I WAS STILL CHECKING IN PARADE FLOATS AT NINTH STREET AND ELK AVENUE AT 11 A.M. WHEN WORD CAME OVER THE RADIO THAT THE COLOR GUARD, CONSISTING OF LOCAL VETERANS OF WAR, HAD STARTED CRESTED BUTTE’S FOURTH OF JULY PARADE WITHOUT ME.
I had been on Elk since 5:30 a.m., setting up scaffolding, tents, and trash cans — the infrastructure behind the fun and funky party that is Crested Butte’s Fourth of July parade, water fight, and block party. I knew I was running late, but it was just me, one intern, and 19 volunteers, most of whom were under the age of 14, corralling 50 floats, 10 food and beverage vendors, and an estimated 10,000 spectators into some semblance of order for one of the biggest annual events on Elk Avenue.
I rushed to write down the names of the last three floats, threw my clipboard in my bike basket, and sped in the opposite direction, darting across an empty Sixth Street and up Sopris Avenue.
Racing against the parade that ran parallel, I needed to reach the emcees at Third Street and Elk Avenue with the list of float names and their order before the color guard reached them.
To my right, the Rotary Club was passing the four-way stop — Rotary is always the first float in the parade because they park their trailer in the parade lineup the night before to claim their spot. Behind them stretched a procession of parade vehicles. Banners, balloons, and bunting hung from trucks, jeeps, and trailers, advertising local businesses, events, clubs, and a couple who eloped in Crested Butte a few days earlier.
In a sea of crimson, Red Ladies past and present waved as they danced along the parade route. KBUT’s trailer, bumping with disco-loving dancers, was led by a spandex-clad roller skater who paused only to lead the group through the motions of “YMCA.” Scientists and researchers with Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, scantily clad in skunk cabbage leaves, waited on Eighth Street, ready to fall in behind the last ‘dry’ float. They would lead the water fight floats and firetrucks in closing the parade with the much-loved (but controversial) water fight. Spectators, many of whom had set up camp chairs the night before to reserve their spots, leaned in to catch candy and beads.
Since moving to town in 2009, I’d been a spectator, participant, and volunteer at the biggest of Crested Butte’s parades. This was only my second year coordinating the annual parade and block party, and the first time I was directly responsible for the success of the event. I was excited and terrified.
July Fourth parades in the United States can be traced to at least a hundred years before Crested Butte was founded, with the first documented procession to celebrate the Constitution’s ratification in Philadelphia in 1788. By the 1880s, just as Crested Butte sprang up as a supply town to support mining in the surrounding mountains, parades were evolving as opportunities for Americans to express their patriotism and celebrate the individuality of local groups.
Before I moved to Crested Butte, my experience with parades included my grandpa’s funeral procession and the time my sisters and I dressed up the cat, put her in a wagon, and paraded her around the cul-de-sac of our southern California neighborhood. Parades took place on TV. Costumes were only worn on Halloween. The Fourth of July was a holiday when we saw more than the usual daily fireworks display viewable from Disneyland. Where I grew up, neighbors were strangers, and community was just a group of buildings.
In Crested Butte, one of the most hyperlocal and loving communities, it was not only my responsibility to carry on an event that’d been happening for at least 100 years, but the Fourth of July parade was in itself an expression of Crested Butte’s identity and a marker of how the community had changed yet remained the same over the years.
The color guard had not yet reached the emcees as I parked my bike near the dunk tank and hurried over to the yellow scaffolding to hand the list of floats to Than Acuff, longtime high school sports coach and legendary parade emcee. I took a minute to catch my breath before turning back down Sopris Avenue to the end of the parade. I had to make sure the water fight didn’t start until they made it to the Big Mine Ice Arena.
IT’S KIND OF INCREDIBLE THAT THE WATER FIGHT STILL EXISTS,
considering its wild and storied past that has touched (and drenched) so many.
Longtime local Tracy Hastings still feels a little bad that she outbid a kid for the chance to ride on the fire truck in the Fourth of July Parade in 1998. Back then, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter would bring a group of disabled veterans to Crested Butte to ski and stay at the resort. All types of activities took place during their visit, including a silent auction to raise money for the Adaptive Sports Center, and that year, the auction included a fire truck ride in the parade.
