In northern Colorado, around a leafy preserve fed by the Poudre River and old farmland left between ever-growing neighborhoods, crews have been building a trail that will stretch about a mile. 

Only about a mile ー fairly small in one sense, big in another sense. 

“We feel like it’s a major accomplishment,” said Zac Wiebe, with Larimer County’s Department of Natural Resources. 

He was alluding to a decades-old dream that will soon be realized. 

The paved path to run about a mile here between Timnath and Windsor — between where the trail dead-ends and on south toward River Bluffs Open Space — will fill a long-lasting gap in the Poudre River Trail. Project coordinators have viewed it as the final gap.

Construction is expected to finish in March — “marking the last phase of a project more than 40 years in the making,” reads Larimer County’s project webpage. 

With the gap filled, the Poudre River Trail will run unbroken about 45 miles from Watson Lake northwest of Fort Collins to Greeley’s Island Grove Regional Park. 

That’s about 45 miles between Larimer and Weld counties; between lush corridors teeming with birds and waters teeming with fish; between urban centers and rural outskirts of big skies and open lands that recall a history of homesteading and mining as well as the natural heritage of Colorado’s fastest growing region. 

The Poudre River Trail was always meant to be that showcase, said Dave “DK” Kemp. He’s the senior trails planner for the city of Fort Collins whose work on the trail dates back 20 years. 

“A lot of these projects are often very visionary and they become sort of ideals that you work toward, wondering if you can ever truly accomplish it,” Kemp said. 

Only with “determination and patience,” said Justin Scharton, Greeley’s Natural Areas and Trails Division manager. And with collaboration. 

“It’s amazing when multiple communities can think more broadly than themselves and their particular interests,” Scharton said. “Instead they think, What if this could be bigger? What if this could be greater than our little section here?” 

That became the thinking of officials in Larimer and Weld counties in the years after a Colorado State University student’s 1975 dissertation titled “The Cache La Poudre Trail Interpretive Plan.” A detailed history on today’s trail published in 2024 points to that document as influential in plans that came out of Fort Collins’ Parks Department. Those plans led to ground breaking in 1978 and to various funding that secured 72 parcels of land for the trail.

The history published in 2024, “A Tale of Two Counties” by George Moncaster, details the different ways in which Larimer and Weld counties sought funding and navigated complex issues while sharing the same vision. As players have come and gone over the decades, the Poudre River Trail represents “an intergenerational ambition,” Moncaster writes. 

The author continues: “Truly, if there is anything to take away from the history of the PRT, it is that individuals and the interests they may represent can come together and achieve long-term goals if the original motivation is preserved throughout.” 

The motivation was not always shared. Early on, residents of Laporte in unincorporated Larimer County resisted tax-funded efforts to expand the trail. Tensions eased later in the ’80s while to the east Weld County officials embarked on “a more decentralized approach,” Moncaster writes, “relying on private donations and a diverse group of contributors.” 

They included some of the county’s earliest ranching families as well as overseers of the Kodak plant, which formerly operated near Windsor starting in the ’70s. The plant’s chemical refuse “posed a serious barrier to trail construction and personal safety,” Moncaster writes. 

“A Tale of Two Counties” describes this as but one early barrier to trail extensions. There have been several barriers in the form of private land and owners unwilling to sell or grant easements. Along with environmental considerations, the property patchwork helps explain why the Poudre River Trail often strays from the Poudre River.

“Just due to various constraints over the years and looking at pretty much every possible alignment we could fathom,” said Wiebe, with Larimer County. 

Another barrier: Interstate 25 between the two counties. 

Wiebe points to a “major breakthrough” in 2024, when the city of Fort Collins built a segment connecting to an underpass built by the Colorado Department of Transportation. That allowed passage to the other side of I-25, toward Timnath, meeting a segment the town had built back in 2015 in partnership with Larimer County. 

That passage from Fort Collins to Weld County’s plains on the other side of the highway had been a focus of Kemp for years. Along with CDOT’s underpass, passage would only be possible with an agreement from a seemingly unlikely landowner: the Great Western Railway. 

The broader collaboration between two counties and their towns also seemed unlikely, Moncaster writes in analyzing the decades: “Budgets, zoning, land acquisition, and future-oriented mindsets had to be coordinated across communities that often clashed over water and industry within the region.”

And it was only possible with funding from Great Outdoors Colorado, which became a key funder for the Poudre River Trail after the agency formed in 1992. Another key steward was established in the ’90s: nonprofit Poudre River Trail Corridor, Inc. 

“It’s literally taken the village,” Kemp said. 

The village has grown over the decades — “boomed,” said Scharton, who joined the city of Greeley in 2019. 

The Natural Areas and Trails Division was established that year as the city’s population was surpassing 100,000. By then, locals were talking about hunting fields they remembered now covered by homes, about fishing holes that had disappeared. 

“I think there’s something universal and human in that we kind of take for granted nature until maybe the finiteness of it starts to become evident,” Scharton said. “It starts to feel like we should prioritize this before it’s gone.” 

In extending the Poudre River Trail, he and fellow coordinators have hoped to connect people to nature still around. Scharton has hoped for another kind of connection: “When people can get out in nature, they can appreciate it and they start to value it. So they’re connected in values, and they support it into the future.” 

Coordinators hope for that support going forward. 

The under-construction segment “connects the whole vision,” Wiebe said, “but hopefully we’re not done.” 

He has another vision: the western end of the trail continuing to the Poudre Canyon. And Scharton has a vision for the eastern end of the trail — continuing east to where the Poudre River meets the South Platte River. 

Those are more long-term visions that will likely require the next generation of coordinators and supporters, Scharton said. 

“There was a generation of folks that started this work,” he said. “I feel like we’re the middle generation.”