Things to Do in Columbia Falls This Fall: Sunday Markets and More

"We did all of the remodeling work ourselves, and that's probably why it took so long for us to open," Tommy Truong told the Flathead Beacon, laughing, about the year it took his family to turn the old Columbia Bar into Columbia Cafe. That laugh is worth sitting with for a second, because it captures something true about downtown Columbia Falls right now: the town looks the same from the sidewalk, but almost everything behind the storefronts has changed hands, changed hours, or changed names since last fall.

If you measured Columbia Falls by its biggest weekly gathering, you'd think the season just ended. The Columbia Falls Community Market wrapped its 11th year on Thursday, September 24, closing out a run that pulled in roughly 80 vendors and 90 local businesses over the summer at the grounds off Veteran Drive. That reading is easy to fall into, and it misses half the picture. A second, smaller market is still running every Sunday through October 11, and the stretch between now and Harvestfest is shaping up to be one of the busier stretches downtown has had in a while, not a lull.

Same Street, Different Owners

Start with the building. The storefront that now houses Columbia Cafe has been standing on Nucleus Avenue for more than a century. It opened as a dance hall, later ran as a Chinese restaurant, and in 1965 the Finberg family took it over and ran it as the Columbia Bar for nearly 60 years, gaining a loyal following for Taco Tuesdays led by longtime bartender Mike Scallen. A local developer bought the bar in 2023, kept it open another year, then closed it in the fall of 2024. The storefront sat empty long enough that people in town started asking what would happen to it.

What happened is the Truong family. Johnny and Judy Truong moved to Northwest Montana about ten years ago, worked local nail salons while they looked for a place to settle, and opened Posh Nails and Spa on the north end of Nucleus Avenue in November 2020. A few years later they expanded into food, opening the fast-casual Asian and Japanese spot Teriyaki Kitchen down the street. When the old Columbia Bar came up for sale in 2025, Johnny's brother Tommy, who had moved from Las Vegas after years opening Korean barbecue locations nationwide, saw the opportunity. The family bought the building, gutted it to the studs themselves to save money, and opened Columbia Cafe as a breakfast and lunch spot this year.

That's three businesses now run by one family within a few blocks of each other on the same street, each one taking over a space that used to be something else. It's a pattern worth knowing if you live nearby: the turnover on Nucleus Avenue isn't random churn. It's the same small group of local operators reinvesting in buildings as they come open, which is a different story than storefronts sitting vacant.

One Market Ended; Another Continues

Here's the part that catches people off guard every September. Columbia Falls actually runs two separate farmers markets, on two different schedules, and they don't close on the same date.

The big one, the Columbia Falls Community Market, runs Thursdays from 5 to 8 p.m. on the grounds adjacent to St. Richard Catholic Church, off Veteran Drive. It's the one with the central stage, the food trucks, and the weekly rotation of sponsors and musicians. That market ran its last Thursday of the 2026 season on September 24.

The smaller one, the Bad Rock Farmers Market, sets up on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Forage and Floral's bandstand area downtown, and it keeps going through October 11. It's organized by Shayna Kyle, who farms with her husband in Columbia Heights as Moonlight Farm and is part of a roughly 15-grower cooperative called the Falls Farm Co-op. The Bad Rock market runs smaller on purpose, usually 18 to 24 vendors, charges farmers a five-dollar vendor fee, and is built as what Kyle describes as a "local local," in-and-out kind of stop rather than an evening event.

If your mental calendar says market season in Columbia Falls ends the last Thursday in September, you're only tracking half of it.

That extra stretch matters for anyone timing a weekend around it. Two more Sundays of local produce, eggs, honey, and handmade goods remain on the calendar after the bigger market has already gone quiet, and the crowd at Bad Rock tends to be different too, smaller and quicker, built for people who want to grab what they need and move on rather than stay for a band.

What Else Is Landing in the Same Window

The market overlap isn't the only thing filling this stretch. The Columbia Falls Area Chamber of Commerce has a ribbon-cutting scheduled for Stockman Bank's grand opening on October 7, at the bank's location on 9th Street West, which is one more sign of steady commercial movement in town even as the summer event calendar winds down. Ribbon cuttings don't get the same attention as a new restaurant, but they're a reasonable pulse check on how much new business activity a town is actually absorbing in a given month, and Columbia Falls has had more than one this fall.

Then the calendar tips into festival season. On October 17, the Chamber runs its 4th Annual Harvestfest at Canyon Elementary School in Hungry Horse, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. It's built around a timed 5K, a kids' costume fun run and parade, a chili cook-off with a 25-dollar entry fee and a top prize of 75 dollars, a cornbread competition at 10 dollars entry, a free chili and cornbread lunch while supplies last, and tours of large equipment for kids who want to climb on something. Entry to the event itself is free, with a suggested donation to the Canyon Kids Christmas Fund.

Line those three dates up and the picture is less like a gap and more like a relay. The Sunday market carries the outdoor, farm-to-table part of fall through October 11. Harvestfest picks it up six days later with the costume-and-chili version of the same instinct, just moved indoors to a school gym and a parking lot in Hungry Horse. There isn't really a week without a local event, even though the biggest weekly draw closed its doors on the 24th.

Reading the Turnover, Not Just the Calendar

None of this is really about events on a calendar. It's about what the calendar tells you regarding the pace of change in a small town. A hundred-year-old building that sat empty for months after a well-loved dive bar closed didn't stay empty. It got picked up by a family already running two other businesses within walking distance, renovated by hand, and reopened as something new within about a year. A bank is cutting a ribbon on a new location just after a market closes. A community market that's now in its 11th year is stable enough to draw roughly 80 vendors across a season, while a five-year-old farmers cooperative down the street is still finding its footing with a smaller, quieter Sunday format.

That's a town where the built environment is turning over at a pace worth noticing, whether or not you're in the market for anything. The people who know Columbia Falls best right now are the ones who caught that one market ended while another continued on Sundays, and that the storefront everyone assumed would sit empty has a breakfast menu now.

If you're the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you're curious about where Columbia Falls is heading, not just what's for sale, Maureen Gerber spends her time paying attention to exactly this kind of change. Let's Connect.