Thursday, October 1, 2026

October opens at 90 degrees, and Denver never gets that hot in the month again

1892 · Denver

On Oct. 1, 1892, the downtown Denver weather office reached 90 degrees. It is still the hottest reading October has ever produced, and the latest 90 the city has on the books. The same square later learned how to snow.

The National Weather Service still flags that 90 with a hash mark: highest temperature of the month, set in 1892, and the latest 90-degree day the season has ever allowed. One day. Then October retired from the 90s. If you are waiting on another one, you have been waiting since Grover Cleveland's first term ended and his second one started.

The thermometer lived downtown then. Denver's official record runs from the city office from 1872 through December 1949, Stapleton from 1950 to February 1995, and DIA after that. A 90 on 16th Street is not the same instrument as a 90 on the plains, but the books did not throw this one out. The modern normal high for the date, on the Weather Service's 1981–2010 table, is 72. The normal low is 42. Average is a suggestion. This square does not take suggestions.

Sixty-seven years later it did the opposite. On Oct. 1, 1959, Stapleton managed a high of 35 — still the lowest maximum the date has allowed — a low of 30, and 5.0 inches of snow. The Weather Service's week history puts 5.9 inches on the books from the 30th into the 1st, light winds, the tail of a late-September storm that had already snapped limbs still in leaf. Colorado Springs took the worse of that system. Denver took the calendar joke.

The cold reprise is 1985. The late-September air mass that put 17 degrees on the 29th and 25 on the 30th was still here at dawn on the 1st. The official low was 27, the date record. Most rain on the square is a modest 0.82 inches, in 1994. Most snow is that 1959 five inches. The month's all-time floor, minus 2, waits until the 29th of 1917 and is not today's problem.

So October 1 is the day Denver proved it could still be summer, and then spent the next century proving it did not have to. Pack the light jacket. The record is already wearing both.

Sources: NWS Boulder — Denver October normals and records · ThorntonWeather — Oct. 1 to Oct. 7 weather history · Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Oct. 1 · Denver7 — October's only 90

A Denver kid learns the saxophone, then talks Sly Stone into starting a band

1942 · Denver

Gerald L. Martini was born in Denver on Oct. 1, 1942. He picked up the saxophone at 13, took the idea west, and talked a Bay Area disc jockey named Sly Stone into the band that became Sly and the Family Stone.

The birthday has a small argument. Current biographies, including Wikipedia, put it on Oct. 1, 1942. Older listings, including some reference almanacs, say 1943. Denver gets the credit either way. The saxophone does not care which form you file.

By 12 he had already been through the ukulele, the accordion, and the clarinet, which is a lot of living-room furniture for one childhood. The saxophone arrived at 13. Two years later he was playing bars. The career that mattered took him to the Bay Area: San Francisco City College music classes, a gig with Joe Piazza and the Continentals, and a friendship with Sylvester Stewart, not yet the name on the record.

Stone had a disc-jockey job at KSOL. Martini stopped by, more than once, and pitched a band. Stone eventually took the pitch. The group that came out of that suggestion — Sly, his brother Freddie, his sister Rose, Larry Graham, Cynthia Robinson, Greg Errico, and the Denver sax — was unusual on purpose. Black and white members. Men and women. Horns up front. By the end of the 1960s the singles included "Everyday People," which is a Denver birth certificate doing more civic work than most plaques.

Martini stayed from the 1967 start through the 1975 unraveling, then kept the alumni circuit: Graham Central Station, Rubicon, a Prince tour that also had Larry Graham, a Family Stone reunion. In 1993 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the band, sax included. The horn lines are still the part you hum when you think you are humming the chorus.

He did not stay in Denver long enough to become a local monument. The city can live with that. It exported the idea, and the idea had a horn section.

Sources: Wikipedia — Jerry Martini · On This Day — Denver timeline (lists the birthday as 1943) · Wikimedia Commons — 1968 Family Stone publicity photo

Elktober starts, and Rocky Mountain National Park locks the gate

2013 · Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park

On Oct. 1, 2013, the federal shutdown closed Rocky Mountain National Park on the first morning of elk season. The park had just finished reopening after the September floods. Rangers gave campers 48 hours. The elk did not get the memo.

Estes Park calls the rut elktober, because the bulls bugle in the meadows and the town sells the soundtrack. In 2013 the meadow had already had a worse month. The September floods shut the park, then let it back in pieces. By the Thursday before this date, rangers said 93 percent was open. By Sunday, nearly all of it. Kyle Patterson, the park information officer, called the reopening a cause of significant celebration.

Tuesday morning the celebration had a padlock. Congress had not passed a budget. The Interior Department closed national parks and furloughed more than 20,000 Park Service employees. At Moraine, two rangers told campers they had 48 hours, long enough for backcountry hikers to walk out. Markus and Manuela Grunau had come from Cologne — about 5,000 miles — to watch elk. Their neighbors in the campground were the ones who explained the shutdown. The road through the park closed with the gates.

Colorado did not enjoy being the state that had just dried out and was now closed for the busiest wildlife week of the fall. On Oct. 11 the Park Service took a state donation of $362,700 and reopened Rocky Mountain for ten days, through Oct. 20. Secretary Sally Jewell called it a practical temporary fix and asked Congress for a clean bill. The shutdown itself ended Oct. 17. The elk, unfurloughed the entire time, kept to the meadow.

The photograph on this card is not from the locked week. It is the job the week was supposed to do: a small herd at the Beaver Ponds along Trail Ridge, where the rut still files its complaint every October whether the gate is staffed or not.

Sources: The Colorado Independent — shutdown and elktober, Oct. 2, 2013 · U.S. Interior Department — Colorado agreement to reopen Rocky Mountain