Emma Crawford's Coffin Washed Off Red Mountain. Now It Races.

Picture a group of kids poking around the base of Red Mountain in 1929, and what they find is not a fossil or a lost dog. It is casket handles. A nameplate. A few bones. That was Emma Crawford, and she had been buried near the summit for almost forty years before the mountain gave her back.

Most people driving through Manitou Springs on their way up to the Pikes Peak Cog Railway have no idea the town's biggest party of the year started with a coffin sliding down a hillside. But that is exactly what happened, and the whole thing is true.

The girl who wanted the mountain

Emma Crawford showed up in Manitou Springs in 1889, around 17 years old, and she came for the same reason a lot of people came here back then. Tuberculosis. The idea was that the mineral springs and the thin mountain air might do what the doctors back east could not.

And Emma did not just rest and take the waters like a proper invalid. She climbed. She summited Red Mountain, which is no gentle stroll even if you are healthy, and she tied a red scarf at the peak. She loved that spot so much she asked to be buried there, overlooking the town.

She got her wish in 1891, when the tuberculosis finally took her. Her fiancé was a man named Wilhelm Hildenbrand, a civil engineer working on the Cog Railway, so this was a guy who understood a hard grade better than anybody. He and eleven other townspeople carried Emma's coffin up roughly 7,200 feet of slope and buried her near the summit, right where she wanted to be.

Here is the thing about burying someone near the top of a Colorado mountain. Gravity does not care about your last wishes.

Thirty-eight years of winters

Winter after winter, spring rain after spring rain, the ground up on Red Mountain kept shifting. And in 1929 it finally let go. Emma's coffin washed down the mountainside, which is how those kids ended up finding the handles and the nameplate and the bones at the bottom.

Let that sit for a second. A woman climbs a mountain because she is dying, ties a red scarf at the top, gets carried up there by the man she was going to marry and eleven neighbors, and then the mountain slowly slides her back into town over four decades. You could not write that.

So Manitou did what Manitou does. It leaned in.

How a tragedy became a race

In 1995 the Manitou Springs Chamber of Commerce launched the Emma Crawford Coffin Races in her memory, billed as the first coffin races in the nation. Not one of the first. The first. And the format has since been copied by towns all over the country, which tells you Manitou was onto something.

If you have never watched it, the setup is beautifully ridiculous. Each team is one costumed "Emma" riding a coffin-like contraption, plus four costumed runners playing her mourners. They push that thing down a 195-yard track along Manitou Avenue, going for the fastest finishing time. Thousands of spectators pack this tiny mountain town to watch grown adults in Victorian mourning gear sprint a casket down the street.

The awards are half the fun. There is Best Emma, Best Coffin, Best Entourage, and Miss Emma. And before the racing there is a Parade of Coffins down the avenue, which is exactly as strange and wonderful as it sounds.

Plan your day trip

The 2026 event is the 32nd Annual Emma Crawford Coffin Races and Festival, set for Saturday, October 24, 2026. Manitou Springs in late October is about as good as a Colorado autumn day gets, so this is the kind of trip you build a whole Saturday around.

If you want to actually race, the team entry fee is