The town empties out on Monday morning, August 10. The last Mountain Arts Festival tent comes down at Ute Pass Cultural Center, the out-of-town plates thin from the Midland Avenue lots, and for about six weeks the City Above the Clouds belongs to the people who live in it.
Those six weeks are the best of the year, and they are also the least publicized. The festival gets the press. The aspens on Kebler Pass get the Instagram traffic. What sits in between is a stretch of Fridays and Saturdays when a lot has quietly changed on Midland, the farmers market is running its final laps, and the color on Rampart turns a week before anyone in the Springs notices.
What actually opened on Midland this summer
If you have driven past 110 W. Midland Ave. lately, the patio is full again. The Woodland Social opened over Independence Day weekend at 110 W. Midland Ave., offering food, drink and live music during its opening weekend, much like its predecessor 110 Reserve did during its time. The husband-and-wife owners, Levi and Miranda Kleeb, are not new to feeding this town. They also own and operate The Salty Cow, a food truck that serves and caters at events in southern Colorado, as well as Red Beard Coffee.
Two things worth knowing before you go. During its soft opening, the Kleebs intend to run the restaurant from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., with hours anticipated to extend three hours earlier as they get a feel for the community. And hiring is slower than they expected. "At the coffee shop we post an ad and we get hundreds of applicants within the first day," Miranda said. "But here, it's been a little different." Translation for residents: a Friday at 7 p.m. is not the reservation you want in August. Try a Wednesday.
The bigger opening is up the hill. Tava House is the six-acre project from Chef Victor Matthews, the name behind Paragon Culinary School and Black Bear Distillery in Green Mountain Falls. "It's enormous," food journalist Matthew Schniper said of the six-acre campus. "There's a banquet facility on one side, a tap room downstairs and there's a steakhouse coming upstairs." The upstairs steakhouse is called Firebrand, and the new two-story destination will feature a pour-your-own taproom, an elegant event space and an upstairs fine-dining steakhouse called Firebrand.
The name is not a coincidence. The name comes partly from the Ute language in reference to Sun Mountain, also known as Pikes Peak. If you have lived here long enough to remember the older iteration of Black Bear as a fine-dining room, this is the same lineage returning at a bigger scale.
A useful rule for August in Woodland Park: the places locals want are the ones tourists don't Google. The Woodland Social's patio and Firebrand's dining room are already both.
The Friday market has fewer Fridays than you think
The Woodland Park Farmers Market at Memorial Park runs every Friday, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., and it does not go year-round. Join us every Friday through September from 8am - 1 pm at Memorial Park in Woodland Park. That is the whole window. From today's vantage point in early August, you have roughly eight Friday mornings left before the summer market closes and the vendors do not reappear until the Saturday before Thanksgiving at Ute Pass Cultural Center.
The market is older and larger than it looks from Highway 24. Award-winning market in continuous operation since 1991, at elevation of 8,600ft and next to Pikes Peak. Summer market outdoors, 100 vendor spaces. From second Friday in June to end of September. Listed in America's Top 101 Farmers Markets.
If you have been treating it as a produce stop, the season is telling you to widen the list. Late August is when the stone fruit from the Western Slope stops and the storage crops start, so this is the window for tomatoes and peaches before the shelves shift to squash and root vegetables. It is also the last reliable stretch for the food-truck lunch on Center Street before the vendor mix compresses in September.
Why Rampart turns a week before the Springs
Here is the number worth internalizing if you live at 8,500 feet. Colorado Springs itself sees peak fall color around mid-October, but the higher country visible from your kitchen window turns a full week earlier. As for Colorado Springs and the southern Front Range, the map indicates we can expect peak color around Oct. 13-20. But color around the higher elevations of the Pikes Peak region such as Cheyenne Canon, Rampart Range and Pikes Peak itself should be approaching peak color at least a week or more earlier.
For residents that means the best drive of the year is a weekday in late September or the first week of October, not the second weekend of October when the guidebooks send everyone west. The road that matters is a short one. From Baldwin Street to Loy Creek Road to Rampart Range Road puts you at the Rampart Reservoir Trailhead in under fifteen minutes. Great views of aspens with Pikes Peak in the background. This trail is a 2.6-mile round-trip hike with just 284 feet of elevation gain.
The trade-off nobody mentions on the tourism sites: This is THE ROAD for Colorado Springs locals. Expect heavy traffic throughout fall weekends. The residents' move is to go on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, be off the mountain by noon, and let the visitors have Saturday.
Rough timing to plan around:
| Location | Approximate peak window |
|---|---|
| Rampart Range, upper Pikes Peak slopes | Early October |
| Rampart Reservoir Trail area | Early to mid-October |
| Downtown Colorado Springs and Westside | Oct. 13–20 |
Those dates are averages. The month of September is the ideal time to witness a gilded aspen spectacle on a scenic drive in Colorado, but you have to time it right: The color lasts only about a week in most places. If you see the first gold appearing on the north-facing slopes above town, you have about seven days.
Six weekends, one plan
The residents' calendar for the window between the festival and the first hard freeze:
- Weekend of Aug. 15. First test run at The Woodland Social. Aim for a mid-afternoon Saturday, before the dinner rush and while the patio still has shade. The pimento bacon cheeseburger is on the soft-opening menu.
- Weekend of Aug. 22. Farmers market Friday morning at Memorial Park. Peach and tomato peak. Then a Firebrand reservation Saturday if you can get one; the taproom downstairs takes walk-ins.
- Weekend of Aug. 29. Labor Day weekend belongs to everyone else. Let them have Highway 24. Use the long weekend for the shorter, closer trails; the Rampart Reservoir Trail is a good 90-minute morning out with dogs on leash.
- Weekend of Sept. 12. Scout drive on Rampart Range Road. Nothing will be at peak yet, but you are looking for the first stands turning on the north aspects. Whichever stand you flag is where you go back the following week.
- Weekend of Sept. 19. Second Wednesday concert series has wrapped for the year, but Ute Pass Cultural Center still runs Cultural Center programming through fall. Check the city calendar the week of.
- Weekend of Sept. 26. Last Friday of the summer farmers market. Storage crops, winter squash, and the vendors you want to say goodbye to before Thanksgiving. Then a weekday aspen drive the following Tuesday, when the color is likely at or near peak on Rampart and traffic is manageable.
The move for residents
Every town has a version of this window. What is unusual about Woodland Park is the compression. The best food openings in years are three blocks apart on Midland. The oldest farmers market in the region is a two-minute drive from either of them. And the aspen drive that Front Range visitors will fight for in mid-October is a stand of trees on a fire road that you can be at before your coffee gets cold.
The people who live here already know most of this. The point of writing it down is to say the calendar rewards planning between now and October 1, and after that the window closes for another year.
If you have been thinking about how your home fits into the year ahead, or you are curious what the shift from summer to fall does to demand for homes in this elevation band, Colorado Springs Collective is a call away. Request Your Home Valuation and we will bring a read on the market that is as specific as the neighborhood it comes from.
