New segment of Clear Creek Canyon trail could open by Labor Day

Runners, walkers, cyclists and even families with baby strollers have been waiting more than three years for the next segment of the popular Peaks to Plains trail in Clear Creek Canyon to open. It will only be a few more months now.

Project planners say they expect to open the next 1.25 miles of trail by December, and they are hoping to open it much sooner.

“Chances are, we will,” construction manager Jeffrey Hoge said last week while providing a construction tour. “If things align, Labor Day would be great.”

Since August 2021, the trail has ended just past Tunnel 1 on U.S. 6, a mile and a half west of that highway’s intersection with Colorado Highway 93 and Colorado 58. The Peaks to Plains trail features rock walls towering 1,000 feet over rushing creek rapids, and it attracts hundreds of visitors on weekends. Often, they pause at a chain link fence marking the current terminus, openly wondering when the next section will open.

That segment is part of an $80-million project — funded primarily by Jefferson County Open Space with help from Great Outdoors Colorado and the Denver Regional Council of Governments —  to extend the trail three miles from its current terminus.

Another 1.75-mile section — much of which is already in an advanced stage of construction — is expected to open in 2026, and preliminary plans have begun to extend the trail yet another six miles up the canyon by 2033.

Meanwhile, an excavator on crawling treads used a massive bucket to move boulders, restoring the creek and its banks to the way they appeared before trail construction. At one point, the excavator was chained to a front-end loader providing an anchor from above so it wouldn’t fall down the 45-degree slope where it was working.

Workers are also removing dangerous obstacles in that section of the creek, which has rapids that attract kayakers. Some of them were things that predated the trail construction, including hunks of rebar, a concrete road barrier that apparently had been in the creek for many years, and an assortment of shopping carts.

“As we put it back to its natural state, we’re also cleaning it up, making it safer,” Hoge said. “It will be like we weren’t even here. That’s the idea. Part of the aesthetics is that it’s supposed to look like this trail has been here for a long time.”

Just upstream, two 200-foot bridges have been installed, which will take the trail across the creek to the north bank. The segment opening this year will terminate at a new trailhead, which still needs to be finished.

“We need to build some walls and do some concrete work,” Jeffco Open Space project management supervisor Scot Grossman said of the new, as-yet-unnamed trailhead. “A big wall needs to go in between the road and the trailhead. We need to pave it, build a restroom and a kiosk.”

In the three miles of trail upstream from Tunnel 1, there are five elevated sections similar to the viaducts in Glenwood Canyon but smaller, since they will only accommodate foot traffic and bicycles. The section of viaduct just upstream from Tunnel 1, the last of the five to be built, is awaiting concrete pouring and pedestrian railings.

The other four viaducts, including those in the section of trail that will open in 2026, are finished except for the installation of pedestrian railings.

“We have a couple of bridges to put in and a bunch of other stuff,” Hoge said, “but we should be good for 2026.”