Wheat Ridge Carnation Festival

The carnival takes the south side of Anderson Park. Its rides have included the Century Wheel, the Kamikaze, the Zipper, Crystal Lil’s Glass House, the Orient Express, a Super Slide, a Looney Airport for the smallest riders, and a carousel whose chariot seats four adults or six children. The concession stands sell funnel cakes, corn dogs, popcorn and turkey legs. This is the Wheat Ridge Carnation Festival, held each August at the park at 44th Avenue and Field Street, three days from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening. Admission is free, and so are the music, the vendor fair, the art show and the car show. The 2026 festival, the 57th, ran August 7 through 9. Mayor Bud Starker, writing in 2022, placed it on the second weekend of August.

Anderson Park in August

The Wheat Ridge Rotary Club runs the beer garden with Coors, and the Optimist and Kiwanis clubs join in, by one festival page’s account. Three bars pour domestic and craft beer, wine and seltzers, along with water and soft drinks. A drink may be carried from the food court to the main garden and down the midway, past more than 50 artisans and crafters at the Vendor Fair, but not beyond the festival grounds. Seating is under big trees and tents. The Rotary Club counts the festival as its major fundraiser of the year, and its proceeds go to scholarships and local nonprofits.

Music plays from two stands, the Main Stage and the Carnation Pavilion, and most acts come from Denver. The 2026 program leaned on tribute bands: Judgment Day for Whitesnake, Ten Years Gone for Led Zeppelin, DM 101 for Depeche Mode, Chili Powder for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sonic Highways for the Foo Fighters, Message in a Bottle for the Police, and Stone Beat Invasion for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones together. Boogie Machine played disco in giant hair and custom retro costumes. Hazel Miller and the Collective held the Pavilion on Friday night, and That Eighties Band closed Saturday on the Main Stage. On Sunday the Main Stage alone carried Shelvis and the Roustabouts, Los Cheesies, and Colorado Transit Authority, a nine-piece band playing the music of Chicago. The festival suggests bringing a lawn chair.

Fireworks have customarily gone up Friday and Saturday at 9:15 p.m. On August 5, 2026, two days before opening, the festival canceled them, citing a Stage 2 Fire Ban and no rain in the forecast. The announcement, signed by festival chair Joseph DeMott, read: “While we understand some disappointment that we pause this tradition once in a while, public safety must come first.”

Indoors, the Wheat Ridge Art League hangs its Fine Art Show in the Anderson Building. The league was organized in 1974, has about 40 members, most of them from Jefferson County, and uses the festival as its annual membership show. In 2026 about 30 members showed more than 500 pieces in watercolor, acrylic, pastel, colored pencil, oil and charcoal, with blown and fused glass among the three-dimensional work. Most of it is for sale. A juror gives the awards. In 2026 the juror was the pastel painter Bruce Gomez, and in 2024 the Best in Show went to “Grandpa’s Train” by Chad Harr. Visitors fill out ballots for a People’s Choice Award. The building is a prefabricated metal structure that the Wheat Ridge Volunteer Fire Department put up in 1972. It held the City Council chambers, the city offices and the gymnasium until the council moved to a new municipal building in 1978. A pool followed in 1979 in what was then Wheat Ridge Park. The park was renamed in the 1990s for the city’s first mayor.

On Sunday morning, cars fill the park for Big Wheels on the Farm, a show of classics, hot rods, muscle cars, trucks and custom rides, held from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wheat Ridge High School hosts it to raise money for student clubs. The trophies at the main tent are made by hand by Warren Tech students. In 2022 the bill also included the Zoppé Family circus, then in the 177th year of its family-run show, according to Starker. That year Tosca Zoppé was to re-create her father’s bareback act and stage a human pyramid of six to eight people standing on four horses running side by side.

