Two Different Crews Are Rebuilding the High Line Canal Through Cherry Hills Village This Year

Walk the canal path from Belleview north toward Hampden this month and the trail tells two stories at once. Near Quincy Farm, the footbridge looks freshly rebuilt and the old irrigation pond has a clean, replanted edge. Continue north toward Three Pond Park and the canal's midpoint marker, and the crusher fine has worn through to bare dirt in the low spots, the kind that turns to mud that eats a running shoe after any real rain.

That contrast isn't random. It's the visible seam between two separate projects, run by two separate organizations, on two separate budgets and timelines. Once you know which is which, the trail stops looking chaotic and starts looking like exactly what it is: a shared corridor being repaired in pieces, with your daily stretch caught in the middle.

Two Different Crews, Two Different Clocks

Between 2023 and 2028, the High Line Canal Conservancy is running a $33 million campaign called Great Lengths for the High Line, part of a five-year push that leverages public funding toward $100 million in total investment along the canal. That money, plus a $10 million contribution from Denver Water and a mix of private philanthropy and grants, funds targeted projects up and down all 71 miles of the canal.

Cherry Hills Village's own Public Works Department is running something different: a resurfacing project on the trail surface itself, paid for with the City's own budget and a matching grant, separate from anything the Conservancy is doing. One project rebuilds specific landmarks. The other repairs the ground you're actually walking on. They rarely finish in the same season, which is why the trail can look brand new in one spot and neglected fifty yards later.

The Ground Under Your Feet Is the City's Problem

The trail through Cherry Hills Village is entirely soft-surface, and the existing surface was installed back in 2016. A decade of use, on one of the busiest stretches of the entire canal, has caught up with it. This is one of the most heavily visited sections of the High Line Canal; at the most recent count by the High Line Canal Conservancy, 177,281 users accessed mile 34 and 97,528 visited mile 36 in a single year. Put those two numbers next to each other and the wear pattern makes sense: mile 34, which runs past Quincy Farm, sees nearly double the foot and wheel traffic of mile 36 near Hampden.

Over time and with that kind of use, the trail surface has started to wear thin, with low spots forming where the crusher fines have entirely worn away and the trail is down to bare dirt, and since nothing binds the surface together there, it becomes muddy and rutted. The City's fix, approved through an Arapahoe County Open Spaces grant, covers the full stretch bounded by Belleview Avenue to the south and Hampden Avenue to the north, a total of 3.8 miles spanning Miles 33 through 36.5, adjacent to Three Pond Park, Dahlia Hollow Park, Quincy Farm, and Blackmer Common, and including the canal's special mile marker at 35.5.

The material going down is specific too: an estimated 2,340 tons of Gray Breeze crusher fines, applied as a 2-inch layer to create a new wearing surface free of large ruts and depressions. The work is expected to take approximately four weeks and is being managed and performed in-house by the Public Works Department, and projects funded through this grant program must be completed by December 31, 2026. That deadline is the honest answer to "when will the mud near Three Pond Park finally go away." Sometime before the end of the year, but the City hasn't committed to a specific month yet.

One Public Works discussion noted that a persistent wet spot along the trail is a known shaded, muddy area that's part of the natural bridle trail system, where adding crusher fine "would wash away" and grading is the more realistic fix.

That's a useful distinction if you've been wondering why some muddy patches get resurfaced and others just get graded. Not every soft spot is getting the same treatment, and the bridle trail sections have their own logic.

What the Conservancy Is Building Around You

While the City handles the surface, the Conservancy's list of active projects reads like a punch list for the landmarks you already pass on a normal loop:

• The Quincy Farm pedestrian bridge, which connects the historic farm to the canal, was rebuilt to match the character of the old wooden footbridge, with the project completed in summer 2026.
• Mile 34's Quincy Farm Pond, a 1930s irrigation pond that had filled with sediment and gone shallow, had its dredging completed in fall 2025 and its replanting finished in spring 2026.
• Mile 33's irrigation line, which the City has been extending along the canal to support newly planted trees, will push further north of Belleview Avenue in 2026, with additional tree planting done in partnership with the Conservancy.

