Weird outdoor & roadside things to do in Denver
Looking for weird outdoor & roadside oddities in Denver? These 28 are the genuinely strange ones — Prismatic Electric Fountain (Ferril Lake), Old Elitch Carousel Dome (with floor labyrinth), BOWS — Patrick Marold Steel Arch Installation and more — each hand-vetted and sourced, not pulled from a top-ten list. Great for an unusual date, a weird afternoon, or showing a visitor the side of Denver they'd never find on their own.
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Prismatic Electric Fountain (Ferril Lake)
By day it reads as a plain fountain in the middle of Ferril Lake. Come back after dusk and it becomes a diffe…
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Old Elitch Carousel Dome (with floor labyrinth)
On the corner where Berkeley meets Tennyson sits a 12-sided, bell-roofed pavilion built in 1926 that most peo…
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BOWS — Patrick Marold Steel Arch Installation
On the wooded eastern edge of Cranmer Park, a run of reflective steel inverse arches lines the passageway bet…
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Fairy Doors of South Pearl Street
There are roughly two dozen fairy-sized doors, shrunken storefronts, and mossy hobbit hideaways tucked into t…
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Buried 1893 Streetcar Tracks Under South Pearl Street
The entire South Pearl commercial strip exists because the Denver Tramway Company ran a streetcar line up it…
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Laughing Escalator
Ride the escalator down from the exhibit-hall level at the Colorado Convention Center and you'll start hearin…
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Carpio-Sanguinette Park (Former Sewage Treatment Plant)
On the north bank of the South Platte in Globeville sits a park almost nobody visits, built directly on top o…
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Impossible Winterbourne Steampunk Street Sculptures
Since 2010 an anonymous artist calling himself The Impossible Winterbourne has been bolting tiny rusted steam…
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The Espinosa Brothers' Heads at the Colorado State Capitol
Everyone sees the gold-domed Capitol; almost no one knows it once warehoused two severed human heads. In 1863…
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Cranmer Park Sundial Terrace
Hidden in the residential streets of Hilltop is a hundred-yard WPA-built terrace anchored by a giant quartzit…
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Sand Creek Regional Greenway Trail
A near-13-mile creek-and-cottonwood corridor that threads straight through Denver's industrial north — past r…
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Ninth Street Historic Park
Tucked into the middle of a sprawling commuter campus is one intact block of 1870s-1900s Victorian houses — m…
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Edgar Experimental Mine
This isn't a tourist gold mine with fake gunfights — it's the Colorado School of Mines' actual working resear…
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Palmer Lake Star
Hand-built by volunteers in 1935 to lift Depression-era spirits, the Palmer Lake Star is a 457-foot-wide, fiv…
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A Sanctuary Center
A Sanctuary Center is a free, volunteer-maintained nonprofit sacred garden open sunrise to sunset daily, feat…
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Devil's Head Lookout
Devil's Head is Colorado's last staffed fire lookout — a working ranger mans the historic 1912 tower from rou…
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Redman (Trail of the Whispering Giants)
Redman is a 37-foot folk-art wooden head carved in 1979 from a fallen cottonwood by Hungarian-American artist…
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Lyons Memorial Labyrinth
Built on the first anniversary of the catastrophic 2013 flood using rounded cobbles and boulders deposited by…
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Saul the Sticker Ball (StickerGiant lobby)
Saul is a 231-pound Guinness World Record-holding ball built from over 171,000 stickers, named after Saul Goo…
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Faces Bridge
Tucked beneath the Wilson Avenue bridge along the Big Thompson River trail, dozens of bronze faces — human, f…
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Devil's Backbone Keyhole
Devil's Backbone Open Space is a 2,198-acre Larimer County preserve where a jagged sandstone hogback juts fro…
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Niwot Tree Carvings (Eddie Running Wolf)
Three towering figures — Spear Lodge Man, The Eagle Catcher, and Cheyenne Holy Man — were carved from dead wi…
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The Lyric
The Lyric is a genuine Fort Collins oddity: a locally owned cinema-bar-music venue that screens cult classics…
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Eldorado Springs Pool & Artesian Spring
A genuine 1905 canyon resort fed by 6,000-year-old artesian water that runs a bracingly cool 76°F year-round,…
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Charlie Tayler Water Wheel
Colorado's largest wooden waterwheel — all 30 feet of it — still turns beside a cascading waterfall, built in…
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Mother Cabrini Shrine
A free, open-to-all mountaintop pilgrimage site where visitors climb 373 steps past the Stations of the Cross…
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Triceratops Trail
A free, 1.5-mile gravel trail through a reclaimed clay-mining canyon where 68-million-year-old Triceratops an…
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Carousel of Happiness
Marine veteran Scott Harrison spent 26 years hand-carving 56 whimsical, one-of-a-kind animals — inspired by a…