West Side fall calendars include familiar events: First Friday ArtWalk, the scarecrows on the avenue, Pumpkins in the Park, and trivia at the brewery. That rhythm has held for years, and it will hold again this October.
This fall also brings changes a few blocks off that strip, in the open space, and along other West Side corridors. The historic core of Old Colorado City keeps its familiar rhythm, while activity elsewhere on the West Side is also changing.
A Familiar Fall Calendar on Four Blocks
Walk West Colorado Avenue between 23rd and 27th Streets on the first Friday of any month, and you're doing what residents have done for years. Galleries stay open late, restaurants put out extra seating, and the whole stretch runs 5 to 8 p.m., free except for parking. Mother Muff's and Thunder and Buttons anchor opposite sides of the street for anyone who wants a meal before or after.
October adds its own fixtures on top of that baseline, and the district has already posted the specifics:
- First Friday ArtWalk continues on its usual schedule, 5 to 8 p.m., rain or shine
- The scarecrow display runs the entire month, October 1 through October 31, with local businesses decorating storefronts along the avenue
- Pumpkins in the Park lands on Saturday, October 24, from noon to 6 p.m., with a pumpkin patch, costume and carving contests, and a stop from the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo's traveling ZOOmobile
- OCC Farmer's Market keeps its Saturday morning slot, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.
- Trivia Night at OCC Brewing runs every Thursday
These recurring events are part of the historic core's fall calendar. The restaurant openings and trail updates described here add other points of interest around the historic core.
Two New Kitchens Landed Just Off the Strip
The tourist corridor between 23rd and 27th is where the postcards get taken, but the addition worth noticing sits at 3012 W Colorado Ave, past the numbered blocks that mark the historic district. That's where Codswallop opened, a British fish and chips spot from the same owners behind The Brit Pub. It's a sister concept. The people behind it already know what sells on this side of town, and they built a second business a few blocks past the district's edge rather than inside it.
The other new kitchen isn't on Colorado Avenue at all. Japon soft-opened this spring near the intersection of Garden of the Gods Blvd and Centennial, a corridor that has nothing to do with the brick sidewalks and gallery windows of the historic strip. It's a different commercial pattern entirely, closer to the shopping centers than the tourist walk, and it's been quietly building a following since it opened.
The two openings are outside the four blocks many associate with West Side dining: one just past the district's southern edge and the other to the north, on a corridor built around parking lots rather than sidewalks. They add restaurant options beyond the historic strip.
A Trail Name Is Finally Catching Up, and a Backside Route Is Worth the Detour
Red Rock Canyon Open Space had gone years with a trail called White Acres, a name with no real connection to the land or the people who built the trail system. The Colorado Springs Parks Advisory Board approved changing it to the Don Ellis Trail on August 13, a request the Friends of Red Rock Canyon had been pushing for nearly five years. The formal agreement with the city still needs to be signed and an $850 fee still needs to be paid before it's official, and the group expects the change to land on the ground sometime this fall. If you hike the White Acres loop this month and the signage hasn't changed yet, that's why. The paperwork is still catching up to the vote.
While the naming process works itself out, a different corner of the same open space is worth exploring if your usual loop has gotten routine. Most regulars know Contemplative Trail and the well-worn path through the meadow toward the rock walls. A recent account in The Gazette follows Sand Canyon Trail past that junction into the park's wilder backside. From the parking lot, the trail runs west through open meadow, then climbs toward a Y about a mile in. Bearing left onto the East Fork takes you into terrain that feels genuinely secluded compared to the rest of the park, and a switchback around the 1.7 mile mark opens onto views back toward Garden of the Gods and the canyons to the north. From there the route threads through Intemann, Greenlee, and Mesa trails before rejoining Roundup and looping back to the start.
The trail-name process and the Sand Canyon route offer another kind of West Side update alongside the restaurant openings, beyond the familiar storefronts and well-known loops.
What the Edges Are Telling You
Put the three threads together and a shape emerges. The historic core of Old Colorado City keeps its familiar fall calendar. Meanwhile, the new restaurants described here sit outside that four-block footprint, and the open space that borders the neighborhood is working through a trail-name correction while Sand Canyon offers another route to explore.
None of this means the historic strip is losing relevance. It means there's more to the West Side's story: restaurant openings beyond the tourist corridor and trail updates in the neighboring open space.
Keeping track of those shifts, the trail names, the new addresses, the corridors quietly filling in, is part of what makes local knowledge worth something when you're deciding where to live or what your own property is worth. If you're curious how any of this is shaping values on your particular block of the West Side, CC Signature Group tracks this neighborhood the same way we tracked the trail rename and the new kitchens on Colorado Avenue. Get Your Instant Home Valuation and find out where your home stands this fall.
