Back in the spring, the trail dead-ended at a barricade a few hundred yards past Timnath Community Park. You could walk your dog to the posted closure sign and turn around. That was the whole experience for most of last year: a paved path that promised something bigger and then stopped cold at a canal.
That barricade is gone now. Since late May, you can walk, bike, or run out of the park at 5500 Summerfields Parkway and keep going, uninterrupted, all the way to Greeley in one direction or toward Fort Collins and Bellvue in the other. Larimer County made it official on May 22, and the region marked it with a community celebration on June 13. Two months later, the fanfare has died down and the trail is just part of the neighborhood again. That's actually the more useful moment to look at it: not the ribbon-cutting, but what the connection changes about an ordinary Saturday.
The Mile That Took a Year
Here's the detail that gets lost in the "45 miles finally connected" headline: the segment that closed the gap was only about one mile long. A 10-foot-wide concrete path and a bridge over the Greeley No. 2 Canal, built by Connell Resources. That's it. And it still took the better part of a construction season and roughly $2.4 million to finish.
The reason a single mile carried that price tag says something about how these projects actually get built. The funding wasn't one grant, it was a stack: Great Outdoors Colorado money (funded through Colorado Lottery proceeds), a $250,000 Non-Motorized Trails Program grant from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, a $399,417 Multimodal Transportation and Mitigation Options Fund award from the North Front Range Metropolitan Planning Organization, and additional support from the Colorado Department of Transportation. Four different funding sources, four different approval processes, all to pay for one bridge crossing and a short stretch of pavement. That's the unglamorous reality behind the phrase "50-year vision" that Larimer County used in its own announcement. The overall Poudre River Trail concept traces back to a ceremonial groundbreaking in 1994, with the very first trail segments dating to 1978. The hard part was never the miles that ran through open farmland. It was the handful of crossings, like this one, where a canal, a jurisdiction line, and a funding gap all stacked up in the same short stretch.
As Meegan Flenniken of Larimer County's Land Conservation, Planning & Resource division put it when the segment was finished, closing this kind of gap takes "incredible coordination and a shared commitment to our natural resources." For Timnath, that coordination meant partnering directly with Larimer County rather than waiting on someone else to finish it.
What You Can Actually Do From Timnath Community Park Now
Point your feet west from the park and you eventually cross into Fort Collins' side of the corridor, where the city closed its own final two gaps at the end of 2024: a stretch through Arapaho Bend Natural Area to a new I-25 underpass, and a second piece running along the north side of Rigden Reservoir to the existing trail at Colorado State University's Environmental Learning Center. That's what made it possible to travel from Bellvue, on the far northwest side of Fort Collins, continuously down to Timnath even before this year's completion.
Head the other direction, south and east, and the trail carries you toward Windsor, past River Bluffs Open Space, which connects into a network of trail running further southeast through wildlife areas and parks. Keep going and the corridor eventually lands you at Island Grove Regional Park in Greeley, the anchor point on the eastern end.
None of this requires a car shuttle or a plan B. That's the actual shift. A year ago, a Timnath resident who wanted the Windsor stretch or the Fort Collins stretch had to drive to a different trailhead and start over. Now it's one continuous surface, and Timnath Community Park sits close to the middle of it rather than at a dead end.
The Fine Print Locals Should Know
A few practical notes for anyone using the trail for the first time since the connection closed. When Larimer County and its partners announced the opening in late May and early June, they also flagged that adjacent fence construction was still finishing along the new segment, meaning brief, posted closures were still possible for a while after the trail itself opened to foot and bike traffic. If you're riding a stretch you haven't used before, it's still worth watching for signage rather than assuming every inch is fully wrapped up.
Beyond that, the rules are the ones you'd expect from a regional multi-use trail: no permits or fees anywhere along the corridor, dogs welcome but leashed at all times, and the full route is searchable in the COTREX app if you want to see exactly where you are relative to Windsor or Greeley on a given ride. Restroom access is uneven. Indoor flush facilities exist at a handful of anchor parks along the broader corridor, including Island Grove Park, but plenty of the in-between stretches have nothing, so it's a bring-your-own-water kind of trail outside those anchor points. At Timnath Community Park itself, the amenities are more built out: six pickleball courts, two tennis courts, and a basketball court on a first-come, first-served basis, alongside the trail access. The park is open dawn to dusk, and pet owners are expected to clean up after their dogs, same as anywhere else in town.
Why This Payoff Was Already Built Into Timnath
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you weren't paying attention to the last decade of development here. Some of Timnath's newer neighborhoods didn't just happen to end up near this trail. They were built to plug into it directly. Timnath Lakes, one of the town's master-planned communities, includes about seven miles of its own internal trails specifically designed to connect into the regional Poudre River Trail system. Timnath Ranch North's own amenities documentation says the same thing: its internal trail network ties into both the town's local system and the regional corridor that ultimately reaches Windsor and Fort Collins.
In other words, the developers were betting on this connection years before the county actually delivered it. That bet is why a resident in one of those neighborhoods can walk out a side gate and be on a continuous, 45-mile trail without ever touching a road shoulder. The infrastructure took five decades to finish. The neighborhoods around it were finished years ago, waiting.
If you're curious about what else has opened around town this year, from new restaurants to the retail corner near I-25 and Harmony, that's a separate story worth reading on its own. This one is just about the mile that used to end at a fence, and doesn't anymore.
For anyone thinking through what a home near this corridor is actually worth, or wondering how Timnath compares to trail access in Windsor or Fort Collins, that's a conversation Andrea Stull has with buyers and sellers across Northern Colorado every week. Reach out anytime to talk through what's changing in this corner of the Front Range, trail included.
