Sedalia's Big Fall: A Castle Turns 100, The Games Turn 62, And The Saloon Finally Picks A Kitchen

Drive the stretch of US-85 through Sedalia on any given evening and it still reads as a blink: a gas station, a couple of bars, the turn toward Perry Park Road, and then foothills. Nothing about the crossroads suggests the place is home to a Scottish-style castle celebrating its hundredth year, a highland games that has run for 62 straight years, and a saloon kitchen now run by a chef who cooked on Top Chef. But it is, and 2026 happens to be the year all three of those things hit a real marker, which is not something that lines up often.

That's the part worth sitting with if you already live here. It's easy to treat Sedalia's calendar as background noise, the same festivals and tastings that show up every year. This year carries more weight than usual. Cherokee Ranch & Castle turned 100. The Colorado Highland Games are running their 62nd installment. And Wide Open Saloon, after months of pop-ups, made its kitchen partnership permanent. None of these are new events. What's new is that they're all hitting a milestone in the same calendar year, and each one changes something about what Sedalia offers a person who's simply looking for somewhere to eat, drink, or spend a Saturday close to home.

The saloon finally commits to a kitchen

Wide Open Saloon sits at 5607 US-85, in the building that used to be Johnson's Corner, and for the first half of 2026 its food situation was a rotating experiment. That ended on May 1, when Riot BBQ soft-launched its takeover of the saloon's kitchen as the venue's exclusive culinary partner. The pairing behind Riot BBQ is not a local pop-up finding its footing. Patrick Klaiber is a Michelin-recognized pitmaster, and his partner Manny Barella is a James Beard nominee who competed on Top Chef. Together they'd already landed a spot on Westword's list of Denver's Top 50 Restaurants before they ever set foot in Sedalia.

The path here ran through a residency at the National Western Stock Show's Livestock Exchange and a pop-up at the old Stockyard Saloon in January. By May, according to Westword, the two had become "permanent roommates" at the Sedalia building.

That's the shift residents should register. Wide Open regularly runs live music, bike nights, and an acoustic set in the Sedalia Room most Saturday afternoons from 2 to 5. What changes this year is that the food attached to all of that is now coming from a team with a citywide reputation, cooked in the same building where you're already stopping for a beer on a Friday.

The castle turns 100

Cherokee Ranch & Castle, at 6113 N Daniels Park Rd between Sedalia and Highlands Ranch, is marking its hundredth year as a building in 2026. The Scottish-style stone castle went up in the mid-1920s, originally built for Denver businessman Charles Alfred Johnson and designed by architect Burnham Hoyt. It wasn't until 1954 that cattlewoman Tweet Kimball bought the property, renamed it Cherokee Ranch, and turned it into the working ranch and cultural venue it's been ever since. The Foundation marked the centennial in June with the Waterloo Centennial Gala, but the practical calendar for residents runs longer.

Castle tours continue through October 30, Tuesday through Saturday, ninety minutes each, walking guests through the fine art and furnishings collection while covering Kimball's history on the property. Afternoon tea runs the same window on Thursdays and Fridays. Murder mystery dinners paused for the summer and pick back up September 4, then continue monthly through the fall. And each autumn the property opens up for guided elk bugling viewings across its more than 3,000 acres of foothills, timed to the season when bull elk are most active and most audible.

None of that is new information if you've been to a wine tasting there before. What's new is the frame around it. A hundred years is a specific, finite number, and the Foundation built an entire gala around hitting it. The rest of the fall calendar is what that milestone year looks like once the party's over: tours, tea, murder mysteries, and elk, running on the same schedule as always but landing inside a year the castle itself is treating as a milestone.

The games turn 62

The Colorado Highland Games, known for decades as the Colorado Scottish Festival before its rename, return to the Denver Polo Club at 6359 Airport Road on September 26 and 27. The St. Andrew Society of Colorado has run the event since 1963, which puts 2026 at 62 consecutive years, making it one of the longest-running events based in Sedalia by a wide margin. The weekend covers heavy athletics, piping and drumming competitions, highland and country dancing, a British car show on Sunday, and a Saturday-night concert with the artist still to be announced closer to the date. Saturday also brings the event's long-running Bonnie Knees contest.

Sixty-two years is long enough that most current residents have never known Sedalia without this weekend on the calendar. That's exactly why it's easy to undercount what it means. A town whose population is measured in the low hundreds hosts a festival old enough to have outlasted most of the businesses currently operating around it, and it draws visitors from well outside Douglas County every single September.

The window before Rampart Range Road closes

There's a practical piece to this stretch too, and it has nothing to do with events. Devil's Head Fire Lookout, reached by driving about 10 miles west of Sedalia on Highway 67 and then south on Rampart Range Road, is an early-1900s lookout tower sitting near 9,749 feet in Pike National Forest. The hike itself is a moderate three miles round trip with roughly 869 feet of elevation gain, according to AllTrails, and takes most people an hour and a half to two hours.

The detail that matters for planning is the road, not the trail. Rampart Range Road closes to vehicles from December 1 through April 1 each year, per the U.S. Forest Service. That gives residents close to four months from today before the lookout goes quiet for the season, which is longer than it feels but still worth putting on the calendar before the first hard snow makes the decision for you.

How the pieces line up

None of these four things depend on each other, but stacked against the calendar they turn a normal Sedalia fall into a fuller one. If you're mapping out the next ten weeks, the shape looks something like this:

• Catch a Saturday acoustic set and a Riot BBQ plate at Wide Open before the weather turns.
• Book a castle tour or afternoon tea at Cherokee Ranch before the October 30 close, or hold out for a September 4 murder mystery dinner.
• Set aside the last weekend of September for the Highland Games, especially if you've never actually walked the grounds at the Denver Polo Club.
• Get to Devil's Head at least once before Rampart Range Road shuts down for winter.

A town this small rarely gets three separate reasons to pay closer attention to itself in the same season. This is the year it did, and most of it is still ahead.

If you're weighing a move within Sedalia, or wondering what a place near any of these landmarks might be worth, Nick Evancich has spent more than 30 years working Colorado real estate with the same hands-on construction background that helps sellers price a home right and buyers know what they're walking into. Let's connect. Start with a free home valuation.