"We celebrated everything here," one longtime Evergreen resident told the Canyon Courier at the Oct. 10 contents sale. "I've been to weddings here." She left with an antique carved chair. People had lined up outside the building at 8:30 a.m. for a sale that opened at 9.
The roof was scheduled to come off on Oct. 28, and the building is expected to be demolished before the end of the year. Before then, the building is being taken apart and spread around the foothills, and its best-known pieces are going a few miles away to Buchanan Park. They will become part of the next place Evergreen gathers, which is being built there right now.
A building that couldn't be moved
El Rancho dates to the late 1940s. It started as a cafe and trading post, then added a gift shop and a post office, and it eventually got an Interstate 70 exit named after it, according to the Denver Post. The Canyon Courier's history adds that a banquet room and gift shop opened in 1953, and that the exit got its name when I-70 was built in the mid-1960s. The two papers give different founding years, 1947 and 1948. The Courier dates the log cabin and the Post dates the cafe. A brewpub came in 2015. The restaurant closed in 2024.
In 2025, the Denver Post reported a plan to move the building across the highway and reopen it. That plan ended in late 2025. The Evergreen Park & Recreation District says it learned then that the building couldn't be moved and would be demolished. EPRD then reached an agreement with QuikTrip, which owns the land, to salvage as much of the building, its landscaping and its stonework as it could. QuikTrip isn't charging the district for the salvaged items.
Many residents spent the past two years trying to stop the demolition. When the salvage plan was announced in February, the Colorado Sun found the reaction mixed. One resident at the meeting said the plan could keep an emotional connection alive and help the community start to heal.
Where the pieces are going
By the end of October, parts of El Rancho were headed to at least five places:
- Buchanan Park. CBS Colorado reported that the plan includes the El Rancho sign and parts of the fireplace, which will be reused in a green room at the new pavilion. The rendering shown in February also put the rounded-wood siding in that room. EPRD has already salvaged and stored what it can reuse there, plus items it considers historically important.
- Tommyknockers in Idaho Springs. The brewery is taking the fermenters, EPRD's Nancy Judge told the Canyon Courier.
- Cabin Creek Brewery in Georgetown. It is getting the silo that stood outside the building. The brew deck is going somewhere else.
- Local homes. At the Oct. 10 sale, residents left with carved and leather-seated chairs and silver gravy boats. One couple from Cody Park planned to give their gravy boats as Christmas presents.
- A Denver company. Judge negotiated for it to take whatever didn't sell that weekend.
The money follows the pieces. Proceeds from the October sale go to the all-access playground under construction at Buchanan Park, and EPRD plans to sell some of the other salvaged items to raise park funds. So the cups and chairs bought this month are helping pay for the park where El Rancho's sign will end up.
The room built from El Rancho
The sign and fireplace are going to the Bear Creek Pavilion, which sits next to the Buchanan Park ballfields. It is a 2,250-square-foot open-air stage for live music, performances and movies at the park's many events. Most of the money came from a $650,000 donation by the Michael E. McGoldrick Foundation. McGoldrick was a Denver-area philanthropist who lived in Evergreen for 35 years.
The tribute space will be attached to the pavilion. Performers will use it as a green room, and it will be open to the public when no show needs it. That fits the building's history. El Rancho was where people held wedding receptions and gathered after funerals, and its replacement is a room beside a stage where people will gather again.
Why Buchanan Park, and why this fall
The tribute needs a home this fall because Buchanan Park is in the middle of its largest rebuild in decades. EPRD is putting $22 million into the 42-acre park. The district borrowed $16 million and is repaying it through a property tax extension voters approved in 2023. Donations and grants cover the rest. Executive Director Cory Vander Veen told the Canyon Courier that three projects are being built at the same time to save money on grading, roads and other shared work.
The pavilion is one of the three. The second is the All-Wheels Park, a 10,500-square-foot skatepark for skateboards and scooters. California Skateparks crew manager Curt Baker told the Canyon Courier it is "such an upgrade from the other park," meaning the small skatepark behind the Wulf Recreation Center. Jaxon Statzell, an Evergreen High graduate who works for California Skateparks, designed it. Boulders dug up during the I-70 realignment at Floyd Hill are built into it. The skatepark started with a grassroots campaign by the Evergreen Skatepark Coalition in 2023. Grants, donations and fundraising paid for more than half of it. Friends of Buchanan Park added more than $80,000 in August 2025, split between the skatepark, the pavilion and the inclusive playground.
The third is an 11,000-square-foot natatorium. It will have an eight-lane lap pool, a diving board, a climbing wall and garage doors that open in warm weather. After it opens, the district plans to close the pool at the Wulf Recreation Center and remodel that space.
Here is when each piece is expected to finish, based on EPRD's schedule, which the district calls preliminary and subject to change:
- Fall 2026: the All-Wheels Park and the Bear Creek Pavilion. The Canyon Courier reported both were expected to wrap up in October.
- Fall/winter 2026: Phase 1 of the All-Abilities Adventure Playground.
- Spring 2027: the natatorium.
- Spring/summer 2027: a gym and field house of about 14,000 to 20,000 square feet.
- Summer/fall 2027: Phase 2 of the playground, which includes a splash pad.
Parts of the park will be under construction until 2028. The El Rancho room will be among the first parts of the new park people can use.
What comes next at the El Rancho exit
QuikTrip plans a gas station and a 5,000-square-foot convenience store on the old El Rancho land. The Colorado Sun reported that the company scaled back its plan by dropping a truck-stop component that neighbors had worried about. In July, CBS Colorado reported that the proposal didn't need a zoning change and was still in public comment. No opening date has been announced.
The roof had to come off before the brewing equipment could be lifted out, and Judge told the Courier that once it's off, the building can't be secured. Anyone driving past the exit this fall is watching the end of nearly 80 years at that spot. The sign, part of the fireplace and the rounded-wood siding are expected to reopen inside the Bear Creek Pavilion's green room at Buchanan Park.
Changes like this affect how people feel about the place they live, along with what a home there is worth. If you'd like to talk through what Evergreen's changes mean for your own plans, Glenn Janda has followed these foothills for more than two decades and is happy to help. Schedule a Free Consultation.
