COColorado State Symbols

Colorado's most recognized symbol is its flag, a red letter C wrapped around a gold disc on blue and white stripes. The name Colorado is Spanish for "colored red," borrowed from the sandstone canyons of the Colorado River, and that same red is why the C is the color it is. The rest of the official list leans on altitude: a wildflower that grows above 7,000 feet, a spruce carrying the state's name, and a bighorn sheep.

Official state symbols

What is on the Colorado state flag

Andrew Carlisle Johnson designed the flag for the Colorado chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the General Assembly adopted it in June 1911. Three horizontal stripes run blue, white, blue. A circular red C sits across the first two stripes, and a solid gold disc fills it. Each color carries an assigned meaning: blue for the sky, white for the snow on the peaks, gold for the sunshine Colorado gets on close to 300 days a year, and red for the earth. The 1911 statute never fixed the shades or the size of the C, so early flags varied badly from maker to maker. A 1929 amendment set the blue and red to the same tones used in the national flag, and a 1964 revision pinned down the diameter of the gold disc and the exact placement of the C.

Inside the state seal

The seal was adopted in 1877, a year after statehood, and it copies most of the 1861 territorial design. At the top is the eye of God inside a triangle, ringed by golden rays. Below it stands a Roman fasces, a bundle of rods around an axe, bound with a red, white and blue band: authority held together by union. The heraldic shield underneath carries three snow-capped mountains with clouds above them, and in the lower half a crossed miner's pick and sledgehammer, a nod to the gold rush that pulled settlers across the plains from 1859. The motto Nil sine numine runs on a scroll beneath, usually rendered as "nothing without providence," and the date 1876 closes the design.

Symbols that surprise people

• Pack burro racing is the official state summer heritage sport, designated in 2012. Runners lead a loaded burro over mountain passes, repeating what prospectors did walking their animals down from the high country.
• Stegosaurus became the state fossil in 1982 after a campaign by Colorado schoolchildren. The first specimen ever described was quarried near Morrison in 1877.
• Rhodochrosite, the state mineral, is a rose-pink crystal. The finest specimen ever pulled out of the ground, the Alma King, came from the Sweet Home Mine near Alma.
• Shelter dogs and cats were named the official state pet in 2013, one of very few such designations in the country.
• Colorado has two official state songs. "Rocky Mountain High" joined "Where the Columbines Grow" in 2007, more than 90 years after the first one was adopted.

Neighboring states' symbols

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