Walk out the gate onto Mesa Road this month and take the short cut down to Gateway Trail. For most of the last two years, that walk meant checking a detour map first. Not anymore. The orange barrels are gone, the trail runs straight into Central Garden without a reroute sign in sight, and the neighborhood's front door to Garden of the Gods finally works the way it was supposed to.
That single change would be worth noting on its own. But it landed the same year the resort at the center of the neighborhood turned 75, and the same year the farmers market five miles down the hill changed hands for the first time in decades. None of these things caused each other. They just happened to land within the same fourteen months, on top of a resort dining room that only opened to the public a few years back and is now leaning hard into its own history. For a neighborhood built around a private club, a mesa-top park, and a handful of legacy local businesses, that kind of alignment is not something Kissing Camels sees very often.
Three storylines, one calendar year
- The resort's public dining room finally settled in. Grand View Restaurant, once a members-only space, opened its doors to non-members as part of a $40 million property-wide renovation completed in 2023. Three years later, it's no longer a novelty. It's just where people eat.
- The park's waterline project wrapped. The multi-phase construction that rerouted Gateway Road starting in late 2024, closed Juniper Way Loop on a rotating schedule, and shut the Columbia Road entrance completely for two months in early 2025 reached 97 percent completion by last spring, according to city updates.
- The Saturday market changed ownership. After more than 40 years under the same banner, the Old Colorado City Farmers Market has a new owner this season, a longtime vendor who built his stall selling Palisade peaches.
Each of those is a small, local, dateable fact. Put together, they describe something bigger: a neighborhood whose infrastructure, hospitality, and weekend rituals all cleared their construction seasons at roughly the same time.
What used to be a detour is now just a walk
The Garden of the Gods waterline project has been the background noise of living on the mesa since late 2024. That fall, the city began closing Gateway Road and Gateway Trail in phases and shutting Juniper Way Loop on a rotating schedule. By February 2025, the city's own construction updates put the project at more than 75 percent complete, and the Columbia Road entrance closed entirely from late February through the end of April, cutting off the Stausenbach and Scotsman trails for that stretch. Two months later, the city reported the project at 97 percent finished, with only final touch-ups remaining and progress continuing on a new accessible concrete trail connecting Parking Lot 4 to Central Garden. No closure bulletin has posted since.
That accessible trail is worth pausing on. It's not a restoration of what was there before. It's new, built specifically to open Central Garden to visitors who couldn't manage the old paths, and it exists because of the same project that spent two years rerouting everyone else.
A second, separate infrastructure story wrapped around the same time. The city's traffic signal project on Garden of the Gods Road itself, the corridor most residents actually use to get to I-25 near Northpark Drive and Mark Dabling Boulevard, was expected to finish by late January 2026 after months of eastbound lane closures. It's a different project from the in-park waterline work, but the timing means two separate multi-year headaches for anyone driving toward the mesa cleared within roughly the same year.
None of this changes what Garden of the Gods is to Kissing Camels: a free public park that borders the neighborhood on one side, drawing an estimated 4.5 million visitors a year and contributing roughly $272 million annually to the local economy. What changed is how easy it is, this year, to actually use it without planning around a road crew.
The clubhouse got a second act, and a birthday
Garden of the Gods Resort and Club opened in June 1951, and this June it marked its 75th anniversary with a weekend of programming from June 12 through 14: wellness sessions, historical exhibits, a pool party, a tennis exhibition, and food and beverage specials at Grand View built around the resort's own history. The resort also released a coffee-table book chronicling its decades and created a time capsule of artifacts and photographs, the kind of thing that only happens once in a property's life. "Celebrating 75 years is both a milestone and a responsibility," co-owner Judy Mackey said of the occasion.
That anniversary sits on top of changes that started a few years earlier. The 2023 renovation that opened Grand View to the public also brought a remodeled Kissing Camels Grille & Bar, reopened as a casual sports bar overlooking the fairways, and an expanded outdoor seating terrace at the Kissing Camels Clubhouse with new furnishings. Together, those changes mean the club's public-facing footprint, the parts open to residents who aren't necessarily members, is larger and more usable than it's been at any point in the last decade. A neighborhood built around a private club now has more of that club available to it without a membership card.
Saturday mornings moved to new management
Down the hill in Old Colorado City, the market that anchors weekend routines for a lot of Kissing Camels households changed hands this year. After more than 40 years under the same operation, the Old Colorado City Farmers Market has a new owner in Zack Quintana, a longtime vendor known for his Palisade peaches. The market returned for the 2026 season with nearly 90 vendors, live music, wine tasting, and family activities, and Quintana told local reporters that a warm, dry winter pushed an early bloom for cherries and other produce that would normally show up later in the season.
The market runs every Saturday from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. through mid-October at Bancroft Park, a five-mile drive from the mesa. If you make the trip and want lunch afterward that has nothing to do with resort dining, Heart of Jerusalem Cafe on Centennial Boulevard has been a standing lunch fixture for the area for years, gyros and hummus that locals order on repeat rather than something new.
What it adds up to for the rest of this year
None of these changes are permanent conditions. Construction seasons end and start again, ownership changes settle in and eventually feel normal, and anniversary programming wraps once the year turns. But for the stretch of 2026 that's left, the pieces line up in a way worth noticing while it lasts. The waterline project's bulletins have gone quiet. Grand View and the Kissing Camels Grille & Bar are both open to anyone who wants a table. The farmers market has ten more Saturdays before it closes for the season on October 17. And the resort's 75th anniversary merchandise, including the history book, is still available for anyone who wants a record of the year the mesa's construction detours finally ended.
Trish Ingels has watched Kissing Camels go through renovation cycles, ownership changes, and anniversary seasons for more than three decades, and she keeps track of exactly this kind of local detail because it's what tells you a neighborhood is actually changing, not just aging. If you're weighing a move onto the mesa, or a change within it, and want a conversation with someone who reads these shifts as they happen rather than after the fact, reach out to Trish Ingels.
