Central City devotes one day a year to the town’s most successful brothel owner, Louisa “Lou” Bunch, a Swedish immigrant who ran her business in the red-light district on Pine Street in the late 1800s.

On Saturday, Main Street offered hot tiny donuts, waffle cones, and a gold rush fashion show. On a cloudless hot day, residents dressed in ruffles, bodices, ornate hats and three-piece suits.

Madam Lou’s establishment was just a stone’s throw from the mine entrance, which gave her a leg up on the brothel competition, but also presented philanthropic opportunities. During an epidemic, she and her entertainers were rumored to have converted the establishment to a makeshift hospital in order to nurse miners back to health after they took ill. 

In an homage to Madam Lou, a rowdy bed race is run every year first down and then up the sloping Main Street. This year’s 47th annual competition drew around 10 teams, which paid a $500 entry fee.

Bed teams were sponsored by local gambling establishments, private groups, the Central City Volunteer Fire Department, and, ironically, by Rick’s Cabaret International (RCI), which wants to establish a strip club in downtown Central City. 

The bed race rules maintain each team has a pusher or two, but one man and one woman must ride the red-blanketed brass bed on wheels, which makes for a heavy uphill haul. 

For the ones pushing, the secret to winning the bed race is in navigating a rickety contraption, which is as stable as a zig-zaggy grocery cart.  

“Everyone thinks this race is about speed, but they’re wrong,” said Jeremy Kaiser, whose bed racers represented Famous Bonanza Casino. “It’s really about stability.” 

In a moment that drew gasps from the crowd, one bed race team, the entry of a Gilpin High All-Class Reunion, crashed into the barrier fence, which bowed into a crowd of cheering fans. 

Bed-pusher Tiny Bradley managed to get the bed back on track without injuring anyone, including his bed-passenger, Kait Cabellero, who said she was terrified.

“All I could do was lay there and look!” she said. 

Bradley credited his stamina to a training regimen of running hills.

Perhaps the spirit of Madam Lou was hovering over the race. “We have a healthy disregard for any rules,” said Gilpin High School Reunion bed team organizer Sara Keehfuss.