They call it the “Old Fashioned July 4 Celebration,” in Aspen, Colorado. This year, as usual, it featured a bicycle parade, a citywide block party, a sea of red, white, and blue, and live bands. The day’s finale, though, was anything but old-fashioned: A choreographed drone light show in the sky.
Aspen was one of many mountain towns in Colorado that decided to skip Fourth of July fireworks this year, scarred by 2018’s horrendous forest fires. “We have a red hot state,” said Pitkin County Sheriff Joe DiSalvo. “Why tempt fate?”
Independence Day fireworks may become a thing of the past in the American West if this trend continues.
“This very well may be the new normal for us,” Ken Jaray, mayor of Manitou, Colorado, told the Gazette of Colorado Springs, a sister publication of the Washington Examiner. “This current council has zero plans to do fireworks again,” Breckenridge Mayor Eric Mamula said.
Cañon City, Frisco, and Georgetown also canceled their fireworks shows, and there’s little reason to think they’ll start back up again. Spring and early summer this year were wetter than normal, but that didn’t erase the fears sparked by the deadly destructive fires of 2018. Frisco, as a safeguard, did its fireworks over Dillon Reservoir, but that wasn’t enough.
Plenty of folks in Denver will still shoot off the traditional pyrotechnics, but for kids growing up in the dry and wooded mountains of the West, Fourth of July fireworks will be little more than a story people tell.
