A History of Pack Burro Racing

Every summer, in a handful of old mining towns high in the Colorado Rockies, runners line up for a race that makes no sense to anyone who has not seen it. (It still doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ve done it four times). Each runner holds a rope. On the other end of that rope stands a donkey, wearing a pack saddle loaded with a pick, a shovel and a gold pan. When the gun goes off, the humans run and the burros decide whether they feel like it. Most of them take off in a crazed stampede.

This is pack burro racing, and Colorado takes it seriously enough to have made it an official state sport. With rules. The lead rope can be no longer than 15 feet. The runner can push, pull, coax or even carry the animal, but may never ride it. And the burro must carry the prospector’s tools the whole way. If the pair gets separated, the runner is supposed to return to the spot where they got separated and resume running from there. And the pair must cross the finish line together.

The courses are not gentle. The flagship race in Fairplay runs 29 miles and climbs to the 13,185-foot summit of Mosquito Pass, which makes it an ultramarathon run in thin air with a 400-1,000-pound partner who has a will of its own. Yet the sport has survived for more than 75 years, outlasting the mining economy that inspired it.

To understand why, you have to go back to the camps, the claims offices and a working animal that built the Colorado mining boom one load at a time.

The burro that built the mining camps

When gold and silver strikes pulled tens of thousands of fortune-seekers into Colorado’s high country in the second half of the 19th century, the burro became the camps’ indispensable worker. Above 10,000 feet, trails were too narrow and treacherous for wagons. Burros were small, sure-footed and tough, and they could pick their way along routes that would kill a horse.

Burros hauled everything. They carried food, tools and blasting supplies up to the diggings and brought ore back down. They packed timber for mine supports and even potbellied stoves for miners’ cabins. By one account, burros moved “millions of dollars worth of gold and silver ore” out of the mountains around Fairplay alone.

The animals were loaded with gear, so prospectors walked beside them rather than riding. That detail would become the heart of a sport. A miner and his burro were a team on foot, sharing the trail and the work.

Prunes, Fairplay’s most famous burro

No animal captures that partnership better than Prunes. He went to work in the Fairplay-area mines in 1867 and, according to his longtime owner Rupert “Rupe” Sherwood, labored in “every mine of any consequence in the district.” His last job was at the Hock Hocking mine in Mosquito Gulch.

Prunes died in 1930 after a brutal spring blizzard, at the age of 63. The town built him a monument on Front Street, made of cement studded with ore samples from local mines. When Sherwood died in August 1931 at age 82, his ashes were buried behind it, next to his old partner.

The Prunes memorial still stands in Fairplay. Today the town’s World Championship Pack Burro Race starts in front of it.

1949: A race over Mosquito Pass

The sport has a founding legend, and like most good legends it involves gold. Two prospectors, the story goes, struck pay dirt at the same spot. Each wanted to file the claim first, so both set off for the claims office in town. Their burros were too heavily loaded to carry a rider, so the men ran alongside, dragging and driving their animals down the mountain. Whoever got there first got the gold.

Nobody can name those two miners, and the tale is almost certainly folklore. The real origin is more practical. After World War II, mining in Park and Lake counties had slumped, and the towns needed visitors. The South Park Chamber of Commerce and civic groups from Leadville settled on a stunt that celebrated their shared history: a race between the two towns, run the way a prospector would have traveled.

The first World Championship Pack Burro Race was held in 1949. The course ran about 23 miles from Leadville to Fairplay over Mosquito Pass, a 13,185-foot crossing once used by miners and freight haulers. Twenty-one teams started. Only eight finished.

The winner was Melville Sutton and his burro, Whitey. They covered the course in 5 hours, 10 minutes and 41.2 seconds, roughly 4.4 miles per hour over a mountain pass, and took home a $500 prize. That was a significant sum in 1949, and it helped make the race a story that newspapers wanted to tell.

The idea caught on. By 1955, entries had nearly doubled to 40 teams. For two decades, the start and finish alternated between Fairplay and Leadville, so that one year’s runners climbed the pass from the east and the next year’s from the west. In 1970, the towns split the event, and Leadville began hosting its own separate race.

That split turned out to be good for the sport. Instead of one shared race, there were now two, and room for more.

Growth, rules and the Triple Crown

In 1978, Buena Vista added a shorter race to its Gold Rush Days festival. With three established events in three neighboring mountain towns, the sport had its marquee series: the Triple Crown. Winning all three in a single summer means covering roughly 63 miles of mountain trail, and it is the achievement every serious burro racer chases.

Race	Town festival	Long course	Notes
Fairplay	Burro Days, late July	29 miles	The original; climbs Mosquito Pass; 15-mile short course
Leadville	Boom Days, early August	21 miles	Hosted separately since 1970; 15-mile short course
Buena Vista	Gold Rush Days	13 miles	Added in 1978

Other towns joined the circuit over the years, including Georgetown, Idaho Springs, Cripple Creek, Victor and Creede. The races vary in length, from Georgetown’s 9-mile course to Fairplay’s ultramarathon, but the rules hold steady across them.

