Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Carbondale, CO

The Town of Carbondale is a home rule municipality in Garfield County, Colorado.

The town population was 6,434 at the 2020 United States census.

The 2020 census counted 2,416 households and 2,583 housing units in Carbondale.

Carbondale was incorporated on April 26, 1888, and the Carbondale post office had opened the year before, on January 6, 1887.

Carbondale takes its name from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, the hometown of some of its early settlers — even though the Colorado town was not founded for coal.

The town sits in the Roaring Fork Valley on the south bank of the Roaring Fork River near its confluence with the Crystal River, downstream from Aspen and upstream from Glenwood Springs.

Carbondale's horizon is dominated by Mount Sopris, which rises to 12,953 feet several miles south of town, and the town is the northern terminus of the West Elk Loop Scenic and Historic Byway.

Early Carbondale farmers and ranchers supplied food to the silver miners of booming Aspen, and before the rise of industrial agriculture in Idaho the town's signature crop was potatoes — a legacy still celebrated each fall with Potato Day, a parade and cookout in Sopris Park.

Despite its name's origin, the Carbondale area held significant coal reserves up the Crystal River Valley, and coal drove the local economy until the mines closed permanently by 1991; a methane explosion in 1981 had killed 15 miners.

Since the 1980s, Carbondale has partly served as a bedroom community for workers priced out of Aspen, while developing its own arts scene anchored by the annual Mountain Fair in Sopris Park, which draws 18,000 to 20,000 people over three days.