Fruita This Week

Thursday, September 3

Burger of the Week returns to Base Camp Provisions, 155 North Mulberry Street, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

The burger changes every week, which remains a quietly generous thing for a kitchen to do. It would be far easier to print one special and leave it there until spring.

Friday, September 4

Here is the part worth reading carefully, because a calendar will mislead you on it.

Food Truck Friday is happening. It is just not happening here.

Grand Valley Food Truck Fridays rotates around the valley, and the September 4 stop is Las Colonias Park in Grand Junction, 5 to 8:30 p.m. The last Fruita date was back on August 21 at Pro Fuels.

The City of Fruita event calendar simply stops listing the series after August 21, which reads as though it ended. It did not. It moved.

If you want the trucks, drive the fifteen minutes. If you do not, Fruita on a Friday evening with no event on is a perfectly good thing in its own right, and the patios are less crowded for exactly this reason.

Saturday, September 5

The Fruita Farmers Market runs Saturday morning at Civic Center Park, 325 East Aspen Avenue.

Worth a note: the listing header says 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. while its own description says 8:30 to noon. Treat noon as the safe answer and arrive in the morning rather than optimising the final half hour.

Early September is a good market. The valley is deep in harvest, and the difference between produce picked twenty minutes away and produce trucked in is at its most obvious right now.

Then make the rest of downtown the event, which is the correct way to spend a Fruita Saturday.

THE OPTIONAL DETOUR

With no evening event pulling on your Saturday, this is the week to do the thing you keep meaning to do.

Ride 18 Road. The North Fruita Desert trail system is twenty minutes north of town and is the reason a lot of people first heard of Fruita at all. September mornings are the good ones: cool, quiet, and without the heat that makes August riding a negotiation.

Or take the entirely different option and go look at dinosaurs.

Real fossils, working paleontology labs, and a building full of evidence that this landscape has been interesting for considerably longer than any of us have been visiting it.

Monday, September 7

Labor Day, and Fruita has scheduled precisely nothing.

No parade, no festival, no ticketed anything.

Trails are open. Downtown is open, though individual holiday hours are worth a phone call rather than an assumption.

And that is the entire listing, which is not an apology.