Carlos Santana once called it “a temple, a shrine.” Kesha said it was “a dream to play Red Rocks” ahead of her sold-out June 1 show. Now Red Rocks' legendary status is inspiring copycats, with a 10,000-seat “White Rocks” outdoor concert space planned for the Texas Hill Country outside Austin.
The eponymous red rocks themselves are around 300 million years old, and some of the first known visitors were dinosaurs, including an aquatic plesiosaur that swam in the shallow inland sea that once covered the land where Denver sits. Later, this was considered sacred ground by the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, the Indigenous tribes who called this region home before European settlers arrived.
Soprano Helen Jepson led 100 orchestra musicians and another 100 choralists in the first official performance at Red Rocks on June 15, 1941. The occasion was covered by Time magazine a week later in an article that declared, “in this enclosure, a whisper sounds clearly, and anything from one fiddle to a full band sends lush tones rolling upward.”
According to the band’s autobiography U2 by U2, the band recorded its live album Under a Blood Red Sky at Red Rocks in 1983 after first seeing the venue two years earlier. Despite plunging temperatures and volatile weather, the striking visuals from the “Sunday Bloody Sunday” video helped the album go triple-platinum.
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Planning Your Trip to Red Rocks in Morrison, Colorado
A pilot program launched Memorial Day weekend, allowing riders to take the W-line train from Denver’s Union Station to the Jefferson County Government Center. From there, a shuttle is available to several locations in Morrison, Colorado, including the Red Rocks Trading Post. However, the pilot is currently only offered during daytime hours on weekends for the summer of 2026– planners envisioned it more as a way to access the hiking trails around Red Rocks and nearby Dinosaur Ridge than a way to get home from the latest Geese show.
That’s one problem that developers of the future White Rocks venue in Austin want to solve. Planned for a location 15 minutes down State Highway 71 near Bee Cave, the 10,000-seat White Rocks Amphitheater will be accompanied by a 150-room hotel and 600 residences. Hopefully, 71 acres will be enough to keep the latter away from any sound spillage from the venue.
Residents in Colorado Springs are suing the city-owned Ford Amphitheater for noise pollution and public nuisance. Opened as recently as 2024 to acclaim from industry publications like Billboard, the 8,000-seat venue has filed for noise hardship permits, but continues to receive pushback from residents in nearby apartments and neighborhoods as far as 2 miles away.
View this post on InstagramFortunately, there's no such problem at Red Rocks, where the closest neighbors are the venue's population of friendly raccoons, who have been known to join the crowd for a show or two, or even take crowd control into their own paws.
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