Today is the last Sunday in September. It is also, quietly, the day the St. Elmo General Store locks its door for the year, the same door it has opened every Mother's Day weekend and closed every year on this same calendar marker. But the store is only the last domino. Three weeks ago, the water slides at Mount Princeton Hot Springs Resort already stopped running. The Biergarten next to them already went dark for the season. A Forest Service fire order that started in August is still running through mid-November. A rockslide closed a popular waterfall trail with no reopening date at all. Chalk Creek Canyon doesn't shut down on a single day in the fall. It shuts down in stages, on five different calendars set by five different operators, and this week happens to be when the last one lands.
That matters if you live here, because the canyon this week looks nothing like the canyon in July, and it also looks nothing like the canyon will look in December. It's a specific, narrow stretch, and knowing what's actually open in it beats guessing from memory of last year's trip.
Five closing dates, five different clocks
Nobody coordinated these. The resort runs on a summer-holiday schedule. The ghost town's general store runs on a Mother's Day-to-last-Sunday-in-September schedule that has nothing to do with holidays. The Forest Service runs on fire risk. A rockslide runs on gravity. Here's how they actually stack up against today's date.
| Feature | Season | Status as of September 27, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Mt. Princeton water slides and Upper Pools | Memorial Day through Labor Day | Closed since September 7 |
| Mt. Princeton Biergarten | Memorial Day through Labor Day | Closed since September 7 |
| Mt. Princeton Bath House and Infinity Pool | Year-round | Open |
| St. Elmo General Store | Mother's Day weekend through the last Sunday in September | Closes today |
| Chalk Creek Drive (County Road 162) | Plowed year-round | Open |
| Chalk Lake Campground fire restrictions | Forest Service order, August 21 through November 14, 2026 | In effect |
| Tincup Pass (County Road 267, high clearance) | Typically late June through September | Nearing its close for the season |
| Agnes Vaille Falls trail | No fixed season | Closed indefinitely after a rockslide reroute |
Two of those rows aren't seasonal at all. The Bath House and its Infinity Pool run every day of the year, which is a different business decision than the slides and Biergarten, both tied to the exact same Memorial Day-to-Labor Day window the Denver Gazette covered when the slides opened back in June. The general store up at St. Elmo runs on a completely separate clock, tied to Mother's Day and this specific Sunday rather than to any holiday weekend. And the Agnes Vaille Falls closure isn't a season at all. It's an open-ended repair problem after a rockslide forced a reroute, with no date attached to when, or if, the original trail reopens.
What's still open right now
If you're used to thinking of the canyon as either "open for summer" or "closed for winter," this week breaks that model. Plenty is still running.
- The Historic Bath House pools at Mount Princeton, the Soaking Pool near 105 degrees and the cooler Exercise Pool near 90, run daily, year-round.
- The creekside hot spring pools along Chalk Creek, the small rock-lined pools where you mix hot mineral water with cold creek water by hand, stay open with the seasons doing the work rather than a posted schedule.
- Chalk Creek Drive itself stays plowed all winter, which is why the drive to St. Elmo remains one of the few ghost-town routes in the state you can actually reach in January.
- Chalk Lake still holds rainbow, brook, and brown trout, and the water above Cascade Falls is still considered some of the better fishing in the canyon, both unaffected by the store's calendar.
What's changed is the built infrastructure around all of that. The slides are gone until next Memorial Day. The Biergarten's hot dogs and beer are gone until the same date. And as of today, the general store's antiques, snacks, and hummingbird feeders go quiet until Mother's Day weekend 2027.
The camping rules just got stricter, not looser
While the summer amenities are shutting down, the Forest Service side of the canyon is doing the opposite. A fire restriction order covering the Chalk Creek Canyon area runs from August 21 through November 14, 2026, meaning campfires stay confined to the rings at the four developed campgrounds, Mount Princeton, Chalk Lake, Cascade, and Iron City, for the rest of this window. That's a longer restriction than the calendar around it suggests. The Pike-San Isabel National Forest's recreation page for Chalk Creek Canyon lays out the standing rule that camping and campfires are limited to those same four sites plus a couple of dispersed areas near St. Elmo and Hancock, but this fall's order tightens fire use specifically, right in the same weeks the general store and water slides are packing it in for the year. If you're planning a fall campfire in the canyon, the store closing today isn't the relevant deadline. November 14 is.
The week this actually creates
Put the closures and the still-open list side by side and you get something specific: a short stretch, roughly from Labor Day through the first real snow, when the canyon empties out but hasn't gone dormant. The aspens along Chalk Creek typically turn gold in late September and early October, right in this same window, and the crowds that fill the general store's parking area all summer have already thinned by the time that color shows up. That combination, quiet roads and turning leaves, is arguably the best version of the canyon all year. It's also the version that disappears the fastest, because the general store that anchors a lot of people's St. Elmo trip, the one with the hummingbird feeders and the chipmunks that will eat out of your hand, just went dark for the winter.
Tincup Pass is closing out at the same time, for a different reason. The high-clearance route over County Road 267 to the Continental Divide is typically passable only from late June through September, and by late September it's already at the edge of that window. Anyone who wanted a last high-country drive out of St. Elmo before the snow was working against the same calendar as the store, just measured in road conditions instead of business hours.
What the canyon looks like once the snow comes
None of this means the canyon goes quiet for good. The plowed road keeps running to St. Elmo all winter, and the town itself, along with the abandoned mining roads above it, draws snowmobilers and snowshoers once the ground is covered. The Bath House pools keep running the same soaking and exercise schedule they run in July. What won't be there is the general store's lights, the Biergarten's tables, or the slides, all gone until a Mother's Day and a Memorial Day still months away.
For anyone living along Chalk Creek Canyon or in Nathrop itself, the practical takeaway isn't complicated: check which calendar you're on before you plan around it. The resort's summer amenities run Memorial Day to Labor Day. The general store runs Mother's Day to this exact Sunday. The Forest Service's fire rules run into mid-November regardless of what the businesses around them are doing. And the falls trail runs on no calendar at all until the rockslide damage gets fixed.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of the Arkansas River Valley, or you already call Chalk Creek Canyon home and have questions about a specific property near it, Jeff Post and the team at First Colorado Land Office know this canyon's calendar because they live inside it too.
