If you live in Manitou, you already know the calendar starts to tighten around mid-August. The Incline crowd thins on weekday mornings, Ruxton stops smelling like sunscreen, and the sandwich boards along Manitou Avenue quietly swap "patio open" for "fire pit lit." By Labor Day the shift is complete, and the next eight weeks turn into something residents plan around whether they mean to or not.
The thing worth naming out loud is this: Manitou's fall is not a menu of events you pick from. It is a three-weekend backbone that the rest of the town's food, parking, and social life reorganizes around. Miss the pattern and you spend October fighting for a table on nights when nothing is happening. Learn it and the season basically runs itself.
The backbone, in three dates
| Weekend | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Sept 5–7 | 52nd Annual Commonwheel Artists Co-op Labor Day Art Festival | Memorial Park |
| Sept 26 | Heritage Brew Festival | Soda Springs Park |
| Oct 24 | 32nd Annual Emma Crawford Coffin Races | Manitou Avenue |
Everything else in this post hangs off those three dates. If you are new to town, print the table and stick it on the fridge. If you have lived here for years, you already know Labor Day is the loudest weekend and Coffin Races Saturday is the one where you either commit fully or leave town.
Labor Day at Memorial Park
Commonwheel is the anchor of the fall calendar, and it has been for a long time. The Labor Day Art Festival at Memorial Park was started by artists in 1974 and is still run by artists, a juried event that draws an estimated 12,000-plus art patrons from up and down the I-25 corridor each year. This year's is the 52nd edition, running Friday-through-Monday setup and public days September 5, 6, and 7.
A few practical notes that never make the tourism copy:
- The park fills fastest between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Saturday. If you are coming for the art rather than the scene, aim for Sunday morning.
- Parking on the north side of Manitou Avenue is a losing game all weekend. Walk down from the Hiawatha Gardens lot or ride in.
- The music stage is genuinely part of the festival, not background noise. Throughout Festival weekend, the entertainment stage highlights local music and poetry.
For residents, the useful reframe is that Labor Day weekend is not a day off. It is three days when the west end of town belongs to visitors, and the rest of us either join in or use the time to hit Barr Trail before the crowds shift there in October.
What changed on the food side this year
The gap between Labor Day and the Heritage Brew Festival on September 26 is the quietest stretch of fall, and it is the right time to work through the restaurants that opened or shuffled since last autumn. Two changes are worth flagging because they alter the town's dinner map in a real way.
First, and this is the one longtime residents keep telling their out-of-town siblings about: Manitou Thai & Ramen marks what may be the first Thai place this town has ever seen, opening in the space inside the Baker House formerly occupied by Persephone Grae's. A local reviewer described the town before it opened as "rife with burgers and beef jerky," which is not wrong. For a walkable downtown of this size to go without a Thai option for decades is unusual, and having one changes the weekly dinner rotation for anyone who used to drive into Colorado Springs on ramen nights.
Second, Persephone Grae's did not close. It relocated to the Westside at 511 N. 30th St. If it was in your rotation, it is still in reach; the drive is shorter than the trip most Manitou residents already make for a Trader Joe's run.
The rest of the September food map, for a resident stitching together dinners between the two festival weekends:
- The Loop at 965 Manitou Ave, the local Mexican spot serving since 1993, open through 9 p.m. most nights. Reliable when you have a group and no reservation.
- Savelli's at 301 Manitou Ave for casual Italian and their specialty ravioli.
- Crystal Park Cantina at 178 Crystal Park Rd, off the main drag and quieter on festival Saturdays.
- Mo's, known around town for biscuits and gravy, meatloaf, and green chili, with a full bar.
- Manitou Sweet Spot, the newer dessert-and-drink café in the heart of downtown pouring handcrafted coffees, dirty sodas, and lemonades.
- Toasted for a locally sourced breakfast or a late-morning happy hour before the crowds arrive.
