Buchanan Park Is Hosting Evergreen's Biggest Party of the Year. It's Also a Construction Site.

On September 12, a few thousand people will ride school buses from Evergreen Middle School and Bergen Valley Elementary into Buchanan Park to eat chili, let their kids try on firefighter gear at the Kids Firefighter Challenge, and vote on Best Showmanship. Most of them will park nowhere near the park itself, because there isn't room. Buchanan has been mid-build since April, when Pinkard Construction broke ground on an $11 million pool expansion on the same 42-acre park that hosts the Big Chili Cook-Off, the rec center weight room, and the ballfields.

Nobody planned it this way on purpose. But this is the first September where Evergreen's single biggest public gathering space and its single biggest active construction site are the same piece of ground, and that overlap says more about how this town is actually growing than any subdivision announcement would.

The Park That Does Everything

Buchanan Park has always worked harder than a typical rec center. It's where the Evergreen Park & Recreation District runs its pools, its gyms, its youth swim lessons, and its Playschool drop-in care. It's also the default site for anything that needs open grass and a captive audience, which is why Big Chili has landed there for years running.

Right now it's also a job site. Pinkard, the same contractor that built the original Buchanan facility back in 2003, returned this spring to add a second, multiuse indoor pool connected to the existing natatorium. The new space will carry eight lanes, a competition timing system, a climbing wall, a rope swing, and a diving board, with three garage-style doors that open the room to the outdoors. EVstudio designed it with aquatics specialist Counsilman-Hunsaker, and construction crews expect the work to run eight to ten months from a full start in May, with EPRD projecting a grand opening sometime in 2027.

a privilege to return to Buchanan Park and expand upon the facility we first built

Pinkard president Tony Burke described the project that way when work began, more than 20 years after his company built the original. It's worth remembering the town already voted for this. A property tax extension approved by Evergreen voters in November 2023 sends roughly $1.4 million a year to EPRD, and that revenue is funding the pool along with a broader Buchanan Park redesign that includes a pavilion, an adventure playground, a skatepark, and new courts. The construction fencing you'll see this fall isn't a surprise imposed on the neighborhood. It's the neighborhood's own ballot measure showing up as rebar and a Myrtha pool shell shipped over from Italy.

What a Saturday at Buchanan Actually Looks Like This Year

If you're headed to Big Chili, the practical picture matters more than the backstory. Parking immediately around Buchanan Rec Center is limited in a normal year, and this year adds a construction footprint to a lot that was already tight. Here's what's different, and what isn't:

• Free shuttle buses run from Evergreen Middle School (2059 Hiwan Drive) and Bergen Valley Elementary (1422 Sugarbush Drive) from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and that's the realistic way in for most attendees.
• Dogs aren't allowed at the festival, well-behaved or not, so leave them home.
• The entire event sits on grass, which means strollers and lawn chairs make more sense than anything with small wheels.
• Every vendor tent this year has to be weighted at 40 pounds per leg under a newly enforced EPRD and Evergreen Fire Rescue code, with officials inspecting setups on site.
• The Kids Firefighter Challenge runs 10:30 to 11:45 a.m. in the front parking lot, and it's historically been as big a draw as the chili itself.

None of this is framed by EPRD or Big Chili's organizers as a construction accommodation specifically. But anyone who's tried to find a parking spot at Buchanan on a normal Tuesday afternoon this year already knows the lot has less room to give than it used to, festival or not.

Everywhere Else, September Runs On Schedule

Here's the part that actually reframes how to think about the month: Buchanan Park's construction hasn't shrunk Evergreen's fall calendar. It's revealed how much of that calendar never depended on Buchanan in the first place.

Taste of Evergreen, the Chamber of Commerce's annual food and drink competition, sets up at Evergreen Lake House with samples from more than 15 local restaurants and breweries, nowhere near Buchanan's construction zone. The Elk & Art Fest, now in its seventh year, takes over the parking lot at Evergreen North Shopping Complex next to the post office, with juried artists numbering somewhere between 65 and 75 depending on the year, showing work under open sky. Growing Out West wraps its season at Cactus Jack's, and Mountain Area Land Trust's Miles for MALT sends hikers out onto trail systems that have nothing to do with any rec center at all.

Big Chili is the one event that couldn't simply relocate, mostly because nowhere else in town can absorb 3,000 people on open grass with room for a fire truck demonstration. Everything else already lived somewhere other than Buchanan, which means the town's actual event capacity is wider and more distributed than a single busy Saturday might suggest.

The Pool Wulf Rec Center Is Losing

The other piece of this story that residents don't always connect: the new Buchanan pool has a direct trade-off attached to it. EPRD executive director Cory Vander Veen was blunt about what the finished project buys the district.

will allow us to sunset our more than 50-year-old swimming pool at Wulf Rec Center

That's the pool a lot of longtime Evergreen families grew up swimming in. Once Buchanan's new eight-lane facility opens, Wulf's aging pool goes offline, and the Evergreen High School swim team along with the Evergreen Hurricanes competitive program move their home base to the new natatorium. EPRD has already reserved roughly $2 million to renovate the rest of the Wulf building for gym and play space once that transition happens, so the closure isn't a loss of the facility, just a retirement of a pool old enough to have outlived its own filtration system twice over.

The recreation center itself is expected to stay open through most of the build, with only a brief shutdown planned near the end to physically connect the new pool to the existing one. So the disruption residents are feeling this September, tighter parking, a visible work zone, a festival routed around scaffolding, is close to its peak. What comes after is a modernized aquatics program the town paid for on purpose, back in 2023, at the ballot box.

What This Actually Says About Evergreen

Small mountain towns don't usually announce growth with a ribbon-cutting on a new subdivision. More often it looks exactly like this: a single park absorbing both a festival and a construction crew in the same month, a 2023 tax measure quietly becoming an eight-lane pool, and a 50-year-old pool finally getting to retire with its replacement already under a roof. If you live near Buchanan, you're watching Evergreen decide what its next twenty years of public space look like, one weighted tent leg and one shuttle bus at a time.

If you're weighing whether Evergreen still fits how you want to live, projects like this one are worth watching, not because a pool changes a home's value on its own, but because it tells you how a community chooses to reinvest in itself. Choice Property Brokers has spent decades in these foothill markets and can talk through what's changing in Evergreen and the towns around it. Get in touch when you're ready to talk about your own next move here.