None of that touches the walking surface itself. It's habitat, safety, and access work layered on top of a trail bed the City is repairing separately. That's the seam you're seeing when the bridge looks new but the path leading to it doesn't.

The Comparison Nobody Put in a Press Release

The most candid read on how residents actually experience this comes from the City's own Parks, Trails and Recreation Commission. A resident response in the 2025 Public Works Survey compared the Cherry Hills Village stretch unfavorably to the Greenwood Village side just south of it, noting the CHV section doesn't feel as maintained, with fewer distinctive bench placements and not enough new trees going in to build out fall color along the trail. Another comment said riding the canal through Greenwood Village is simply more enjoyable right now.

That's not a knock on Cherry Hills Village so much as a timing observation. Greenwood Village's stretch isn't waiting on the same 2016-surface replacement or the same county grant deadline. The two towns share a trail but not a construction calendar, and this year, that shows.

It's worth saying the Commission isn't just fielding complaints. The 2025 survey brought a number of positive comments about the spring Scavenger Hunt, and both Winter Celebration and Movie Night received strong feedback as well, events that get published through the City's Village Crier newsletter each year. The trail surface is mid-repair. The community calendar around it isn't waiting on that repair to keep going.

Your Route This Fall, Mile by Mile

If you're planning a regular loop before the resurfacing wraps, here's what the geography actually looks like right now, moving south to north:

1. Near Belleview Avenue (Mile 33): New irrigation line and tree planting are going in here through 2026. Expect some disturbed edges near the planting zones, but nothing that should slow you down.
2. Quincy Farm (Mile 34): The freshest stretch on the whole corridor right now. Both the pedestrian bridge and the pond restoration are finished.
3. Blackmer Common: Further along the corridor, off the trail and reachable from a parking lot on Dahlia Street. This 14.5-acre parcel sits southeast of Kent Denver School and is treated as a passive preservation area for wildlife viewing rather than a maintained park, so don't expect benches or amenities here, just open grassland. It's also known coyote habitat, worth keeping in mind if you're walking it with a small dog at dawn or dusk.
4. Three Pond Park and the canal's midpoint marker (Mile 35.5): This is inside the heaviest-traffic part of the 3.8-mile resurfacing zone and the most likely place to still hit the worn, muddy low spots the City flagged for repair. As the path winds through here it moves at a quieter pace past open grassland, on what's normally a well-maintained crusher-fine surface, so a rutted patch is the exception right now, not the rule.
5. Toward Hampden Avenue (Mile 36.5): The north end of the resurfacing zone. Lower traffic than the Quincy Farm to Three Pond Park stretch and the section most likely to still look untouched by either project as the year goes on.

If you want a longer loop while the mid-section is under repair, the wider network offers more than 25 miles of maintained trail around Cherry Hills Village, including the Blackmer Lake Trail loop from Temple Sinai at 5.7 miles and the Belleview Pond loop at 6.3 miles, both of which sidestep the busiest construction zone entirely.

The Long View

None of this is a one-season fix. The City's Parks, Trails and Recreation Commission has already flagged bigger asks for next year, including a possible bike path along East Mansfield and a long-standing request for a safer crossing near St. Mary's Academy that Colorado's transportation department has called cost-prohibitive as an underpass. Those conversations are pointed at 2027 capital planning, not this year's resurfacing.

So the honest way to think about the canal right now: the landmarks are getting rebuilt on the Conservancy's five-year campaign, the ground under your feet is getting rebuilt on the City's own clock and a hard December deadline, and the two won't necessarily line up until both punch lists are actually finished. Knowing that doesn't fix the mud near Three Pond Park today, but it does mean you're not wondering all winter whether anyone's working on it. They are. Just not the same anyone.

If you're weighing a move near this stretch of the canal, or you already live along it and have questions about how neighborhood infrastructure like this tends to affect long-term property character, Stephanie Watanabe knows this corridor block by block. Let's Connect.