Patio Season in NoCo: Where to Soak Up the Last of Summer

Northern Colorado runs on a specific kind of optimism about weather. It is sunny roughly three hundred days a year here, which locals cite constantly and which conveniently omits that a fair number of those days are sunny and nineteen degrees.

Which is why late summer into fall is the stretch that matters. From now through late October, the Front Range gives you a run of golden weekends — warm afternoons, cool evenings, the light going long and amber off the foothills by six. Then it doesn't, abruptly, usually on a Tuesday.

You get about ten of these. Here's where to spend them.

For the long afternoon: Ridgeline Brewing Co., Fort Collins

The patio at Ridgeline Brewing Co. is on Linden Street, a block off the Poudre, and it's oriented to catch the last of the evening sun coming off the foothills — which is the whole trick with a Colorado patio. West-facing beats shaded from about four o'clock on.

Sixteen taps, a barrel room visible from the bar, and food trucks rotating nightly, so dinner is solved without leaving the table. Dogs are welcome out there, which in this town is less an amenity than a requirement.

Weekdays it opens at 3:00 PM. Thursday it's noon; Friday noon to midnight; Saturday 11:00 AM to midnight; Sunday 11:00 AM to 9:00 PM. Trivia runs Tuesdays inside, bluegrass most Fridays — good if you want the evening to keep going after the sun drops, and the temperature will drop with it. Bring a layer. Everyone here does.

For the slow morning: Sunrise & Pine Coffee, Fort Collins

Patio season isn't only an evening sport. The porch at Sunrise & Pine Coffee on West Mountain Avenue fills with bikes on weekend mornings, and a September morning on a tree-lined boulevard at 7:00 AM — cool, quiet, the day not yet committed — is arguably the better half of the season.

It's a neighborhood roaster: slow-bar pourovers, house-made pastries. Weekdays from 6:30 AM, weekends from 7:00 AM, closing at 3:00 PM Sunday and 5:00 PM Saturday.

Pair it with: the Mason Trail. Coffee, then a flat ride the length of Fort Collins with the mountains on your right the whole way.

For the view down the street: Union Colony Ale House, Greeley

The rooftop at Union Colony Ale House looks straight down 8th Avenue, which is the best argument anyone has made for downtown Greeley in a while. Forty Colorado taps, shuffleboard downstairs, and a room that gets genuinely loud on UNC game days.

It's the latest-running option on this list — Friday and Saturday to 1:00 AM, Thursday to midnight — so it's the one that survives the part of the evening where the temperature drops and the patio thins out.

Downtown Greeley programs the plaza hard in the fall, including a blues-and-brews night on 9th Street Plaza in September with pours from a dozen Weld and Larimer County breweries. Check the events calendar for the current lineup.

For the last warm hour: Sweetheart Scoops, Loveland

An ice cream shop is a patio destination by a slightly different logic — you go for the ten minutes before it's too cold to want ice cream at all.

Sweetheart Scoops on North Lincoln Avenue churns sixteen rotating flavors daily in small batches. The Palisade peach is the seasonal one to chase; it arrives when the Western Slope fruit comes over the divide in August and it sells out. Open to 9:00 PM most nights, 10:00 PM Friday and Saturday.

Pair it with: dinner two blocks away and a walk down Fourth Street. See One Perfect Saturday in Loveland for the full version of that evening.

For the lakeside lawn: Windsor and the water towns

Not every patio has a building attached. Windsor Lake's Boardwalk Park runs a summer concert series that closes out in late August — blanket on the grass, food-truck row, sunset over the water, live Americana on the main stage. It is the most reliably pleasant three hours available in the region in August, and it's free.

Loveland's lake loop and the Poudre River Trail in Fort Collins do the same job on any evening without a schedule attached.

How to read the season

A few things worth knowing if you're new to how fall works here.

• Afternoons are the warm part, not evenings. The temperature falls fast after sunset at five thousand feet. A seventy-eight-degree day is a fifty-two-degree night.
• West-facing patios win in September. East-facing ones win in July. The sun angle changes what's comfortable more than the forecast does.
• The first hard freeze is usually early-to-mid October, and it ends the season for most outdoor seating within a week.
• Fresh-hop beer season overlaps exactly with the best patio weather. Colorado hop harvest lands in September, and the breweries pour it immediately. See the craft beverage trail for where.

Ten weekends. Then it's ski season, and nobody here complains about that either.

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