Pride in the Park draws large crowd to Washington Park in Laramie

Pride in the Park turned Washington Park into one of the busiest gathering spots in Laramie, with more than 50 vendors and community organizations, live music, performances, food trucks and kids’ activities drawing a large public crowd to the city park. The Saturday, June 13, event ran from noon to 5 p.m. and was billed by Laramie PrideFest as its biggest PrideFest event of the year.

The park setting gave the event a different feel from a formal program or private celebration. Visitors could connect, dance, relax or organize while moving between booths, food trucks and performance areas. Laramie PrideFest described the day as a celebration of community, joy and queer brilliance, and Visit Laramie framed it as a broad public gathering with family-friendly crafts, activities and community partners.

For Albany County, the event showed how a central public space can function as a marketplace as much as a festival ground. Washington Park sits in the middle of Laramie, and a crowd that comes for music and performances also creates foot traffic for nonprofits, local advocates and service groups trying to reach residents face to face. The mix of vendors, community booths and advocacy tables made the park an outreach hub as well as an entertainment venue.

Pride in the Park also sat inside a larger Pride season that has become a fixture in Laramie’s civic calendar. City of Laramie proclamation materials refer to the 9th Annual Laramie PrideFest, and the organization says it supports 2SLGBTQIA+ people in Wyoming through year-round programming, advocacy and community-building. The 2026 lineup included a Pride Proclamation & Visibility March on June 7, a Pride Variety Night on June 13, a Jackalope Cult Cinema screening of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on June 14, and the Matthew Shepard Candlelight Vigil on June 14.

That wider schedule helps explain why Pride in the Park drew such a broad cross-section of residents. In downtown Laramie and at Washington Park, PrideFest has become less a single event than a week of public activity that brings families, visitors, volunteers and advocacy groups into the same civic space. This year’s park gathering reinforced that pattern, making the event one of the clearest examples of how Laramie’s public gatherings now combine culture, outreach and community visibility.