DENVER — The City of Denver, along with several other partners, are ready to welcome the Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche 2022 Championship Parade and Rally on Thursday.
The rally will start at 9 a.m. at Civic Center Park and last until around 1 p.m. There will be live music, an Avalanche highlight reel from the season, and live video of the parade, which leaves from Union Station at 10 a.m. The parade will travel down 17th Street to Broadway and end at Civic Center Park.
You can watch live coverage starting at 9:30 a.m. on Denver7, thedenverchannel.com and on Denver7+, our free streaming app for Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Android TV.
“We have actually not wanted to jinx the Avs, but we had been planning for this celebration just in case it came to fruition for about three weeks now," said Jill Lis with the City of Denver's Office of Special Events. “We're expecting literally hundreds of thousands of Avs fan to descend upon downtown and celebrate on Thursday.”
The Denver Police Department is prepared with flexible plans to keep crowds safe Thursday. Some downtown streets will be closed to traffic, and Chief Paul Pazen says there will not be any movement between 16th and 18th streets to 17th Street.
“For outdoor events like this that aren't ticketed, we do not have a specific capacity or limiting process," Pazen said. “We're all tired, but we're excited, we're happy. We're just as big of Avs fans as everybody else in Denver and in the state of Colorado.”
Tea with Tae is a new business in the 16th Street Mall and part of Popup Denver. The tea shop just opened this past weekend and could not have picked a better time to start serving customers.
“We are expecting a lot of people to come in," said Taelor O'Dorisio, Tea with Tae's CEO and founder. “It's helping bring people back downtown, especially having such a huge win in the sports community. It just helps build the whole downtown community.”
City officials recommend arriving around 7 a.m. to secure a spot for either the parade or rally. They say to only bring water, not chairs or large bags.
