For most of the last decade, a Saturday on the Kissing Camels mesa followed a predictable shape. Coffee at home, a walk with the dog somewhere inside the gates, then the actual errands and real food happened five miles down the hill in Old Colorado City. The mesa was where you slept and the mesa was where you looked at the rocks. It was not where you ate, shopped, or spent an afternoon without getting back in the car.
That shape changed, quietly, over the last three years, and 2026 is the first year all three pieces of the change are running at the same time. The Old Colorado City Farmers Market changed hands. Grand View Restaurant at Garden of the Gods Resort and Club stopped being a members-only dining room. And the eight-month construction project that made the park itself a hassle to walk through, stretching from late 2024 into the summer of 2025, finally wrapped. None of these three things made news on its own. Together, they mean something the neighborhood hasn't had before: a full weekend that doesn't require leaving the mesa or working around a road crew to get it.
The Market Changed Hands, Not the Habit
The Old Colorado City Farmers Market has anchored Saturday mornings for mesa households for more than 40 years, all of it under the same operator. That streak ended this year. The market has a new owner, Zack Quintana, a longtime vendor best known for his Palisade peaches, who took over after four decades of continuity under one banner.
What's notable is what didn't change. The 2026 season came back with nearly 90 vendors, live music, wine tasting, and family activities, running the usual Saturday schedule from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Bancroft Park through mid-October. A warm, dry winter pushed an early bloom for cherries and other produce that would normally show up later in the season, so regulars who time their visits by what's ripe have had to adjust the calendar this year, not the route.
For a market that changes hands for the first time in a generation, that kind of continuity is not something you'd expect. A new owner usually means at least a season of finding its footing. This one didn't seem to need one.
The Club Kitchen You Can Actually Walk Into
Grand View Restaurant sits inside Garden of the Gods Resort and Club, overlooking the red rock formations from Mesa Road. For 70 years, dining there meant club membership. That ended following a $40 million property-wide renovation completed in 2023, when Grand View opened its doors to the public for the first time in the club's history.
Three years on, it's no longer a novelty booking. It's a restaurant led by Master Chef Nathan Gresham that takes reservations from anyone, open for brunch, lunch, and dinner, with a seasonal menu that rotates through dishes like beef tartare and a mixed-greens salad built around candied pecans and Peruvian peppers. For a mesa resident, the practical shift is simple. A dinner reservation used to require either a membership or an invitation. Now it requires a phone call.
Here's what the mesa's three anchor points looked like a few years ago compared to how they run today:
| Anchor | Before | Now (2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Old Colorado City Farmers Market | Same operator for 40+ years | New owner (Zack Quintana), nearly 90 vendors, full 2026 season running |
| Grand View Restaurant | Members-only dining, closed to the public | Open to all by reservation since the 2023 renovation |
| Garden of the Gods trails near the mesa | Waterline and ADA construction, rotating closures, late 2024 into mid-2025 | Project complete since June 2025, no active detours |
The Park Itself Got Easier to Use
The least visible change is the one that affects daily life the most. Garden of the Gods forms the mesa's western boundary, and for the better part of a year, using it meant checking which entrance was open that week. The city's waterline project, an eight-month collaboration between Colorado Springs Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services, Colorado Springs Utilities, and the fire department, installed 8,000 feet of new waterline and nine fire hydrants through the park, along with a new accessible parking lot and an ADA-compliant trail into Central Garden. Roughly 3,200 feet of asphalt got replaced in the process.
The city confirmed the project complete in June 2025. That means this is the first full calendar year mesa residents can walk into the park at whatever entrance is closest without checking for a closure first. Garden of the Gods drew an estimated 5.2 million visitors in 2024, and the crowding argument for the park has never gone away. But the construction argument, the one that made a quick walk feel like it required planning, is gone.
What Actually Changed for the Person Living There
None of these three things is dramatic on its own. A market changed hands and kept its character. A restaurant three years into being open to the public stopped feeling new. A construction project finished. Put side by side, they describe a mesa that stopped depending on the hill for its weekend and stopped depending on construction schedules for its park.
The old routine still works if you want it. Heart of Jerusalem Cafe on Centennial Boulevard has been the standing lunch fixture for the area for years, and nobody's suggesting gyros and hummus need replacing. What's different is that the drive down the hill is now a choice instead of the only option. A Saturday can start at Bancroft Park, include a stop for produce from a vendor who's been selling in that same market for decades, and end with a reservation at Grand View, all without the mesa's food and outdoor life depending on someone else's membership list or someone else's construction timeline.
That's a small thing to notice if you already live there. It's also exactly the kind of thing that doesn't show up on a listing page or a portal description, because it's not about the homes. It's about what a Saturday on the mesa actually looks like now compared to three years ago, and the answer is that it finally looks like a full one.
If you're weighing a move onto the mesa or thinking about what changes within it, The Johnson Team tracks these shifts as they happen, not after the fact, and can walk you through what it's like to live inside Kissing Camels today. Reach out for a conversation about the neighborhood, no pressure, just answers from people who know it block by block.
