Walk down Jefferson Street on a Saturday morning this time of year and the tents at St. Peter's Catholic Church are still full, vendors still calling out for regulars who show up for the same eggs and the same bundle of dahlias every week. This coming Saturday, October 3, is the last one. The Monument Hill Farmers' Market, also known locally as the Hometown Market, closes out its season after running every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. since May 23. Vendor counts cited by market organizers vary from about 45 to more than 65 depending on the week, but the pattern holds either way: this is the biggest weekly market in the Monument and Palmer Lake area, and this weekend it packs up for the year.
If you've been treating that Saturday close as the end of Monument's market season, the calendar disagrees with you.
The Same Weekend, A Different Closing
October 3 isn't just the market's last day. It happens to land on the same weekend as the final Cars & Coffee show from the Tri-Lakes Cruisers, the car club that's been meeting monthly at the VCA Animal Hospital parking lot on CO-105 since April. Their schedule runs the first Sunday of the month through October, which puts the last show of the year on Sunday, October 4, the day right after the farmers market's final Saturday.
Two routines that have anchored Monument weekends since spring end within 24 hours of each other. If you only pay attention to one of them, it looks like the town's outdoor season just stopped. It didn't. It moved.
One Week Later, A Bigger Market Shows Up
The following weekend, October 10 and 11, Lewis Palmer High School's north parking lot on Higby Drive hosts Fall Market Days, a twice-a-year event that's a different animal from the Saturday produce market. This one runs Saturday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and it draws roughly 140 makers, artists, and boutique vendors, more than double what shows up on a typical Jefferson Street Saturday. It's the same format that ran in June, and it exists specifically because the town's craft and maker vendors don't get folded into the weekly produce market. This is their own separate calendar.
So the actual sequence for Monument this fall looks like this:
- Saturday, October 3: last Saturday of the weekly farmers market at 55 Jefferson Street
- Sunday, October 4: last Cars & Coffee of the year at the VCA Animal Hospital lot on CO-105
- Saturday and Sunday, October 10 and 11: Fall Market Days at Lewis Palmer High School, roughly 140 vendors
- Wednesday, October 28: Tri-Lakes Community & Business Expo at the Tri-Lakes YMCA
Read as a list, it looks like a lot ends and then a lot starts again. Read as a town's actual rhythm, it's closer to a handoff. The produce market steps aside so the craft market gets its turn, and the car club's monthly schedule gives way to whatever comes next on its own calendar, which the club has run this way for years.
What Filled In While The Market Ran
Spring and summer weren't just about the market and the car shows. A few newer spots opened and started showing up in the same conversations as the town's longtime anchors. 1979 Coffee Monument opened with a balcony that looks out over the mountains and a bike rack out front, positioning itself as a stop for people already moving through downtown on foot or by bike rather than a destination unto itself. Papa Bear Pizza built a following around pies made on Alaskan starter dough, with board games out for families waiting on a table, a detail that matters in a town where Saturday mornings already belong to a farmers market a few blocks away.
None of that displaces what was already there. La Casa Fiesta has been serving New Mexican food on Front Street for years, and Back East Bar & Grill keeps its Saturday music bingo nights running as a fixture separate from anything happening at the market or the car show. Forge Coffee Lab, known from its original location, opened a second spot in town this year as well. The town's food and coffee options grew this year without replacing what residents already had reasons to visit.
The Month Doesn't Quiet Down, It Changes Shape
By the time October 28 arrives, the farmers market has been closed for weeks and Fall Market Days is done too. But the Tri-Lakes Chamber of Commerce closes out the month with its Community & Business Expo at the Tri-Lakes YMCA, a free showcase of local businesses and nonprofits with a food truck from The Original Dr. Taco parked outside. It's not a market and it's not a car show. It's the Chamber's own event, and it's the kind of gathering that only makes sense once you understand Monument's fall calendar isn't one long wind-down toward winter. It's a series of different organizations, each running their own version of "come see what's here," at intervals through the whole month.
That's the part worth holding onto if you live here and only track one thread of it. The farmers market ending on October 3 feels like a season closing. It's really one organization's season closing, timed almost exactly alongside another group's season closing the next day, followed a week later by a completely different market run by a completely different set of organizers, followed later that month by the Chamber's own event. Four separate calendars, overlapping just enough to make the town feel like it's slowing down when it's actually just cycling through who's hosting.
If you've been going to the Saturday market all summer and assumed you'd have nothing left to do on weekends once October hit, Fall Market Days on the 10th and 11th is worth putting on the calendar before you write off the month.
Colorado Springs Collective keeps track of what's actually happening around Monument and the Tri-Lakes area as the seasons turn, not just what's listed on a city calendar. If there's a local event, opening, or closing you think we should be following, let us know what you're seeing on your own street.
