Fruita: Western Slope Orchards and Mike the Headless Chicken

Fruita sits on Colorado's Western Slope where the Colorado River cuts through red-rock mesa country on its way toward Moab. Founded in eighteen eighty-four, the town developed on irrigated orchards of peaches, pears, and apples that thrived in the semi-arid valley. Today it is also a gateway for world-class mountain biking in the surrounding canyon lands and for Dinosaur Journey museum, which displays fossils excavated from the nearby Morrison Formation.

But Fruita is perhaps most famous for Mike the Headless Chicken. In nineteen forty-five, a farmer named Lloyd Olsen chopped off a rooster's head and the bird survived for eighteen months. The axe missed the jugular vein, most of the brain stem was left intact, and a clot sealed the wound.

Fruita celebrates Mike every May with a festival that draws thousands to what is, by most measures, the most improbable piece of local history on the Western Slope.