Greenwood Village Has Ponds Everywhere. Only One of Them Is Actually for Fishing.

Drive the loop between Orchard Road and Belleview Avenue on any given weekend and you will pass four or five ponds without much thought. A flash of water behind a stand of cottonwoods, a few geese loafing on the bank, maybe a jogger circling the edge. They read as interchangeable, the same amenity showing up again and again across the city's park system.

They are not interchangeable. Each one is doing a specific job, governed by a different set of rules, and only one of them is actually meant for a fishing rod. If you have lived here a while and never quite worked out which pond does what, the answer changes how you use a Saturday morning.

The One Pond With Fishing Rights

That pond is at Tommy Davis Park, tucked behind the basketball court and volleyball court at 9200 East Orchard Road. Most of the year it functions the way you'd expect from a park pond: ducks, geese, a walking loop with a few exercise stations, a quiet spot to eat a sandwich on a bench. What sets it apart is that the city treats it as an actual fishery, not just a scenic feature.

Every spring, the city stocks the pond with rainbow trout ahead of the Fishing Derby and Rubber Duck Waddle, a resident-only event built around a fishing contest, a pancake breakfast, and a rubber duck race down the water. This year's derby ran the morning of April 25, with fishing starting at 7 a.m., pancakes from 8 to 9, and the duck release at 8:45. Tickets are handed out at City Hall in the weeks beforehand rather than sold at the gate, which is a detail worth knowing if you plan to bring the kids next spring and don't want to show up empty-handed.

Outside derby season, the pond is quieter than the stocking suggests. One angler who tried casting there on a lunch break described the water as shallow and choked with weeds, with no sign of active fish beyond what the city puts in before the derby. That tracks with how the pond is designed. It is not a year-round trophy fishery. It is recreation infrastructure built around one specific weekend, and the rest of the year it settles back into being a walking loop with water in the middle.

One local angler who scouted it outside derby season summed it up simply: no signs of fish activity, and "an abundance of 'NO PARKING' signs in the neighborhood."

So What Are the Other Ponds For?

If Tommy Davis Park is the city's recreation pond, the rest of the system splits into two other categories: protected habitat and engineered wetland. Laid side by side, the differences are clearer than they look from the road.

The Tommy Davis pond exists so people can fish it. The other two exist so people can look at them without disturbing what lives there, and the rules around each reflect that.

The Preserve the City Had to Drill a Well For

Marjorie Perry Nature Preserve is the most significant open space in the city's system, a 59-acre stretch of wetland and former farmland along the High Line Canal, south of Belleview Avenue and west of Holly Street. The land traces back to 1936, when preservationist Marjorie Perry first purchased it, and the city acquired it in 1990 along with the ponds already sitting on the property. Two conservation easements now bind the city to maintain the land's scenic views, passive recreation use, and wildlife habitat, which is a stronger legal obligation than the average city park carries.

That obligation ran into a problem that had nothing to do with drought or budget cuts. The original 1930 water decree attached to the property never included a storage right for the ponds themselves, which meant the water feeding them had no legal protection against running dry. In 2023 the city purchased water rights specifically to keep the ponds sustained, then drilled a well on the property in early 2025 to actually use those rights. The next phase, a well house and distribution system, is what's currently under construction, and it will also irrigate new trees planted along the canal as part of a five-year, $360,000 planting plan the city approved in 2021 to replace cottonwoods that are now more than a century old.

None of that is visible from the trail. What you see is a pond that looks a little lower some seasons and a little fuller others. What's actually happening is a legal and infrastructure fix decades in the making, built to satisfy a conservation easement rather than a landscaping preference.

Finding the Entrance

The preserve's biggest practical headache is that it has no dedicated parking lot of its own. Visitors reach it one of two ways: by walking or biking in along the High Line Canal Trail, parking at the trailhead on East Orchard Road, or by coming in via the Lee Gulch Trail with parking at Castlewood Park. Skip both of those and you're likely to end up circling residential streets the way more than one visitor has described online, unable to find a marked way in.

Once inside, the reward is real. The preserve holds sedges, bulrushes, and wetland flora that support night herons, blue herons, hawks, owls, foxes, deer, and enough turtles that first-time visitors are often surprised to see them. It is the kind of place that rewards a slow evening walk more than a fast morning run, precisely because it was built and protected to stay that way.

Silo Park, by contrast, solves the wetland-viewing problem differently. Rather than protecting acreage under easement, it built a boardwalk straight through a small wetland area, giving kids and casual visitors a close look at standing water and marsh grass without needing trail knowledge or a parking workaround. It is a smaller, more engineered answer to the same basic idea Marjorie Perry represents on a larger, wilder scale.

The Trail Crossings You'll Only Notice Once You're Looking

Greenwood Village's roughly 40 miles of trails, including 5.47 miles of the High Line Canal Trail on the west side, connect to a network of formal equestrian crossings that most walkers and cyclists pass without ever registering. The city maintains five of them by name:

• Colorado Boulevard Equestrian Trail, accessible via the Orchard Road High Line Canal trailhead
• Monaco/Crestline Equestrian Trail, east of Monaco Street at Crestline Avenue
• Steele Street Equestrian Crossing, accessible by horseback only, north of Long Road at Steele Street, crossing Little Dry Creek
• Platte Avenue Equestrian Crossing, east of Steele Street and west of the High Line Canal, also crossing Little Dry Creek
• Marjorie Perry Nature Preserve Equestrian Crossing, crossing Greenwood Gulch

Combined with the equestrian parks at Rollin D. Barnard on East Orchard Road and Alexander Lane, this is a genuine parallel trail system layered onto the same corridors used for jogging and dog walking. If you've ever wondered why a stretch of the canal trail suddenly widens or why a particular crossing feels engineered differently than the rest, this is why.

Knowing Which Pond You're Looking At

The practical upshot is simple. If you want to fish, mark next April on the calendar and watch for the derby ticket announcement at City Hall, because the rest of the year that pond isn't holding much. If you want herons and turtles, bring binoculars to Marjorie Perry and park at the Orchard Road trailhead or Castlewood Park, not at the preserve itself. If you've got a toddler who wants to see a wetland up close without a half-mile walk, Silo Park's boardwalk does that job on a much smaller scale.

None of this shows up on a map. It shows up after enough seasons of driving past the same water and eventually learning what each one is actually for.

If you're weighing a move to Greenwood Village or Cherry Hills Village and want a guide who already knows which pond gets the trout truck, Steph Watanabe is happy to talk through the neighborhood, the trails, and everything else that doesn't show up in a listing description. Let's Connect.