Katrina Leibee
Audio By Carbonatix
Summer is Joe Palec‘s season. There are many reasons for this, but here’s number one: Elitch Gardens.
Our Summer Guide cover artist grew up in Milwaukee and attended college at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. “In a few words, I just hated it,” he says. “I wasn’t having a good time.”
His father gave him two options: stick it out or move to Colorado, where Palec’s mother lived.
“I headed to Colorado. I had the car packed up with all my belongings,” he recalls. After many hours on Interstate 70, he appreciated his first glimpse of the mountains. But it was when he turned left on I-25 that things got really magical.
He saw Elitch’s. “I could not believe Denver had an amusement park, a pretty legitimate one, right in downtown,” he says. “Right in the backyard.”
The amusement park — which had gotten its start more than a century earlier, then moved from northwest Denver to downtown in the 1990s — wasn’t the only amenity Palec found here.
“Rent was cheap, marijuana was coming, and I was super into music then,” he explains. “I’m proud to say that I was part of that first wave, and then I caught on to a lot of people moving here, a lot of rich people moving here.” He wasn’t one of them.
He worked at Jimmy John’s on what was then known as the 16th Street Mall, and also did a stint as a sign spinner. After work, he stayed downtown to party. “The 16th Street Mall was my stomping ground,” he says. “It felt like coming home.”
Through it all, he worked on his art. And as Denver grew, so did his career; he worked in the cannabis industry for a while, and “met people who helped launch my career,” he says, until he was able to make it as a full-time artist and leave the sandwiches and sign-spinning behind. “I am lucky. I work hard, but I happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
He now lives in Baker and owns a studio in the Art District on Santa Fe, so he gets to visit all the restaurants and mom-and-pop businesses that survive in those areas. He’s particularly partial to a few blocks on Broadway filled with interesting shopping options, from Goldmine Vintage to Meininger’s to Wizard’s Chest — “my favorite place for visitors,” he says.
Not including Elitch’s, of course. Palec once had a season dining plan at Elitch’s. “I ate there 75 times in a row, and documented it on Instagram as Meal Plan Man,” he recalls. In the end, it worked out to a buck a meal — not that they were particularly good meals at that price. But he still vouches for the turkey legs.
Today, Palec has a more basic season plan, so “if I feel like going on a roller coaster, I just walk over,” he explains. His favorite ride at his favorite place? The Star Flyer, with “hands down the best view of Denver you’ll get. You see downtown, Capitol Hill, then it spins you around and you see the mountains.”
In the summer, Palec is also partial to the Renaissance Fair. “I love these types of things. Immersive, a great way to escape reality,” he says. For other escapes, while he admits he isn’t the “biggest camper or hiker, I’ll go if I can get one of my friends to drag me.”
But it always comes back to Elitch’s, whether he’s just taking a break or touting Denver to others. “If the city’s goal is to attract people to come here,” he concludes, “and they see there’s an amusement park a hop, skip and jump away, that’s amazing.”
You can find Summer Guide 2026, our annual celebration of all the cool events in Denver’s hottest season, inserted in the June 11 issue of Westword. You can also read it in our flipbooks.
