gaylord hotel

The Northern Colorado Hemp Expo, known as the NoCo Hemp Expo since it started over eight years ago, won’t be so northern anymore.

Organizers of the annual trade show have announced that the ninth NoCo Hemp Expo will take place at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs March 29-31, 2023, moving south from its last digs in the Denver area.

The first NoCo Hemp Expo took place in 2014 at the Ranch Events Complex in Loveland before eventually moving on to various arenas in Aurora and Denver, including the Crowne Plaza Denver, Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center and National Western Complex. Finding a permanent home has never been easy for organizers for a variety of reasons, with a pot-hating sheriff in Larimer County, the expo’s growth, COVID-19 and even a refugee and homeless shelter all playing a role in location issues.

The expo’s most recent home, the Gaylord, was booked after the Crowne Plaza had to drop out in 2022 because it had been chartered by the State of Colorado for a “transitional housing site for humanitarian purposes.” Although the Gaylord was accommodating, it’s booked for 2023 until the weekend of April 8, notes NoCo co-founder Morris Beegle, and that coincides with Easter.

The Crowne Plaza is also fully scheduled for spring 2023, Beegle says, and the National Western Complex — home to the expo in 2021 after a pause in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic — is currently undergoing construction and renovations. The Colorado Convention Center, another potential host considered by Beegle, is too full in late March, when he’d prefer to hold the event.

Without a possibility in metro Denver, organizers looked around and even outside of Colorado, eventually settling on the Broadmoor, a hotel in operation in Colorado Springs since 1918 that has added considerable convention space.

“We wanted it all under one roof, and really couldn’t find anything in the Denver area that checked all of the boxes,” Beegle says. “The Gaylord was great and easy to work with, but when we looked at 2023 and 2024, the only dates available there were going into Easter weekend, and we didn’t want to ask people to travel that weekend.”

The Broadmoor is all aboard with hemp, Beegle says, even though it’s owned by billionaire Phillip Anschutz, who’s opposed marijuana legalization and funded anti-legalization campaigns in Colorado in the past; his Colorado Springs and Denver Gazette publications frequently editorialize against Colorado’s stance on cannabis. Colorado…