Ask a Colfax neighbor what's at Triad Park and you'll almost always get the same answer: the memorial. The flags. That tall stone monument you can see from the road. Ask them what's behind it, past the parking lot and the picnic shelters, and a lot of them go quiet.

That's the thing about Triad Park. It's one property, jointly owned by Forsyth and Guilford counties, spanning 426 acres off West Market Street near Colfax. But it functions like two separate parks stitched together, and most people who live within ten minutes of it have only ever walked one half.

The Park You Think You Know Is Only Half of It

The Carolina Field of Honor is the part everyone knows, and for good reason. The centerpiece is a granite obelisk that stands 60 feet tall and weighs 106 tons, cut from stone quarried in Mount Airy. Around it sit monuments to each branch of the armed forces and a section holding a steel beam recovered from Ground Zero. It's a solemn, well-kept 8-acre corner of the park, built by the War Memorial Foundation and dedicated back in 2014. If you've ever brought out-of-town family here on a Sunday afternoon, this is almost certainly where you took them.

What sits on the other side of that same 426 acres gets a fraction of the foot traffic. There's an 18-hole disc golf course with two full sets of tees, a long course playing 7,171 feet and a short course at 5,010 feet, free and open on a first-come basis. There's an amphitheater with lawn seating for roughly 3,500 people. There are soccer fields, a softball field, sand volleyball courts, horseshoe pits, a fishing pond, and miles of trail that split between paved paths and wooded routes through the woods that never make it into anyone's Sunday plans.

Ask around and you'll find plenty of longtime Colfax residents who've never set foot on the disc golf course, even though it's a five-minute walk from the memorial parking lot they've used a dozen times.

Why Fall Is the Season the Back Half Finally Makes Sense

Part of the reason the disc golf side gets skipped is timing. Piedmont Triad summers are the kind of heat and humidity that make an 18-hole walk through open fairways feel like a chore, not a Saturday. By late September, that changes. The mornings cool off, the fairways stop baking, and a course built with two tee distances per hole, easy enough for a beginner on the short tees, tough enough for someone chasing a personal best on the long ones, starts to feel like exactly what it was designed for.

The same logic applies to the trails and the open fields around the amphitheater. None of it disappears in summer, but fall is when walking the woodland paths or tossing a football on the open lawn stops requiring a pep talk about sunscreen and water breaks. If you've been meaning to actually explore the part of the park past the memorial, the next six or eight weekends are close to ideal.

The Farmers Market Is Doing Its Own Quiet Handoff

A few minutes down Sandy Ridge Road, the Robert G. Shaw Piedmont Triad Farmers Market is going through a shift of its own, and it's one that a lot of regulars miss because they've mentally filed the market as a summer stop.

The market at 2914 Sandy Ridge Road is open daily, seven in the morning until six at night, essentially year round. Early in the season the tables are stacked with salad greens and radishes. By midsummer it's tomatoes, peppers, corn, and stone fruit at their peak. What most casual visitors don't realize is that the market doesn't close down once August ends. It just changes what's on the tables.

Right now, and through the coming weeks, that means:

• Storage vegetables that hold up through the cooler months
• Apples and pears from Piedmont growers
• Preserves, jams, and baked goods made from the last of the summer harvest
• Cut flowers and fall plants from the same vendors who had tomato starts in April

If your last visit was a July trip for corn and you haven't been back since, the tables look different now, and that's worth a return visit on its own. There's also a small cafe on the property, the Moose Cafe, if you want to turn the errand into lunch instead of a quick in-and-out.

One Deadline Worth Knowing About Before You Forget Again

If you've ever thought about placing a Remembrance Paver at the Carolina Field of Honor, honoring a veteran's service, a birthday, an anniversary, there's a detail worth knowing before you assume you have time.

The memorial runs pavers on an annual installation cycle tied to Veterans Day. Orders placed between January and the end of July get installed in time for the ceremony on Veterans Day, which falls on Wednesday, November 11, 2026 this year. That ordering window closed at the end of July. So if today is the day you finally decide to do it, you haven't missed your only chance, but you have missed this year's installation. Orders placed now roll into the next cycle.

It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that's easy to put off for years without realizing there's an actual calendar behind it.

A Weekend That Actually Uses Both

None of this requires a special occasion. It's just a matter of treating the market and the park as one loop instead of two separate errands you do on different weekends.

Start at the market in the morning while the tables are still full and the parking lot isn't packed. Pick up what's in season, apples if you want something for the counter, a jar of preserves if you want something for later. From there it's a short drive to Triad Park, and instead of parking near the memorial like usual, follow the signs back toward the disc golf course. Even if you've never thrown a disc in your life, the short tees are forgiving enough for a first try, and the walk through the course doubles as a decent look at the wooded half of the park most people never see.

If you want to make a full afternoon of it, Blue Rock Pizza & Tap and Outwest are both close by if you're looking for something more substantial than market snacks once you're done walking. Neither requires reservations for a casual weekend stop.

The point isn't that Colfax has secret attractions nobody knows about. The market and the park are both about as well known as a place this size gets. The point is that most of us have only been using half of what's actually there, and fall is the season that makes the other half worth the extra ten minutes.

If you're already calling this part of the Triad home and want more of these local rundowns as the seasons change, I write them regularly for the neighborhoods I work in, including the Triad area around Colfax. And if you've got a friend or family member who keeps talking about wanting a quieter corner of the Piedmont Triad with easy access to Greensboro and the airport, I'm always happy to talk neighborhoods over coffee. You can find me at Britney Kensmoe whenever that conversation comes up.