Washington Park is Denver's outdoor living room

Locals just call it Wash Park, and on a warm evening it works less like a destination than a shared backyard. German-born landscape architect Reinhard Schuetze began laying out the 165-acre grounds in 1899, and the bones of his plan are still here: a long open meadow for picnics and pickup games, curving roads, and two lakes fed by an old city ditch.

Smith Lake and Grasmere Lake are both open for boating, but leave the outboard at home. Denver allows only hand-launched, human- or wind-powered boats on its park lakes, so you’ll see canoes, kayaks, paddleboards, and pedal boats rather than anything with a motor. The 1913 boathouse on Smith Lake still anchors the north end.

The flowers are the other draw. The park’s Perennial Garden, dating to the 1910s, is the largest formal flower bed in Denver’s park system, and a separate Mount Vernon garden was patterned after the one at George Washington’s Virginia estate.

Wrapping it all is a loop path of roughly two and a half miles that fills early with runners, walkers, and strollers. For boating rules and hours before you launch, check the Denver Parks & Recreation boating page.