Glenwood Springs is a house rule municipality that is the county seat of Garfield County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 9,963 at the 2020 United States Census. Glenwood Springs is located at the confluence of the Roaring Fork River and the Colorado River, threading together the Roaring Fork Valley and a series of smaller towns stirring and down the Colorado River.

Glenwood Springs is a historic destination for vacationers in imitation of diverse natural amenities, most particularly the hot springs.

For centuries the area that is now Glenwood Springs was populated by Indigenous people since the colonization of the Americas. The oral history of the Kapuuta and Mouache bands remember that Glenwood Springs is located within the “traditional Nuuchiu tuvupu (The People’s Land) of the Subuagan and Parianuche bands.” Fred Conetah’s History of the Northern Utes states that the Yampa or White River bands used the area, which is now in the Ute ancestral jurisdiction. The Utes were nomadic hunter-gatherers who seasonally used the natural hot springs in the area. The U.S. government surveyed the land in the mid-19th century, although they had no claim on the land. An 1868 unity negotiated by the Tabeguache Ute Chief Ouray preserved the hunting grounds in the Place of present-day Glenwood Springs.

For a rapid time in the 19th century, Glenwood Springs was known as “Defiance”, a state sometimes still used by local teams or businesses. Defiance was traditional in 1883, as a camp of tents, saloons, and brothels afterward an increasing amount of cabins and lodging establishments. It was populated gone gamblers, gunslingers, and prostitutes. Isaac Cooper was the founder of the town. His wife Sarah was having a hard time adjusting to the frontier animatronics and, in an attempt to make her atmosphere somewhat more comfortable, persuaded the founders to tweak the name to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, after her hometown of Glenwood, Iowa.