“I saw that auction item and bid on it,” said Hastings. “I happened to be working the banquet event. It’s my number and someone else’s, so I stand to the side to see who’s bidding. It’s a local kid. He’s like seven or eight. There were 30 seconds left in the auction. I’m not kidding; it got down to three-two-one. I grabbed that clipboard and outbid him. For a second, I did feel bad. But I enjoyed the shit out of that ride. Being that high up, you could get people right between the eyes,” said Hastings of her ability to nail people in the parade’s water fight.
“The water fight itself spontaneously began by locals in the early ’80s via water balloons. Clearly, it was a hit and began to scale up over the years,” said Rob Weisbaum, current Crested Butte EMS and fire chief.
In those days, the parade would usually make two passes down Elk Avenue, with a first “dry” run followed by a full waterworks succession. On the second pass, fire trucks shot water into the sky, resulting in a drenching rain-down onto spectators, many of whom were perched on the rooftops. Horse troughs of water were strategically placed along the parade route for quick water cannon refills. Buckets of water balloons were everywhere. The steps down to Coal Creek from Totem Pole Park provided easy access to crisp running water to refill buckets.
“We would get a bunch of water out of the creek and hose people down,” said former mayor Alan Bernholtz. But there were rules: no animals, no kids, and no old people unless they threw water, too.
When Bernholtz bought the business that became Crested Butte Mountain Guides, he hated that all the floats were just businesses, so he created an annual float series called “The Bizarro World Float.”
“We had a zip line into a giant thing of water. We had a fire-breathing dragon. We had a slip-and-slide, and the slip-and-slide was so cool that people from the crowd would jump on our float and do it. We were representing fun,” he said.
Bernholtz and Weisbaum agree that 1998 was the year the water fight got out of control. The year that, “for whatever reason, everyone went crazy,” said Bernholtz.
A horse was spooked when hit in the side of the face with a water balloon. An 80-year-old man took a painful water balloon hit to the chest while riding on the Flauschink “has been” float. Another high-powered water balloon struck someone’s grandmother. In a now infamous piece of local lore, a woman threw a Bakery Café cup full of water on what Bernholtz called the “angriest guy in town,” and a fistfight ensued. Parade spectators on the deck of The Eldo, one of the most coveted parade-watching spots, soaked the crowds below with squirt guns and water cannons. The fire department retaliated by hosing the Eldo deck at full power.
“The fire truck stopped in front of the Eldo deck and opened up the high-power cannon on us. We were grabbing deck umbrellas for cover and hiding in corners and just getting absolutely destroyed,” said parade announcer Than Acuff, who was just an “innocent” bystander at the time.
After that, the town put the kibosh on water fights, and water of any kind was strictly prohibited.
But Buttians love a good workaround.
“The next year, there was no water allowed anywhere, so we did our own ‘Freedomfest,’” said Acuff, who, along with other dissidents, created an alternative parade route. “My flatbed truck had three-foot walls and a tailgate, so we turned it into a mud wrestling pit. Some women (who shall remain nameless) jumped in and went to town, and one particular Australian [was] in there reffing, wearing just a speedo and a whistle,” said Acuff.
After the parade, Acuff parked his mud wrestling trailer in Bernholtz’s yard, where the wrestling continued and water fights started.
“Hundreds of people came because there was no water in the parade,” said Bernholtz, though he denies that he ran for town council that fall because he wanted to bring the water fight back to the parade. He remembers Mark Reaman, editor of the Crested Butte News, telling him that he’d made such a political statement by boycotting the parade that he should run for council. He did and was elected mayor.
From his seat on the town council, Bernholtz was able to help negotiate a compromise in 2000, lifting the town ordinance on Fourth of July water fights. The water fight was allowed to return, but it was contained to the 100 block, just past Old Town Hall at the end of the parade route. The town council decreed fines of $100 for just having water with the intent to fight and up to a $1000 fine or 90 days jail time for anyone caught water-fighting outside of the designated area.
These days, the water fight serves as a crescendo to the Fourth of July parade, and floats that want to participate turn down Second Street (trailed by fire trucks, water cannons poised) to Big Mine Arena, where the fight was relocated after Covid.
Here, water still rains from fire hoses shot high into the sky, and for a few hours, anyone who wants to participate can run beneath the rainfall, douse their friends with water cannons, and be a kid at a water fight on the Fourth of July.