Spaghetti, pancakes and pie

The spaghetti dinner is the oldest-running event of the festival, and it is large enough to have its own tent in the food court, beside the beer garden. Two dozen volunteers from West Metro Fire Rescue work it in shifts on Friday and Saturday evenings. It benefits the Colorado Professional Firefighters Foundation. The 2026 schedule listed it from 5 to 8 p.m. One festival page gives 4:30.

Saturday starts earlier, a few blocks south, at the Wheat Ridge Grange hall, 3850 High Court, behind Wheat Ridge Cyclery. From 7 to 9:30 a.m. the Grange board serves ham, eggs, pancakes, coffee and juice before the parade. There is no charge, and donations go to the Grange’s work with young people. The festival recommends the hall itself as a historical building worth a look.

Saturday afternoon belongs to the contests in the Food Court Tent. The chili cook-off runs from 2 to 5 p.m. in red and green categories. Pie judging begins at 3. Entrants bring fruit, savory or cream pies in adult and children’s divisions, and they compete for the Carnation Festival Blue Ribbon. The winner is announced at 4, after which slices are sold until they run out. In one recent year the bakers ranged from 16 to 90 years old, and every pie entered was sweet or fruit.

Saturday morning on 38th Avenue

The Grand Parade rolls west along 38th Avenue at 9:30 a.m. Entries stage between Ames and Depew streets, and the route runs on to Upham Street. In 2022, as Starker described it, the Wheat Ridge Police Honor Guard led, with the department’s first patrol car, Unit 1. Behind them came the festival royalty, the mayor, the City Council, the City Clerk and Treasurer, and city staff. Then came high school bands, dance troupes, scout troops, fire and EMS vehicles, and tractors pulling trailers of chickens and goats from local farms. The crowd along the curb catches candy thrown from the entries. The Westernaires and the El Jebel Shriners are regulars. Up to 80 entries take part.

Each year the festival names a Grand Marshal, a Count and a Countess from residents who have done much for Wheat Ridge, and they ride in the parade as its royalty. Judging includes the crowd: two resident judges pick three spectators at random to help choose winners for marching band, marching unit, musical group, business, vehicle and float, most creative, and a community award. The winners receive commemorative plates painted with a local artist’s design.

The parade was first held in 1969 under chairwoman Leah Dozeman. It has stayed on 38th Avenue except for a brief move to 44th at one point. Over the years its floats carried mounds of carnations from the local growers.

Thirty-two greenhouses

According to the city’s parks department, Wheat Ridge began during the Gold Rush of 1859 as a rest stop for miners bound for the mountain camps. Travelers on the Overland Trail noted the golden ridges of wheat, and the place took its name from them. Miners who failed returned and farmed. Wheat gave way to orchards and vegetable farms, and those gave way to greenhouses. The department says the town came to grow more carnations than anywhere in the world. Colorado’s sunshine suited the flower, and land near Denver gave the growers room to build. The festival calls the city’s old title the “Carnation Capital of the World.” Starker’s 2022 column calls it the “Carnation Capital of the U.S.”

In the 1960s Wheat Ridge had 32 carnation growers. According to the Wheat Ridge Historical Society, as the festival relates it, a bouquet went to the White House every Monday morning and stood in the front foyer with a card: “With compliments to our nation’s capital, Wheat Ridge Colorado, Carnation City.”

The city incorporated on August 15, 1969. A group of residents, taking the “Carnation City” name as their cue, organized an agricultural and floricultural weekend to mark the city’s birthday, its farming past and its flowers. The high school teams were, and are, the Farmers. The festival moved among a few sites before settling at Anderson Park. It is run by The Carnation Festival, Inc., a nonprofit board of Wheat Ridge volunteers. All proceeds go to local service clubs, schools, student and senior groups, or back into the festival itself. The festival’s own pages count 2023 attendance two ways: around 30,000 on one page, around 50,000 over the weekend on another. The same history concedes that the festival’s exact origins are uncertain, and that many of the city’s founders and the festival’s originators have died.

The last carnation grower in Wheat Ridge closed in 2008. The world’s carnations now come mostly from South America.