The 21st annual Arvada Kite Festival was an enormous affair when it took to the air in April. Hundreds of families dispersed over the grass fields of the Stenger Sports Complex and unfurled their own kites into the blue skies or watched as the professionals did the same with a group of super-sized, multi-colored kites.
It doesn’t take much skill to fly a kite at first glance — just wind. But there is a lot to know, and though wind tends to be calmest heading into the summer months, the Front Range has enough of it to lift a kite and get it soaring almost any time.
Hobbyists at this year’s festival spoke with The Denver Post and shared their tips on where to buy kites — and where they’ll fly best.
Into the Wind (1408 Pearl St., Boulder)
Twenty-one-year-old Selma Torrico bought her kite, a black bat with adorable green eyes, from her former employer in Boulder. Into the Wind is a singular shop that has been selling all types of regular and stunt kites for longer than the Arvada Kite Festival has been around. (It also sources wind-up and novelty toys.)
A kite with a flat frame like Torrico’s bat is one of the easiest to fly, she said. She had another growing up, a dragon kite, that she flew with her family in Boulder. That predilection led her to work at Into the Wind five years ago.
“It’s one of life’s simple pleasures,” said Torrico, who now works at a restaurant. The wind in Arvada during this year’s festival was decent enough for Torrico to cast and gently guide her kite for more than an hour. It’s usually optimal by ponds and other bodies of water, she said, her sun hat secured tightly on her brow.
Into the Wind sells creature, diamond, box and dragon kites. A similar kite to Torrico’s, a tie-dye butterfly with a simple frame, was listed at $32.95 in the store’s online shop.
Online retailers
Forty-year-old Eddy Mena learned to fly kites as a child in Nicaragua. (He called them “palometas” in Spanish.) He learned to build his own out of newspaper, letting them rip and cutting the kite line once they reached a point of no return.
The one he flew at the festival, however, came from Amazon: of a sharp-toothed cartoon shark ($14.99).
Though lacking in lake breeze, the foothills and plains east of the Rocky Mountains have a low wind ceiling that can get a kite up in the sky easily, Mena said.
“Once the wind lifts up the kite, I follow the wind,” he said. “I’m constantly moving and never in the same place.”
His son’s mother, Sarah Miller, held up a green cobra kite with a lengthy tail. Further afield, Tim Fernandez had opted for a similar kite, only with a tail that was 98 feet long, twice as tall as the Hollywood Sign. (Currently ) He spent about $15 more on a translucent .
“Usually I have the little kites, but this year I needed to go a little bigger,” he said before his cobra’s sprawling tail wrapped around two other kite lines, bringing all three of them down. “It’s so fun and relaxing.”
Warehouse retailers
Costco, Walmart and other all-in-one megastores stock kites for as low as $10.
Steven Chau and his friend Ben Kim impressed their young children at the kite festival by maneuvering a purple dragon kite with a horned head that Chau had picked up last year. “It was one of those Costco buys and we never really took it out” until April for the festival, Chau, 36, of Aurora, said.
Kite-flying wasn’t a childhood pastime for Chau, as his parents were constantly working, but he wanted to introduce it to his two young children and start what he hopes will become a new tradition.
“It’s definitely easier if you have a gust of wind,” he said as his friends and family sat by. “I think the trick is, you have to get it to a certain point where it just kind of lifts itself up.”