The rules of the trail

The rules are designed to keep the race faithful to its mining-camp roots and fair to the animals:

• The rope. The lead rope may be no longer than 15 feet, and the runner must stay in control of the burro.
• No riding. The runner may push, pull or carry the burro, but never ride it.
• The pack. Each burro carries a pack saddle with a pick, a shovel and a gold pan. A 33-pound pack weight was required for decades; that rule has since been relaxed, but the tools must still make the trip.
• Humane treatment. Cruelty is prohibited. Whipping is banned, officials can send a burro to a veterinarian, and the governing association allows only a gentle swat “only as hard as you would on yourself.”
• Finish together. Runner and burro cross the line as a team. Runners must be at least 16.

The racers

Women have competed since 1951, only two years after the first race, and some of the sport’s greatest champions are women. Barb Dolan won the Triple Crown 13 times and was named a Sportswoman of Colorado for her racing. Karen Thorpe, a two-time race winner, took the Triple Crown in 2011.

On the men’s side, Hal Walter of Westcliffe has won seven championships across more than three decades of racing. Curtis Imrie of Buena Vista, a three-time world champion, raced for some 40 years and was still finishing near the front at Fairplay in his late career.

What separates the champions is less raw speed than horsemanship. A burro cannot be forced up a mountain. It has to be trained, trusted and persuaded. Veterans spend years building a bond with a single animal, and many say the burro is the real athlete. A stubborn burro that plants its feet at a creek crossing can erase a ten-minute lead in seconds.

Official status and the modern scene

In 2012, the Colorado General Assembly passed House Joint Resolution 12-1021, designating pack burro racing the state’s official “summer heritage sport.” The resolution called it “the only indigenous sport of Colorado,” a sport born in the state’s own history rather than imported from somewhere else. It also recognized the women who had raced since 1951 and the Triple Crown as the sport’s highest honor.

The designation gave burro racing a kind of legitimacy that its founders, looking for a tourism gimmick in 1949, could hardly have imagined. It also helped draw a new generation of runners. Trail runners and ultramarathoners, already comfortable with long miles at altitude, discovered that adding a 15-foot rope and an animal partner made the familiar strange again.

Today the sport is organized by the Western Pack Burro Ass-ociation, whose punning name signals that nobody involved takes themselves too seriously. The association keeps the race calendar, preserves the sport’s history, serves as a resource for owners and racers, and works to ensure the animals are treated humanely. Fairplay’s race keeps its own motto in the same spirit: “Get Yur Ass Up the Pass.”

By most measures, the sport is healthy. The author’s second jaunt with a burro, Leadville’s 2022 race, drew over 80 competitors across its 15- and 21-mile courses. Fairplay marked 75 years of racing in 2023 and 2024 with national coverage, including a feature in Smithsonian magazine (Read this fantastic article). Many racers do not own burros at all and instead lease or borrow trained animals from experienced owners, which lowers the barrier for newcomers.

Beyond Colorado

Colorado is the heartland, but the idea has spread. Big Bear, California, held burro races during its Old Miners Days in the 1950s. Apache Junction, Arizona, ran a race starting in 1958 and revived it in 2021. Beatty, Nevada, followed in the 1960s, and Superior, Arizona, launched a race in 2019. New Mexico joined the map in 2020, and a recent race in Cerrillos drew 70 teams. Each one borrows the same basic recipe: a mining-town past, a rope, a pack and a donkey.

Why it endures

Pack burro racing began as a promotional stunt, and by rights it should have faded like most of them. Instead it has outlived the mines, the miners and nearly everyone who ran in 1949. There are a few reasons why.

First, it is rooted in a real place and a real history. The races run through the same towns, over the same passes, that burros once climbed with ore on their backs. When a runner coaxes a donkey past the Prunes memorial in Fairplay, the past is not a theme. It is the course.

Second, it is hard in an honest way. A 29-mile race to 13,000 feet would challenge any athlete. Doing it while managing a strong-willed animal adds a layer of strategy and humility that pure running lacks. Fitness alone does not win. Patience, training and partnership do.

Third, it is fun, and it knows it. The puns, the festivals, the crowds cheering a burro that has decided to stop for grass all keep the sport from taking itself too seriously, which may be the secret to its staying power. (Author’s note: It is more fun for the burros and the spectators than for some of the human participants.)

Finally, it celebrates the animal. In an era when the working burro has all but vanished from the mountains, these races keep alive a bond between people and donkeys that built Colorado. The racers tend to say the same thing in different words: you do not run a burro race. You run it together. (Or, in my case, you are either trying to coax the burro to run, or trying not to let it drag you to your death).