If you have a visiting sibling in September and you want the "we live here" version of the day, take them through a Rocky Mountain Food Tours morning walk. The tour runs through August 31 in 2026 and blends five culinary tastings with three of the ancient mineral springs, artisanal bites, and spring water at the base of Pikes Peak. It is the rare guided experience that even long-time residents pick up something from.
The Heritage Brew Festival, and why the date matters
September 26 gets less attention than the two bigger weekends on either side of it, and that is exactly what makes it useful. The Heritage Brew Festival brings local breweries to the park for beer, food, and live music, and proceeds benefit the local free museum. The crowd is manageable, the parking situation is a normal Saturday rather than a road closure, and the town does not feel besieged.
If you have friends in Monument or on the west side of the Springs who say Manitou is "too much" in October, this is the weekend you invite them to. The bar to enjoy it is lower than any other festival day in fall.
Coffin Races Saturday: the one you plan around
Then October arrives, and everything reorganizes around a single Saturday. The Emma Crawford Coffin Races have been running since 1995 and the 2026 edition is the 32nd, so if you have not been by now, this is the year.
The scale of the day surprises new residents every time. The Manitou Springs Chamber of Commerce started the first coffin races in the nation in 1995 in memory of a beloved resident, and the races have grown into a Manitou Springs tradition. Attendance is not small-town numbers anymore. Over 10,000 spectators flock to downtown Manitou, most of them in costume.
The logistics detail that matters most for anyone living within walking distance:
The road closes at 9 a.m. and reopens immediately after the races conclude.
That is Manitou Avenue, through the heart of downtown, closed all morning and most of the afternoon. Teams race the 195-yard track along Manitou Avenue, and the races follow the parade at approximately 1 to 2 p.m. If you have plans that require driving through downtown that Saturday, they do not exist. Reroute or walk.
A resident's version of the day, in order:
- Move your car out of the closure zone before 8:30 a.m. If you park on Manitou Ave regularly, this is the one day of the year that bites people.
- Walk the parade route from the west end starting around 11. This is where the costumes are best, before the crowd compresses at the finish.
- Watch the actual races from the median or the 700 block. The Fan Zone lives in the center of the road that day.
- Stay for the after-party at Soda Springs Park. The After Party is at Soda Springs Park and draws over 3,000 attendees, entourage participants, and spectators.
- Eat afterward, not before. Restaurants along the avenue are pinned during the races and much easier at 5:30 p.m.
If you want to enter a team, the deadline is not casual. Registration forms and the $100 entry fee must be received by Thursday, October 22, 2026, at midnight, with the note "no exceptions." Applications go through Visit Manitou Springs at 354 Manitou Avenue.
The free shuttle nobody uses enough
One more thing that mostly gets missed: there is a free shuttle running through October that solves a lot of the parking pain for anyone who lives up Ruxton, up Crystal Park, or off Beckers Lane. The bus is free through October 2026, with pickup and drop-off at 484 Manitou Ave, also known as the Duck Stop for the painted birds hung on the building.
For festival Saturdays it is the difference between a five-block walk and finding a parking spot at 8:15 a.m. Locals use it more each year, and it deserves to be a bigger part of the fall routine.
Where this leaves the season
If you take one thing from all of the above, take this: the fall calendar in Manitou is not a set of things you attend, it is a rhythm the town settles into for eight weeks. Labor Day belongs to Commonwheel and the artists. Late September belongs to the breweries and to the food scene that has quietly gained a Thai restaurant and lost a Baker House tenant to the Westside. Late October belongs to Emma Crawford and to the 10,000 people who come to see coffins race up the main street of a small mountain town. The two weeks in between belong to residents, and they are the most enjoyable stretch of the year if you plan the edges right.
If you are thinking about the season ahead in a bigger sense, whether that means finally putting the house on the market before the holidays or knowing what a fall listing in Manitou actually looks like once the tourism wave settles, Brent Patterson and the team live in this pattern year after year and are always happy to talk it through over coffee at whichever downtown spot still has an open patio.
