Before it was a destination, it was a squatter camp called Defiance — tents and saloons at the confluence of the Colorado and Roaring Fork Rivers, on land the Ute had used for hunting and healing for millennia. Isaac Cooper platted it in 1883; his wife Sarah pushed to rename it Glenwood Springs the following year, after her Iowa hometown. The town incorporated in 1885, and what came next wasn't a mining boom but something rarer: a civic tradition. The Strawberry Days Festival launched in 1898 and has run every year since, documented as Colorado's oldest continuously held civic celebration west of the Mississippi. The Hotel Colorado opened in 1893 and drew President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. The rough camp that named itself Defiance kept choosing, instead, to become a place where people gathered — and kept showing up to do it again.
