Red Rocks Amphitheatre: Stone and Sound

The two sandstone monoliths that frame the stage at Red Rocks are between two hundred ninety and three hundred million years old, formed when this part of North America was a lowland basin filling with sediment from ancient mountain ranges. The Fountain Formation, geologists call it: a deep red arkosic sandstone that weathers into vertical walls and fins. Creation Rock and Ship Rock, as they are named, rise about three hundred feet above the natural bowl between them. The acoustic properties are an accident of geology. Sound bounces off the stone walls in a way that no engineer could have designed from scratch.

The Ute people used this place for centuries. Anglo explorers named it the Garden of the Angels in the eighteen seventies. A Denver real estate promoter tried to turn it into a private resort. The city of Denver bought the park in nineteen twenty-seven and then faced the question of what to do with it.

The answer was architect Burnham Hoyt, who designed an amphitheater modeled on the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens. The labor came from the Civilian Conservation Corps. Roughly two hundred men, paid one dollar a day, blasted and excavated twenty-five thousand cubic yards of rock between nineteen thirty-six and nineteen forty-one. They moved eight hundred tons of quarried stone by hand. The amphitheater opened on June fifteenth, nineteen forty-one.

The concerts began. Louis Armstrong played. The Colorado Symphony performed under the stars. The Beatles played here on August twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-four, the only stop on their American tour that did not sell out. Jimi Hendrix played. U Two recorded a live album here in nineteen eighty-three, filmed in a rainstorm, that became one of their defining documents.

It seats just over nine thousand people. There is not a bad seat. The stone walls are still three hundred million years old.