The Pickleball Courts, The Troll, And How Palmer Lake Gets Things Built

On the west side of Centennial Park, a construction crew started pouring six concrete slabs on June 1, 2025. Fencing, sidewalks, and a final color coating followed, and the surface needed forty five days to cure before anyone could set foot on it. As of that August, Awake Palmer Lake had not even settled on a grand opening date. Today those six courts are finished: professional-grade, fenced, striped, free to use, and open every day of the year.

What's easy to miss, if you're just showing up to play a pickup game, is that no city budget paid for any of it.

Why the town didn't build these itself

Palmer Lake is small enough that its parks department doesn't have a line item for a project like this. The courts came from Awake Palmer Lake, the local nonprofit that's been restoring the lake and its surrounding parkland since 1995. Getting six courts built took a federal grant through the Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging, plus six local businesses each committing $2,000 a year for three years to keep the lights, nets, and surfacing maintained, First National Bank of Monument, Dead Flowers, Yaks Motorcycle Maintenance and Detail Shop, Monumental Spa, and Pikes Peak Harley Davidson among them.

Tim Caves, who ran point on the project for Awake Palmer Lake, described the thinking behind it simply:

"We began to imagine what else we could add to the community."

The courts were built to full regulation spec, with proper surfacing and permanent nets, and they're free and open year round.

Compare that to what happened a few years earlier at Glen Park, on the other side of town. Those courts only got resurfaced because parking-fee revenue from the reservoir trailhead happened to cover the cost that year, according to Mike Pietsch, vice chair of the town's Parks and Trails Commission. Two courts, lined for both tennis and pickleball, funded by whatever spare change the hiking kiosk generated. That's the town's actual capital budget for recreation in a given year: whatever hikers paid to park.

The trailhead fee that quietly funds the rest of the park

That same reservoir kiosk sits at the end of Old Carriage Road, where the Palmer Lake Reservoir Trailhead climbs into Pike National Forest. From there, three named routes fan out: the La Deux Reservoirs Trail, the Chautauqua Mountain and Balanced Rock Loop, and the Limbaugh Canyon and Reservoir Loop. Parking runs around $5.30 to $5.40, cash or card at the kiosk, and it's the same few dollars that once patched up the courts at Glen Park.

The trail rules are stricter than most people expect for what looks like a casual foothills walk. No dogs are allowed near either reservoir, since both sit inside the town's protected watershed. Fishing is permitted only from the bank of the upper, or second, reservoir. No wading, no swimming, in either one. Most hikers reach the first reservoir in under fifteen minutes and the second, larger one in 30 to 45 minutes depending on pace, according to trail logs on AllTrails. It's a short enough round trip to do before dinner, and steep enough that most people don't do it twice in one evening.

Downtown, the new thing is the food

While Awake Palmer Lake has been pouring concrete, the strip of restaurants along Highway 105 has kept doing what it's always done, just with a couple of new names in the mix.

• 105 Social House, on Primrose Street, opened as a gastropub with a full bar and a patio, and has become a go-to for weekend brunch.
• O'Malley's Steak Pub has been family-owned and independent since 1986, and still runs on the same "everybody knows your name" logic it started with.
• Joe Mamas does breakfast and brunch out of a small spot on CO-105, making its own jam and pastries in house.
• Palmer Lake Pub, veteran-owned, keeps a rotating lineup of local bands and a Wednesday karaoke night with Party Marty.
• Sundance Pit BBQ is run by JT Cline, a Palmer Lake native who came back to bring Texas-style barbecue to the Tri-Lakes area.
• Rock House Ice Cream anchors the strip for anyone who wants dessert after a lake walk.

None of this is a boom. It's a small town holding onto its restaurant density while a couple of newer operators fill in gaps that were always there.

The troll nobody asked the town for

Awake Palmer Lake's list of active projects reads like a town building its own amenities one campaign at a time. Past the pickleball courts, the group commissioned local artist Jodie Bliss to build a sculpture of a troll under the pedestrian bridge that crosses the lake, funded the same way the courts were, through direct donations rather than a municipal arts budget. An earlier campaign let residents design decorative train cars for that same bridge, a project the group now lists as completed. A community bathroom on the west side of the park was still under construction in the summer of 2025, with the goal of finishing before that summer was out.

None of these show up on a town council agenda as capital expenditures. They show up as donation drives with a thermometer graphic and a deadline.

A calendar that bends to fire season

The town's event calendar runs on the same volunteer energy, and this year it also ran into the reality of a dry Colorado summer. The 250th America Celebration on July 4 went ahead as planned at Palmer Lake Park, with live music, food vendors, and a beer garden, but Awake the Lake canceled its fireworks display because of fire conditions. The festival didn't get canceled. Just the part that involved setting things on fire near dry grass.

Three weeks later, the Palmer Lake Arts Fest took over Centennial Park on July 25 and 26, with live bands, art demos, food trucks, and a stargazing party at the north end of the lake. The Tri-Lakes Smokin' Showdown and Palmer Paddle followed on August 1, combining paddleboard races, a barbecue cook-off, and the event's long-running "Dumb Things That Float" competition, all on the same water Awake Palmer Lake has spent three decades restoring. The season wraps up on October 18 with the town's twelfth annual .5K, a 546-yard loop around the lake in peak fall color with a donut at the halfway mark and a beer or root beer at the finish.

None of it got scaled back for lack of interest. What got adjusted was the fireworks, because the land itself set the terms this year, the same way it sets terms on parking fees, watershed rules, and what a small nonprofit can realistically fund in a given summer.

What this actually tells you about the town

Put the pieces together and a pattern shows up that's easy to miss if you only see one project at a time. Palmer Lake doesn't wait on a capital budget to decide what gets built. It waits on donations, a grant application, or a few thousand dollars from six local businesses. The five-dollar parking fee at the reservoir trailhead has, in a real year, been the difference between resurfaced courts and no courts at all. The bathroom, the troll, the pickleball courts, all of it got paid for the same way: someone noticed a gap and Awake Palmer Lake filled it, dollar by dollar.

That's not a complaint about the town's finances. It's closer to a description of how the place actually runs. If you live here, the five dollars you drop at the trailhead kiosk or the plate you buy from Sundance Pit BBQ is doing more civic work than it looks like it's doing.

At Western Mountain Real Estate, we pay attention to details like these because they tell you more about a place than any listing sheet does. If you're already calling Palmer Lake home and have questions about what any of this means for your property, your land, or your next move in the Tri-Lakes area, our team is a phone call away. List With Confidence. Sell With Satisfaction.