served a taco salad with olives cut to look like tarantulas. Wallner said the tours used city buses and offered 72 seats, which “filled up really quick.”

Mayor Joe Ayala said the point was education: “It’s about telling people it’s awesome, take a picture, don’t take a tarantula.” He wanted La Junta known as the tarantula capital of the world, and he had already picked a slogan. “Instead of the home where the buffalo roam,” he said, “it’s gonna be, ‘Give me a home where the tarantulas roam.’”