The Outhouse Races came back this year. So did the Pancake Picnic Breakfast, the petting zoo, and a parade that still shuts down the roads around the Black Forest Community Center for a Saturday morning. This year's theme was "Stars, Stripes and Tall Pines," a nod to the nation's 250th and Colorado's own 150th, and the festival marked its 57th consecutive year on August 8. If you live out here, you already know all of that. What you might not know is what fills the weeks after the parade route empties out.
The easy assumption is that Black Forest's social calendar peaks with the festival and then goes quiet until the holidays. That assumption is wrong, and the reason it's wrong tells you something real about how this community actually functions. There is no single town office running Black Forest's events calendar the way a municipal parks department might in a place like Monument or Parker. Instead, three separate volunteer organizations hand the calendar off to each other, one after another, and each runs its own piece without much overlap.
Three Organizations, Three Different Jobs
The Black Forest Festival belongs to the Black Forest Community Club, the same group that has run it for 57 years and that organizes the parade, the booth fair, and the Biergarten fundraiser that precedes it. Once that wraps, the calendar doesn't fall to the same club. It shifts to a market operator running weekly Saturday hours, and later in the fall it shifts again to the Black Forest Arts & Crafts Guild, a distinct nonprofit that has nothing to do with running the festival and instead spends its year building toward a single big show.
Here's how that handoff breaks down through the rest of 2026:
| Organization | Event | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Black Forest Community Club | Black Forest Festival | Held August 8, 2026 |
| Backyard Farmers Market | Weekly Saturday market | Continues into fall on Black Forest Road |
| Black Forest Arts & Crafts Guild | Fall Show and Sale | Historically early November at the Community Center |
None of these three groups publishes on a shared municipal calendar. If you only follow the festival's own promotion, you'd reasonably think the season winds down in August. It doesn't. It just changes hands.
The Market Keeps Its Tents Up Longer Than You'd Guess
The Backyard Farmers Market runs Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 12530 Black Forest Road, and it's built around the kind of vendor list that rewards a scenic drive out rather than a quick errand: tamales, watermelons, fresh-baked tarts, cheeses, microgreens. Plenty of Front Range Saturday markets treat Labor Day as their unofficial closing bell. This one is described by regional market guides as running "well into the fall," which puts it on a different clock than markets built around the tourist calendar.
That distinction matters if you've been operating on the assumption that farmers market season and festival season end at the same time. They don't. The festival is a single day. The market is a standing weekly appointment that outlasts it by weeks, and if you've been meaning to make it out there before the season closes, late August isn't your last chance. It's closer to the middle of the run.
A few things worth knowing before you go:
- The market champions sustainability, so bring your own bags. You're not leaving with just one item.
- It's a working Saturday morning market, not a festival. Expect vendors and produce, not a parade.
- The scenic drive along Black Forest Road is part of the appeal for anyone coming from the Cathedral Pines side of the neighborhood.
The Real Fall Anchor Isn't the Festival. It's the Guild's Show in November.
If the festival is the loudest event on Black Forest's calendar, the Black Forest Arts & Crafts Guild's Fall Show and Sale is the one with the most staying power. It's held at the Black Forest Community Center, the same venue that hosts the festival, but it's run entirely separately by the Guild, a nonprofit built around fine arts, decorative arts, and culinary crafts made by Black Forest residents. Last year's show ran November 5 through 9, with extended hours across the weekend: Wednesday from 4 to 7 p.m., Thursday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Guild hasn't published exact 2026 dates yet, but if the pattern holds, expect it to land in the same early-November window again.
What makes the Guild's show worth marking on your own calendar rather than waiting to hear about it secondhand is what it actually funds. The Guild maintains a scholarship fund and annually awards money to a graduating senior from a Black Forest area high school, public, private, charter, or home school. That's not a detail most people associate with a craft fair. It's the kind of thing you only know if you've paid attention to who's actually running these events and why, rather than treating them as interchangeable seasonal filler.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
The takeaway isn't that Black Forest has more going on than people think. It's that the "going on" is structured differently than it looks from the outside. A newcomer used to a single town calendar, the kind Monument or Parker residents check for concerts in the park or a farmers market schedule, might assume Black Forest works the same way. It doesn't. There's no unified events page because there's no single organization behind the calendar. The festival, the market, and the Guild's show are three separate institutions with three separate volunteer bases, and each one only shows up on its own channel: the Community Club's own site for the festival, the market's own listing for Saturday hours, and bfacg.org for the Guild's show dates once they're set.
If you've lived out here through a few Augusts, you've probably already sensed this without naming it. The festival ends and the neighborhood doesn't feel emptied out the way a town with one events calendar might after its big summer weekend. That's because Black Forest's fall isn't one thing winding down. It's three different volunteer groups taking their turns, and the only way to catch all three is knowing to look for them separately.
Precision Spaces tracks this kind of neighborhood detail because it's the same discipline that goes into reading a market accurately: knowing who actually runs what, rather than assuming one source tells the whole story. If you're curious about how Black Forest and Cathedral Pines fit into the broader north El Paso County market, or you just want a straight answer about what's happening with home values out here, reach out to Precision Spaces directly. Rob Leatherman works this area daily and is glad to talk through it, no pressure attached.
