The Sloan's Lake Fine Arts and Music Festival

This past Sunday afternoon I attended the Sloan's Lake 7th annual Fine Arts and Music Festival.  This is the first time I have ever heard of this event, and I don't know how I missed the first 6 festivals, but evidently did.  In any case, this was not a big event, but still a very pleasant one.  There was a small stage where music events were taking place, and a modest number of art booths, including several featuring photography.  One of these booths featured the work of Neil Thomas, a photographer from Kenya (and no doubt a descendant of the original British colonists), who displayed some wonderful photographs of the people, wildlife, and scenery of Africa. Be sure to check out his web site at www.neilthomas.com. This was a dog friendly event, and virtually everyone there seemed to have at least one, or more likely, two dogs walking past the booths.  Denver, and for that matter all of Colorado, has to be the most pet friendly state in the union.

Sloan's Lake, by the way, became a lake when a farmer by the name of Thomas Sloan decided to dig a well on his farm.  He did not realize that his land was located over a natural spring, and the next day he woke up to find a 200 acre lake on his property.  Over the years, the City of Denver incorporated this land into a major park in the northwest part of the city, and in recent years this area has become a hotbed for development.  As I recall, the south and east parts of the area were traditionally an Hispanic neighborhood, but these days, many of the homes here have been torn down to put up apartment towers, condos, pricey duplexes, and McMansions.  Gentrification is often a sad thing, forcing people out of the neighborhoods they have lived in for most of their lives, but with views like the one in the photograph on the right, it is surprising it didn't start happening even sooner.