Larkspur's Community Calendar Beyond the Renaissance Festival

August 20, 2026

Cottage stoop with stacked firewood beside weathered siding, a gravel path, and golden aspen leaves.

Larkspur's year-round population sits at roughly 222 people as of 2026. For eight weekends every summer, more people than that pass through the gates of the Colorado Renaissance Festival before the joust's first show even starts.

The festival is one part of Larkspur's summer calendar, alongside other community activities. It closed for the season on August 2. In the back half of August, those activities continue on their own schedules.

A Festival That's Bigger Than Its Own Town

The Colorado Renaissance Festival has held its 350-acre site at 650 W Perry Park Avenue since 1976, running Saturdays and Sundays from mid-June through early August. This year's run covered eight weekends, June 13 through August 2, with adult tickets at $32 and kids 5 to 12 at $15. Last year marked a first in the festival's history: tickets sold out entirely during Pirate Invasion week, something that hadn't happened in decades of operation. The festival responded by capping online ticket sales for 2026.

That's a genuinely large seasonal operation sitting inside a town whose own population wouldn't fill a fraction of the festival's daily attendance. During those eight weekends, Interstate 25's Exit 173 and Highway 105 through Perry Park carried festival-related traffic. With the festival closed for the season, that traffic has ended.

Wednesdays Never Stopped

While the festival ran its full eight-week season, the Larkspur Farmers Market kept its own separate schedule going, every Wednesday from 3 to 7 p.m. at Larkspur Community Park on Spruce Mountain Road. The market opened for the season on June 3, ran straight through the festival's entire run without pausing, and has two more Wednesdays left before it wraps for the year: August 26 and September 2.

The vendor mix is the kind of thing that only makes sense at town scale: organic produce and eggs from local farms, locally sourced meats, artisan oils, handcrafted soaps and candles, and rotating local art and crafts. It's a Wednesday fixture that has run in parallel with the festival all summer.

Monday Belongs to the Food Trucks

The town runs a second weekly fixture that has even less overlap with festival season. Food Truck Monday sets up at Larkspur Community Park from 4 to 7 p.m., and the lineup rotates week to week rather than sticking with a fixed roster. Past seasons have brought names like Big Belly Brother's BBQ, Hibachi King, Mondal's Burgers, Allora Pizza Co., and Nothing Bundt Cakes through the rotation, a different combination most weeks.

The festival charges admission, and its food vendors are cash-only. Food Truck Monday is free to attend, run by the town's own parks department, and open to whoever shows up at the Community Park. Unlike the festival, Food Truck Monday continues past Labor Day.

The Ballfield Restaurant at Community Park

Tucked at the Community Park baseball field is a converted concession stand that's become one of the more distinctly local food stops in town. It's run by an owner named Ron, and it operates year-round rather than seasonally, which already sets it apart from most of what the festival brings through. The menu runs from coffee and breakfast sandwiches to smash-style burgers, Italian sausage with peppers and onions, hot dogs, and a smoked barbecue pulled pork sandwich topped with slaw and hatch green chile. Regulars have pushed for a chicken sandwich and a Spiedie, a sandwich style with roots in upstate New York that Ron brought with him.

Friday Nights, and Whatever Else Shows Up

Music in the Park runs Friday evenings from 6 to 8 p.m., another recurring fixture that sits entirely outside the festival's calendar. Community events layer in around it without much predictability. In early August, the town hosted a VCC Hot Rods car show at the park from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the kind of one-off that pops up on the town's own calendar and has nothing to do with the festival two miles down the road.

Taken together, the recurring lineup this time of year looks something like this:

Wednesdays, 3 to 7 p.m.: Larkspur Farmers Market at Community Park
Mondays, 4 to 7 p.m.: Food Truck Monday, rotating vendors
Fridays, 6 to 8 p.m.: Music in the Park
Year-round: The Stand, at the Community Park ballfield

That's the actual weekly infrastructure of the town. The festival was the loudest thing on the calendar for two months, but it was never the only thing running.

Larkspur's Nearby Trail Systems

Sandstone Ranch Open Space sits on Perry Park Road between Larkspur and Perry Park, a working cattle ranch dating back to the 1870s that Douglas County acquired in 2017 after the land had been slated for a high-end housing development. The county built out roughly 12 miles of multi-use trail across the property, completed in the fall of 2020, and it remains one of the county's larger trail systems while staying relatively under the radar compared to better-known spots like Castlewood Canyon. The two anchor routes are the Sandstone Meadow Trail Loop, about 3.7 miles round trip with an option to extend to the Ranch Overlook, and the Juniper Valley Loop, around 3.5 miles through juniper forest down to a low valley. Cattle still work the pastures. Hikers share the trail with mountain bikers and horses.

Closer to town, Spruce Mountain Open Space offers a shorter hike up to stone formations and a view worth the climb, with a trailhead that has its own parking and restrooms. It's worth noting the town's own government offices sit on Spruce Mountain Road, a small detail that says something about how central that landmark is to how Larkspur organizes itself.

Both trail systems are within a few miles of the festival site, adding nearby outdoor destinations to the area's summer offerings.