My Love Letter to Red Rocks

One of the best concert venues in the world

Sarah Paris
The Riff
Published in
6 min readMay 22

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Red Rocks at night
A mostly empty Red Rocks Amphitheatre at night. Photo by Wes McKeehan/ Pexels

Standing at the top of the open-air amphitheatre, I could see my breath.

A light rain fell, and as the sky turned to indigo, the temperature plummeted, transforming the summer day into a crisp, late-fall night.

Before I returned to my seat with snacks and an overpriced warm beer for my friend, Tony, I stopped to take it all in. The stage lights cast plumes of smoke over the crowd, and the Denver cityscape twinkled down in the valley below.

Although Chris Martin had stopped singing, the audience belted out “Everything’s Not Lost,” and I could feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck. “This is what heaven must feel like,” I whispered to myself.

Sure, my friends and I were at a Coldplay concert, and I definitely didn’t want to spend eternal life listening to “Yellow,” but the magic enveloping the crowd felt different … special.

Red Rocks, I love you.

Coldplay continued

I wanted to continually feel this moment and this camaraderie, this music seeping into my bones, in the craggy arms of this beautiful natural canyon, for the rest of my life.

Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre, located on the outskirts of Denver in the small mountain village of Morrison, Colorado, captures the musical experience in a unique, phenomenal way.

Sure, crowded bars with sticky floors and graffiti-covered bathrooms promise loud music and punk rock aesthetics. Stadiums allow for larger-than-life performances. Ornate concert halls allow you to get lost in a life of symphony.

But this place? This ancient pathway to fossilized dinosaur tracks and national park surroundings?

This is The Shire. This is the Narnia of music venues.

A history of the venue’s world, part 1

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Sarah Paris
The Riff

Author of Signs My Toddler Has a Drinking Problem (humor collection).Freelance writer of all things. Fiction is my heartbeat. Believer. Adventurer. Semi- funny.