Berthoud, Colorado
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Berthoud, Colorado sits on US 287 about halfway between Loveland and Longmont, twenty-some miles south of Fort Collins, on a rise just north of the Little Thompson River at 5,033 feet. It has called itself the Garden Spot of Colorado for generations, and the name still fits — the town is ringed by irrigated farm ground with the Front Range standing up behind it to the west. What's changed is the size. Berthoud was a town of about 3,500 in the late 1990s; the 2020 census counted 10,332, and the town's own estimate is pushing 14,000. New rooftops keep going up on the edges, and yet Mountain Avenue on a Saturday morning still feels like the small town it started as.
The town that moved up the hill
The Colorado Central Railroad came through the Little Thompson valley in the 1870s and a settlement called Little Thompson grew up beside the tracks. It was renamed for Edward L. Berthoud, the surveyor who laid out the rail route through the valley — the same Berthoud that Berthoud Pass, far to the southwest, is named for. In 1883–84 the whole community picked up and moved north to higher ground to escape the steep grades down by the river, and the Town of Berthoud incorporated on August 28, 1888.
The Berthoud Historical Society, founded in 1977, keeps that story in two buildings a short walk apart. The Little Thompson Valley Pioneer Museum is housed in Alfred Bimson's 1893 blacksmith shop and is laid out as rooms — a drugstore, a kitchen, a schoolroom. Out back is a replica of the backyard observatory that John Bunyan, president of the Berthoud National Bank from 1912 to 1948, built for himself in 1933; the replica went up in 2004 and opens for public stargazing on the first Friday of the month. Around the corner, the McCarty-Fickel Home is a 1916 house designed by Colorado architect Glenn Huntington for Dr. and Mrs. D.W. McCarty, kept in the Fickel family until 2008 and now a museum, complete with the doctor's 1930s medical office still on site.
Mountain Avenue on a Saturday
Downtown Berthoud is Mountain Avenue, with Fickel Park as its green center — a sculpture exhibit that keeps growing, and the outdoor quilt show that hangs local quilts across the park every June. The morning starts at Kofe House at 434 Mountain or with a loaf from Rise Artisan Bread, the neighborhood bakery on 5th Street that's been pulling bread and bagels since 2016. Grandpa's Cafe, out at 903 Mountain, is the community gathering spot for a sit-down breakfast; Benny's Tacos on Third Street does scratch-made Mexican; and when the day tips toward evening there are two breweries to choose from, City Star Brewing at 321 Mountain and Berthoud Brewing over on 8th Street. Grocery runs happen at Hays Market at 919 Mountain, a fourth-generation family store whose roots go back to Hays Mercantile in Johnstown in 1929; the Hays brothers bought the Berthoud store in 2001 and still run it.
An Apollo telescope behind the high school
The thing Berthoud has that almost no town its size has is the Little Thompson Observatory, on the grounds of Berthoud High School. It was organized in 1996 and opened in 1999, built by roughly 150 volunteers — Habitat for Humanity crews among them — on more than 10,000 donated hours and about $50,000 in local money. The original instrument is an 18-inch Tinsley telescope; since 2014 a second dome has housed a 24-inch telescope that saw service in the Apollo program at Mount Wilson Observatory before it retired to Berthoud, and there's a radio telescope besides. Public star nights are the third Friday of every month except July, doors at 7 p.m., and there has never been a charge. Inside, one wall is painted with the Greek and Roman constellations and another with the Lakota ones, dedicated in 2011 by Lakota chief Sam Moves Camp. About 400 people a month come through, and roughly seven in ten are schoolkids.
Spartans in maroon and white
Berthoud High School, at 850 Spartan Avenue in the Thompson School District, is the Spartans — maroon and white — with about 700 students. The football team won a state championship in 2007, the marching band has been a state finalist, the forensics team goes to nationals most years, and the robotics teams have made the world competition more than once. The school's roots go back to a 1897 building that held every grade, and to the 1921 junior-senior high that the town passed a bond for when the old one overflowed; that building's site is now Turner Middle School. On a fall Friday the observatory dome and the stadium lights are on the same campus, which is a very Berthoud kind of sentence.
Berthoud Day, and the country around it
The big day is Berthoud Day, the first Saturday of June. It starts at 7 a.m. with the Boy Scout pancake breakfast next to the Lions Club at 600 Third Street, the parade rolls down Mountain Avenue from Third Street to Ninth at 10, and then the park fills up with vendor booths, live music, beer and — this being Colorado in the 2020s — a pickleball tournament that runs into the evening. The rest of the calendar carries Oktoberfest, Snowfest and the quilt show. For the outdoors, Carter Lake sits in the foothills just northwest of town at 5,760 feet, with boating, fishing, camping and rock climbing on the cliffs above the water; Berthoud Reservoir has an easy 1.4-mile loop for a walk with the dog; and TPC Colorado, the only TPC course in the state, wraps around the reservoirs at Heron Lakes on the edge of town.
That's the Berthoud balance: a golf course pros play, and a free telescope run by volunteers; a town growing by thousands, and a bakery where they know your order. The mountains don't seem to mind either way.
Take Berthoud home
Third-Friday star nights, a Saturday loaf from Rise, the parade coming down Mountain Avenue — that's the Berthoud we had in mind when we put it on a mug. Fill it, sit on the porch, and watch the mountains do their thing.