If you tell someone in Colorado Springs you live in Custer County, the first question is usually some version of "what do you do out there." The honest answer this month is that you barely have time to answer, because Westcliffe and Silver Cliff have more going on most weekends than the size of Main Street would suggest.
None of it is run by a tourism board or a marketing agency. A Friday farmers market, a monthly gallery walk, a Sunday concert series, and a dark sky observatory all operate independently of each other, each one built and kept alive by a different group of unpaid locals. That's the part worth sitting with. The Wet Mountain Valley's summer calendar isn't a product someone sells. It's four separate volunteer boards, none of them coordinating with the others, all deciding on their own that this town deserves something to do.
Friday still belongs to Jess Price Park
The Westcliffe Farmers Market celebrates its 19th anniversary this year, held every Friday from 9am to 1pm from June 5th through September 25th at Jess Price Park. Nineteen consecutive years of a weekly market, in a town where you can walk the length of downtown in under ten minutes, means the market has outlasted plenty of the storefronts around it. Somebody has been running the same folding tables and produce boxes since roughly 2007, long before "shop local" became a slogan anywhere else.
The First Saturday habit nobody had to mandate
On the first Saturday of the month, June through October, the galleries and shops downtown open their doors together for what's simply called ArtWalk First Saturday, where visitors meander Main Street to discover fine arts and support the local one-of-a-kind art galleries and shops. This isn't a chamber-of-commerce event with a corporate sponsor banner. It's the galleries themselves agreeing on a shared night.
This year's late-summer draw at 3rd Street Gallery has been a themed show tied to the state's own big anniversary. The gallery's late-July exhibition, running through August 29, was built around the bold landscapes and adventurous spirit of the Centennial State, timed deliberately to Colorado's sesquicentennial year.
What happened at Beckwith Ranch, and why the near-miss matters more than the concert
The most telling event of the month didn't happen on Main Street. It happened five miles north, at a ranch that almost got torched on purpose.
The Historic Beckwith Ranch traces back to brothers Edwin and Elton Beckwith, who established the ranch in 1870 and grew it into one of the largest cattle operations in south-central Colorado. By 1880 they had about 200 horses and 7,000 head of cattle, roughly half of all the cattle in the Wet Mountain Valley at the time, spread across more than 3,000 acres of land. By 1898, the brothers were worth an estimated $5 million, a figure that puts the scale of this operation into perspective for a valley this size, then or now.
The ranch didn't stay a landmark by default. The mansion sat abandoned for nearly 15 years, from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, with proposals ranging from letting the fire department burn it down as a training exercise to simply letting it collapse. It survived because a nonprofit stepped in. In the early 2000s, the nonprofit Friends of Beckwith Ranch used State Historical Fund grants and private donations to restore the ranch buildings and reopen them as a wedding and events center. Today, ten of the property's eleven buildings have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since May 20, 1998.
This August, the same restored grounds are hosting the Wet Mountain Valley Rotary Club's Rockin' the Ranch, an afternoon of live music built around a specific milestone: celebrating the State of Colorado's 150th Birthday. A ranch that was one signature away from a controlled burn a few decades ago is now where the county throws its statehood party. That's not incidental. It's the direct output of one volunteer group's restoration work meeting another volunteer group's decision to use the space.
Sunday afternoons are underwritten by a radio station most people forget is local
Sunday in August has its own fixed point. The High Peaks Summerfest concert series, hosted by KLZR 91.7 FM, is held on Sunday afternoons in August. KLZR isn't a syndicated signal piped in from Denver or Pueblo. It's community radio, and it depends on the community to stay on air. The station's other marquee event, Taste of the Valley, is one of the Valley's premier events of the year where guests gather in celebration and support of KLZR 91.7 Community Radio. The concert series and the fundraiser aren't separate calendar items. They're the same institution running two different events to keep itself funded, and in the process handing the valley two more reasons to be outside on a summer weekend.
Why the sky still looks like it did seventy years ago
This is the part of the Valley's calendar that took the longest to build, and it started with one person's frustration over streetlights.
In 1998, Suzanne Jack, known locally as Smokey, organized a small group of concerned citizens with a simple goal: reduce light pollution in Westcliffe. It took three years of donated fixtures and volunteer labor. Under Smokey's leadership, replacing one light at a time, Dark Skies had solicited enough donations to change all 45 streetlights in the Town of Westcliffe to dark sky friendly fixtures by August of 2001. She didn't live to see the payoff. Smokey Jack died of cancer in 2004 at the age of 58, more than a decade before the designation her work made possible actually arrived. Dark Skies, Inc. of the Wet Mountain Valley led the effort for the towns of Silver Cliff and Westcliffe to be certified as an International Dark Sky Community in March 2015, and today Westcliffe and Silver Cliff were the first towns certified in Colorado, and remain one of the world's highest altitude certified Dark Sky Communities.
The observatory built in her name went up the same year the certification came through. Local merchants Paul Wenke of Ace Hardware, Frank Oberlin of Critical Path Metal Works, and Kent Beach of Beach Ready Mix Concrete donated all the construction materials, and volunteers including construction leader John Peleaux, Mike Liebman, Bob Remington, Bob Tobin, Bob Huestis, and Jack Naff did the work. The Smokey Jack Observatory was formally dedicated on the night of Friday, November 13, 2015, with over 100 people attending.
It's open to the public now, and not just after dark. Dark Skies of the Wet Mountain Valley invites visitors to Bluff Park to watch the surface of the sun during free daytime Solar Sessions, which begin at 11:00 AM and end at noon, with no reservations required. Night viewing runs strongest in warmer months, since the best and warmest months to visit the Smokey Jack Observatory are May through September.
Ask anyone who's stood at the eyepiece for the first time and you'll hear some version of the same line visitors give the volunteer guides:
"I've never seen so many stars!"
That reaction exists because one woman spent three years convincing a small town to change its lightbulbs, and a handful of volunteers spent a summer building a shed with a retractable roof to put a telescope in.
What actually fills the calendar
If you want to catch any of this yourself, the recurring pieces are easy to plan around:
- Fridays, through September 25: Westcliffe Farmers Market, Jess Price Park, 9am to 1pm
- First Saturday of the month, through October: ArtWalk on Main Street, galleries open together
- Sundays in August: High Peaks Summerfest, hosted by KLZR 91.7 FM
- Ongoing through September: Free Solar Sessions and Star Parties at Smokey Jack Observatory, Bluff Park
None of these required outside capital or a corporate calendar. A Rotary chapter restored and reopened a ranch that nearly got demolished. A radio station funds its own concert series. A handful of gallery owners agreed on a monthly night. And one woman's three-year streetlight campaign eventually became the reason this is one of the world's darkest, highest small towns you can stand in and actually see the Milky Way.
That's the part worth remembering the next time somebody asks what there is to do out here. The answer isn't that Westcliffe has a full calendar despite being small. It's that a handful of people, working through a handful of nonprofits, decided the calendar was worth building themselves.
Jennifer "Danni" Gunn has spent more than thirty years watching these same institutions take shape in Park County and the surrounding high country, which is part of why Rocky Mountain RLA approaches every listing the way a longtime local would: with an eye for what actually gives a property and its community their value. If you're weighing what your own piece of the Wet Mountain Valley or the wider high country is worth, Danni offers a free property valuation and consultation to walk through it with you.
