"Last year, I didn't have an apple on a tree." Tony Ferrara wasn't exaggerating for effect when he told the Gazette that in the fall of 2024. He was describing 2023, the year a late freeze wiped out the bloom at Happy Apple Farm before a single apple had the chance to set, then a July hailstorm finished off whatever survived. For a lot of small businesses, a season like that would be the end of the story. For Ferrara, it was just the bad half of a cycle that repeats every few years, and one that most people who drive out to Penrose for a fall weekend never think to ask about.
Here's what surprised me digging into this: Penrose has built its entire identity around apples. The town has thrown an Apple Day celebration every October since 1935. But ask how many working orchards are actually behind that name today, and the answer is a fraction of what it used to be. Ferrara put it plainly in a Fox21 interview: Penrose once had "12, 15, [or] 16 orchards." Now there's "maybe three." Of those, Happy Apple Farm is the one still open to the public for u-pick, hayrides, and a country store. The town's most famous seasonal tradition is carried, in practice, by one family and one bet on the weather every spring.
The Last Orchard Still Opening Its Gates
Happy Apple Farm sits on First Street in Penrose, on land Ferrara's father bought in 1984 after retiring from the Air Force, where he'd flown fighters in Vietnam. He wanted an apple orchard. Four decades later, his son runs it, and three generations of the same local families now show up on the same weekends every fall, something Ferrara has noticed firsthand watching customers bring their own kids and grandkids through the gate year after year.
The math behind the farm is less sentimental. Ferrara told Fox21 that apples typically make up 70 to 75 percent of the farm's annual income. That's not a side business propped up by pumpkins and hayrides. It's the whole operation riding on whether a Colorado high-desert apple tree makes it through a Colorado high-desert spring, which is a real gamble most years and a coin flip in the bad ones.
Why the Same Farm Can Be the Best Trip of the Year, or a Letdown
The volatility isn't random weather trivia. It's the actual reason locals plan a Penrose apple trip differently than they'd plan a trip to, say, a produce stand with a predictable supply chain. Apple trees bloom early in spring and stay vulnerable to frost for weeks. A subzero night in winter can damage the dormant buds that would have flowered months later. A hailstorm in July, well after bloom, can strip a tree that survived everything else. Ferrara summed up the 2023 season for Fox21 in one line: "the hail polished it off on July 20th." Two separate weather events, months apart, both aimed at the same trees.
Then 2024 flipped the script entirely. Ferrara told Fox21 it was the farm's best crop in about 15 years, with branches bending under the weight of fruit and picking starting as early as August 17. He described crowds thick enough that he was "almost wiped out" by weekend traffic, with third and fourth generation families showing up to keep the tradition going.
That's the pattern worth knowing if you live nearby: this isn't a farm where you can assume a good year because last year was good, or a bad year because the year before was rough. It swings hard in both directions, sometimes in consecutive seasons, and the only way to know where a given fall lands on that spectrum is to actually check before you drive out. In a bad year, the country store still stocks apples, just sourced from Western Slope growers under the farm's own label rather than picked on site, along with the same jams, honey, and apple butter regardless of what the trees produced.
The Parts of the Weekend That Don't Depend on the Trees
What doesn't gamble on frost timing is everything built around the orchard rather than inside it. The pumpkin patch and free hayride run on their own schedule, tied to pumpkins rather than apple trees, which are a different crop with different risks. Pets are welcome on the hayride, admission has never carried a fee, and a military discount applies regardless of how the apple harvest is going that particular week.
A few miles away on Apple Lane, Bugling Elk Vineyards and Winery offers an even steadier anchor. Shawn Kauffman, a retired Green Beret who spent 26 years with the Army's 10th Special Forces Group, founded the vineyard in 2017 and opened its tasting room in July 2023, the same summer Ferrara's orchard was recovering from its worst season in over a decade. Kauffman's own crop struggles have looked different from Ferrara's. He originally planted more than 1,400 malbec vines hoping to rival Argentine wine, and eventually gave up on the variety entirely. "I have lost over 3,000 vines in the last five years," he told the Colorado Sun in 2023. Grapes fail differently than apples do, on a longer timeline and for different reasons, which means a bad apple year at Happy Apple Farm and a bad grape year at Bugling Elk rarely land on the same calendar. That's part of why pairing the two into one outing works. If one half of the loop is having a rough season, the other usually isn't.
Fremont County's relationship with wine actually runs deeper than one veteran's tasting room. The Colorado Sun reported that Fremont County had roughly 133,000 grapevines in 1910, producing more than 300,000 pounds of fruit, much of it planted by Italian immigrants who'd come to work the mines. That history thinned out during Prohibition, but the valley's soil and mild pockets of climate never stopped being good for vines. Kauffman is one of several growers now betting that the area's wine identity, largely dormant for a century, has room to come back even as its apple identity gets harder to sustain.
Apple Valley Cider Company adds a third option less dependent on any single tree surviving a freeze, since cider production can draw on fruit sourced more broadly than a single orchard's own harvest. When Apple Day itself went to a modified, pandemic-era format in 2020, Apple Valley opened its own tasting room to help fill the gap, a reminder that the town's fall identity has more than one business willing to carry it when conditions get hard.
What Locals Actually Do With This Information
If you already live near Penrose, the practical version of all this is simple. Before building a Saturday around apple picking specifically, call the farm or check its social media for that week's crop status. That single step separates a trip where you fill a bag straight off the tree from one where you end up buying apples that were trucked in from the Western Slope. Either way, the pumpkin patch, the hayride, and the country store are reliable regardless of what the orchard is doing that week, and Bugling Elk's tasting room, open most days but closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays, gives the loop a second stop that isn't riding on the same weather.
Apple Day itself is the one date on this list that has never depended on a single tree. It traces back to 1935, when school superintendent Robert Peterson organized a softball tournament that happened to coincide with the local harvest, and it has run every first weekend of October for more than 75 years, according to Visit Colorado Springs. In 2026, the Penrose Park and Recreation District has it scheduled for October 3, complete with the parade and community events the town has built around it for generations. Whatever the trees decide to do that year, Apple Day happens anyway.
That's the real shape of Penrose's fall season. One farm carries most of the actual apple growing, and it wins or loses on weather nobody controls. Everything else in the loop, the pumpkin patch, the wine, the cider, the parade, exists partly because that volatility is real and the town has learned to build around it rather than pretend it isn't there.
Understanding a place at this level of detail, down to which businesses ride out a bad season and which ones don't, is the same instinct that goes into knowing a neighborhood's property values, its water rights, or its zoning quirks. Gold District Realty works and lives in these Teller and Fremont County communities year round, which means we're paying attention to the same rhythms long before they show up in a listing description. If you're weighing what your own place in this corridor might be worth, whether it's this season or a few years down the road, our team can walk you through an Instant Property Valuation whenever you're ready to look.
