The Falcon Harvest Festival Keeps Outgrowing Falcon High School's Parking Lot

Last September 27, a trailer loaded with pumpkins from a Pueblo pumpkin patch drew its own line at the Falcon Harvest Festival, handing out a free pumpkin to anyone who wanted one. A few rows over, Tally Kerr worked her traveling bookstore, Roadrunner Bookshop, to a steady stream of browsers. Crystal Betel and Sheila Smith, who organize the event, put that day's turnout somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 people, a jump they said blew past the roughly 3,000 who had shown up the year before.

This Saturday, September 26, the fifth annual festival lands on the same parking lot at Falcon High School, and the numbers behind it say something about how fast this stretch of El Paso County has filled in.

A Small Market That Started Big, Dipped, Then Got Bigger

The Falcon Harvest Festival didn't arrive with steady, predictable growth. An early year of the event promoted a lineup of 160 vendors while organizers aimed to top the roughly 7,000 people they said had turned out the year before that. By 2024, the count had come back down to around 3,000, according to the organizers themselves. Then 2025 blew past that same year-over-year comparison in the other direction, landing back in the 7,000-to-10,000 range.

Those swings say as much about how hard a single Saturday is to count as they do about steady growth. What's held closer to flat is the vendor list. This year's festival is advertised at 140-plus local vendors, not far off where the event started, even as attendance estimates have bounced between 3,000 and 10,000 depending on the year. Falcon didn't need more booths to draw a bigger crowd in its best years. It needed the same booths, the same lot, and word to keep spreading.

The Kind of Event Local Institutions Show Up For

The 2024 festival, held September 28 that year, is the one with the clearest evidence of how far this has grown beyond a vendor market. By 10:30 that morning, cars were already parking along the side streets near the high school. Trucks from the Falcon Fire Protection District sat parked on the north end of the lot. The El Paso County Sheriff's Office brought out its SWAT vehicle for people to look at. Ali Haselhorst, a Peyton resident who started growing elderberries a decade ago to treat her kids' colds, worked the booth for her business, Momma's Elderberry Syrup, and Kevin and Jennifer Braun of Blackout Electric sponsored that year's event, calling the turnout "a great day for everyone."

A community newspaper covering that event put it plainly: almost every vendor was local to the Falcon area. That's the detail worth holding onto. A fire department and a sheriff's office don't show up to a market that isn't already drawing a crowd worth the trip.

What the Parking Overflow Actually Tells You

Falcon is an unincorporated community, which means there's no city council or municipal water department deciding how to handle a festival that outgrows its venue. It happens because a private organizer, a high school willing to host it, and a pool of vendors and attendees keep choosing to show up year after year. The overflow onto side streets isn't a planning failure. It's what happens when a one-day event outgrows the assumptions it was built on. Falcon High School's lot was sized for a school, not a regional festival, and five years in, that mismatch is the clearest sign of how much this corner of the county has filled in around a single Saturday.

Falcon's Fall Isn't Standing Still Elsewhere Either

The festival isn't happening in isolation. Ascent Brewery, a taproom in the heart of Falcon, marked its one-year anniversary earlier this year, a sign that new hospitality concepts are willing to bet on this stretch of Highway 24 rather than defaulting to Colorado Springs storefronts. A new Dunkin' location held its grand opening this past May. And permits were issued this past August for a Whataburger at the intersection of East Woodmen and Meridian roads, part of the Owl Marketplace development, at a reported construction cost of $1.4 million. No opening date has been set for that one yet.

None of that competes with the harvest festival for attention, but it's the same pattern at a different scale. A name-brand chain arrives at the highway corridor while the community's own gathering stays anchored to a school parking lot a few minutes off that same highway. Falcon is filling in from both directions at once: new retail at the intersections, and a homegrown Saturday event that keeps needing more room than it has.

If the Crowd Isn't Your Thing

Not everyone wants to fight for parking on a Saturday morning. Homestead Ranch Regional Park, built around the site of an original 1800s homestead, offers a quieter alternative with a spring-fed pond that draws foxes and birds and a network of trails good for a slower morning. It won't have live music or food trucks, but it's a fair trade if 140 vendors and a few thousand strangers sound like more Saturday than you're after.

Here's what to expect if you're heading to the festival itself:

• When: Saturday, September 26, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Where: Falcon High School lot, 10255 Lambert Rd
• What's there: 140-plus local vendors, 15-plus food trucks, live music, a fall photo booth, and a kids' zone with bounce houses
• Cost: Free admission
• Parking note: In 2024, cars were already lining nearby side streets by 10:30 a.m.

The Same Lot, A Bigger Story

A festival that once counted its crowd in the thousands now regularly claims estimates in the five-figure range, while the vendor count has held close to where it began. That's not a story about a bigger festival. It's a story about a bigger Falcon, one Saturday at a time.

If you're weighing whether this corner of El Paso County has room to grow into, a single festival won't answer that on its own, but the parking overflow outside Falcon High School each September is as honest an indicator as you'll find. You can see more of what's shaping this area, from new retail at Woodmen and Meridian to the neighborhoods page for Falcon.

If you're curious what a place like Falcon is worth right now, or just want a local read on where it's headed next, Pulse Real Estate Group is a phone call away.