Upon my first glance—no wait, scratch that—upon my first few glances, stares, and ponderings, I wasn’t sure what to assume about the type of place that the Buffalo Rose might be on the inside. The outside has a very unassuming façade, and the few windows to the inside are too dark to be able to tell what is happening on the other side of the glass. The closed off porch area with a covered roof that spills out onto the sidewalk hints of a bar that would be teeming with people having a good time, if only the weather was nice enough to be outside. The logo on the Buffalo Rose sign has an old western flair to it because of the

inclusion of a bull’s skull with horns. Anywhere other than the Old West, and I would associate this icon with biker culture, but since Golden is a historical old western town, I was not certain whether this was a more generically-used symbol here.

The name “Buffalo Rose” is intriguing in and of itself. Buffalos are large and bulky animals, yet a rose is such a small and delicate flower—to put these two words together into one name is akin to creating an oxymoron. I don’t know the meaning of the name, but one of Golden’s famous bronze statues sits right