Denver, Colorado (CNN) -- Coming to the Mile High City this weekend was the perfect 65th birthday present for Karen Stevenson. She and her husband drove out of the Bible Belt to experience, for the first time, what it's like to buy and smoke weed legally.
She wore a T-shirt featuring an image of María Sabina, a late-Mexican shaman, puffing on a joint -- a shirt that, until this day, she never dared to wear outside her Cape Girardeau, Missouri, home.
"It's kind of like being a part of history," she said Saturday, while waiting for a bus in front of a marijuana-themed sandwich shop. "I used to want to go to Amsterdam. Now I don't have to."
The Stevensons are among the tens of thousands of visitors -- by some estimates 80,000 -- who've come to Denver to mark 420 (April 20), a date that's emerged as a holiday among those steeped in cannabis culture.
Though the date has long been observed in Colorado, this is the first celebration since recreational sales of marijuana became legal here on New Year's Day. (Recreational use became legal in late 2012.)
Replete with the Denver "420 Rally" in Civic Center Park, the High Times Cannabis Cup -- an expo and a competition sponsored by the magazine -- and a 420 concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre headlined by Snoop Dogg, the weekend has drawn the trappings one might expect. Dreadlocks. Tie-dye. T-shirts brandishing phrases like "Cheech & Chong for President."
Those predictable, or stereotypical, images, however, only tell part of the story.
They don't speak for the white-haired Mississippi man who looked like he'd walked out of a law firm on casual Friday. They don't reflect what drew a Crohn's disease patient from Missouri. Nor do they represent three older Texas women, one with her nails perfectly manicured in hot pink and her hair done just so, who advocate on behalf of seniors and are working to reform marijuana laws.
"We're not trying to force people to smoke pot," said Dawn Brooks, 62, of Austin, the one with the bright nails. "Cannabis is merely a plant. That's all it is. And more and more seniors are coming out of the closet."
This is a weekend that draws people of various backgrounds and with different needs and desires.
That said, for many of those who turned out Saturday, the vast majority it seemed from out-of-state, it was all about the smoking. And for some of them, it was in a frenzied way -- a mad rush to try everything because they couldn't take any of it home.
Kate, a 30-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, was waiting with her boyfriend, Scott, for a free bus ride to the Cannabis Cup expo at Denver Mart.
"It's like his Super Bowl," said Kate, who, like many people we spoke to, didn't want her last name used. "He's been giddy about it for weeks. ... Super stoked is an understatement."
Bus to Show, a nonprofit that works to reduce intoxicated driving, partnered with High Times to offer transportation this weekend. It set up a downtown location for pickups and drop-offs outside Cheba Hut, a marijuana-themed sub shop.
Besides the free shuttles to and from the expo, the organization sold out a $20-a-day hop-on, hop-off shuttle tour of what it called The Cannabis Freedom Trail. The CannaBUS, as the tour shuttles are called, have been shepherding as many as 200 people a day to various cannabis dispensaries around town.
On one tour we joined, smoke wafted out windows. Strangers shared pipes and exchanged samples of weed and wax, a concentrated form of marijuana. Canisters of buds bearing names like "tangerine haze" and "strawberry cough," were passed around to smell. Nutella pancakes came up in conversations at least three times.
Wearing a neon green wig and green Power Ranger mini-dress, Teri Starbird, 50, who lives outside Wichita, Kansas, lit up some "Bruce Banner." It is one of the contenders in this year's Cannabis Cup competition.
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