Your Blodgett Trailhead Just Split In Two: Here's What Changed This Summer

The gate at the new southern entrance to Blodgett Open Space still smells like fresh gravel. Walk in from the new lot and the trail forks almost immediately, one way toward a marked downhill bike run, the other toward a wider path shared by hikers and slower riders. That fork is not an accident of construction. It is the whole point of a project the city spent more than a year building, and it changes something residents on this side of Colorado Springs have navigated the same way for a decade: which trail to use, and for what.

Blodgett Open Space did not just get bigger this year. It got sorted.

The Network Just Got Sorted, Not Just Bigger

On July 17, 2026, the City of Colorado Springs officially opened seven miles of newly built trail across the southern half of Blodgett Open Space, the section that sits below the old Pikeview Quarry. The new mileage includes 2.5 miles of directional, downhill-only bike trail on what planners call Blodgett Bike Hill, four miles of multi-use trail for hikers and riders sharing the same tread, a half-mile connector built to regional trail standard, four new trail bridges, and a fresh 50-space lot at what the city is calling the Quarry Trailhead. Funding came through the city's Trails, Open Space and Parks sales tax program along with a Colorado Parks and Wildlife non-motorized trail grant.

That is the finished piece. The city says another seven miles are coming to the central and northern sections of the 384-acre open space by the end of 2026, which will complete a plan adopted in 2024 after an extended community input process.

The design logic behind all of it is a split by use. The north end, closer to the peak itself, stays hiking and multi-use, dog-on-leash, family territory. The south end, under the old quarry, becomes the bike-first side, with directional descents that did not exist here before. If you have parked at the same Woodmen Road lot for years and wandered wherever the crowd thinned out, that habit is about to run into a trail system that was not built to be wandered that way anymore.

Fenceline Is Being Retired

The clearest sign of that shift is what is happening to Fenceline, a trail generations of local mountain bikers have ridden as a long climb-and-descend on the property's edge. The portion of Fenceline on city land is being removed and replaced with what the trail-building community is calling Fenceline 2.0, professionally constructed by contractors working with input from the Colorado Springs Mountain Bike Association. The rebuild includes a flow trail and two tech-trail options at different difficulty levels, engineered with crossing points meant to cut down on conflicts between riders headed different directions. The original alignment survives only on the stretch that sits on national forest land outside city jurisdiction, where the Forest Service has no current plans to change it.

Skyler Roarbaugh, director of the city's Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services Department, put it plainly when the southern trails opened on July 17:

"The opening of these trails is a major milestone for Blodgett Open Space and for outdoor recreation in Colorado Springs."

Getting there took more than a year of work. Crews flagged alignments, closed unauthorized social trails, and coordinated with the Colorado Springs Fire Department on fuel mitigation across the property while construction moved through. Anyone hiking Blodgett earlier this year likely walked past that flagging without knowing what it was building toward.

The View From Ute Valley Already Connects The Two

Blodgett does not exist in isolation from the rest of the neighborhood's trail system, and the view proves it. A Colorado Springs Gazette hiking column earlier this year mapped a 2.4-mile loop out of Ute Valley Park starting at the Pinon Valley Park trailhead on Mule Deer Drive, climbing 312 feet to a ridge before dropping back through a route called Triple Treat Trail. From that ridge, the sightline runs unbroken from Blodgett Peak in the north to Cheyenne Mountain in the south, the same two anchor points that the city's long-term trail planning is trying to physically link.

Ute Valley itself has been public open space since 1969, expanded through several later land acquisitions, with no entrance fee and multiple access points beyond the main Vindicator Drive lot, including entries off South Rockrimmon Boulevard and near the Tech Center area. The terrain ranges from smooth singletrack to technical rocky climbs and sandstone ledges, which is why it draws hikers, trail runners, and mountain bikers in roughly equal numbers on any given weekend.

The point is not that Ute Valley and Blodgett are the same park. They are not. The point is that the view from one already tells you where the other is headed, and the city's own planning documents describe a future trail called Chamberlain that would make that visual connection a physical one.

A New Line To Balanced Rock

The stitching is not limited to open space trails. At the southern edge of the neighborhood, where Garden of the Gods Road meets the park, the Garden of the Gods Trading Post is partway through a $1.4 million expansion. The project adds 3,500 square feet to the shop and a new parking lot, made possible by a 2023 land transfer between the Trading Post's owners and the City of Colorado Springs. Construction on the parking lot began this spring, with groundbreaking on the building expansion itself following in September.

Tucked into that plan is a new trail connecting the Trading Post directly to Balanced Rock, one of the park's most recognizable formations. It is a small addition on its own. Set next to everything happening at Blodgett and Ute Valley, it reads as one more piece of a neighborhood that is quietly closing the gaps between its separate green spaces.

What's Still Unfinished

Not everything is real yet, and it is worth being precise about which parts are.

The Chamberlain Trail, eventually a 16-mile regional spine running from Cheyenne Mountain State Park to Blodgett Open Space, exists so far only as an alignment inside the finished section of Blodgett. The corridor connecting it to Cheyenne Mountain has not been built. What is finished is the northern doorway where that future trail will one day arrive.

The old Pikeview Quarry, which sits between the newly opened southern trails and the rest of the property, is not part of the current Blodgett Master Plan at all. It remains under active land reclamation, and ownership is expected to transfer to the city sometime in 2026. Once that happens, a separate planning process would begin for what city and trail-advocacy stakeholders have referred to as a future bike park on the site, a project with no timeline yet attached.

Which Gate To Use This Weekend

For residents deciding where to park this month, the practical version of all this planning comes down to a short list.

• For a family walk or a dog on leash, use the north end of Blodgett, reached via Centennial Boulevard where it becomes Woodmen Road. This stays multi-use and hiking-focused under the finished plan.
• For a downhill mountain bike lap, the new Quarry Trailhead off Blodgett Ranch Trail is the entrance built for it, with 50 parking spaces that did not exist before this summer.
• If you're headed for the summit of Blodgett Peak itself, know that the peak sits on Pike National Forest land outside city trail management. Route-finding is difficult, the terrain is treacherous in places, and serious injuries have occurred there. The city's new trail work does not extend to the summit route.
• At Ute Valley Park, the Vindicator Drive lot is the largest and easiest to find, though weekend traffic fills it fast enough that the South Rockrimmon Boulevard and Tech Center access points are worth knowing as backups.

One more date worth flagging before the summer closes out. Rock Ledge Ranch's Living History Program, the working farm and blacksmith shop tucked next to the Visitor and Nature Center, has its historic buildings staffed with interpreters on a set schedule running from June 3 through today, August 15. If you have been meaning to get out there this year, today is the last day before the site goes quiet until next summer.

Northwest Colorado Springs has always had the raw material for this kind of trail network, the open space, the elevation, the sightlines between Blodgett and Cheyenne Mountain. What changed this year is that the pieces finally got built to talk to each other. Whether you are walking a dog on the north end or lapping a new downhill run on the south, you are using a version of this neighborhood that did not exist a year ago.

If you're curious how this kind of neighborhood investment tends to show up in home values and buyer interest over time, that's a conversation the team at Kirkpatrick Associates has almost daily. No pressure to make it about real estate today. Just good to know your trailhead before you need to know your listing price.