You're riding east from Las Colonias on a Saturday morning, past the amphitheater, past the last bend where the pavement curves along the river, and then the trail just stops. No sign, no detour arrow, just gravel shoulder and a decision: turn back, or pick your way onto C ½ Road and hope the drivers are paying attention. Anyone who has ridden the Grand Junction side of the Riverfront Trail toward Palisade knows this moment. It has been the same moment for years.
What most riders don't know is that this particular gap is finally getting fixed, and the fix has nothing in common with how the valley is solving the trail's other missing piece, out past Clifton. One gap got closed with a checkbook. The other is getting closed by giving up on the river entirely.
Forty years, eight pearls, and two blank spots
The Riverfront Trail traces back to 1987, when local community leaders brought together Mesa County, Grand Junction, Fruita, Palisade, and Colorado State Parks to form the Colorado Riverfront Commission, with the idea of stitching the Colorado and Gunnison riverbanks into one public corridor. The vision got described as a string of pearls, with each park or preserved parcel functioning as a bead on the line. Eight of those pearls, spanning about 21 miles, came together over the next two decades. What's left are two stretches where the string simply doesn't connect: the mile-and-a-half between Las Colonias Park and 29 Road, and the longer run between Clifton's 33½ Road and Palisade's Riverbend Park at 36¼ Road.
Both gaps have been on the to-do list for years. Only one of them has money attached to it right now.
The gap that money could fix
In November 2025, Mesa County announced it had signed an intergovernmental agreement with the City of Grand Junction and Colorado Parks and Wildlife to jointly purchase a 12-acre parcel needed to finally connect Las Colonias to 29 Road. The county's release put the price at nearly $1.7 million, split three ways, with the county's share at $555,000 plus closing costs. The Daily Sentinel had covered an earlier version of this same purchase when Grand Junction's city council first voted on it, quoting a $1.6 million price tag at that stage. The two accounts don't reconcile the $100,000 difference, which is likely closing costs added once the three-agency agreement was finalized, but it's worth flagging rather than picking one number and pretending the other doesn't exist.
Of the 12 acres, about five will become the trail easement. The other seven stay undesignated, reserved for whatever public use comes next, with the city holding title and administering the land. Construction started in 2025, and the county's own language says completion is anticipated sometime in 2026, closing what the Business Times has called the last mile-and-a-half stretch on the north side of the river. When it's done, Mesa County says the trail will run uninterrupted from Loma all the way to Clifton, meaning the C ½ Road detour that generations of riders have learned to navigate by memory finally becomes unnecessary.
City Transportation and Engineering Director Trent Prall called the council vote "a special night in the history of our riverfront." After roughly forty years of assembling this trail parcel by parcel, that's not an exaggeration so much as an accounting of how rare a clean land purchase has actually been for this project.
The gap money couldn't fix
The other missing piece, between Clifton and Palisade, has resisted a purchase-based solution for a simple reason: the land along the river there belongs to people who never agreed to give up an easement. One Riverfront, the nonprofit that has coordinated trail development for decades, has said plainly that it has been unable to secure the access it needs from landowners in that stretch, despite years of trying.
So planners changed the question. Instead of asking how to get an easement along the river, Mesa County and One Riverfront hired KLJ Engineering to study alternate corridors that don't hug the water at all. After roughly ten months of work, KLJ presented its recommendation at a public meeting at the Clifton Community Campus: pick up the trail where it currently ends at 33½ Road, cross Clifton Water Company property to 34 Road, follow Grand Valley Canal Road for about a mile, turn north on 35 Road, and finish the connection using U.S. Highway 6, according to reporting from the Daily Sentinel. KLJ was expected to finalize the study shortly after that meeting, with county commissioners slated to formally adopt it in January 2026.
One resident who showed up to that meeting, a regular bike commuter named Maxwell, put his finger on what a lot of riders are actually worried about. He told the Sentinel he'd heard talk of a separated path running alongside the highway rather than a standard bike lane, and that as long as there's real protection between riders and traffic, he'd take it. That's the trade this route represents. It gives up river views for a stretch in exchange for finally connecting the two towns at all.
Unlike the Las Colonias side, there's no dollar figure attached to actual construction here yet. This is still a recommended alignment moving through public review, not a funded project with a completion date. The routes shown in county materials are explicitly described as not yet finalized.
Same forty-year project, two different playbooks
Put the two gaps side by side and the pattern is obvious once you see it. The Las Colonias to 29 Road stretch sat on land that was ultimately purchasable, close to existing public parks, with room to negotiate a straightforward three-way deal. The Clifton to Palisade stretch sits against working water infrastructure and private agricultural land that owners weren't willing to part with, no matter how long the ask went on. Distance wasn't the deciding factor. Both gaps run through comparable terrain over comparable mileage. What decided the outcome was who owned the ground in between and whether they'd sell or grant access.
That's worth sitting with if you've ever wondered why a project with this much community backing has taken so long. The engineering was never the hard part.
What riders will actually notice this year
If you already ride or walk this trail, here's what's realistic to expect through the rest of 2026:
- Between Las Colonias and 29 Road, expect visible construction activity and possible temporary detours as the new easement gets built out. The county's own timeline points to completion sometime this year, though no specific month has been announced.
- Between Clifton and Palisade, expect no physical change yet. The 33½ Road dead end and the Riverbend Park access point at Palisade remain exactly as they've been. This piece is still in the planning and public-comment phase.
- The C ½ Road workaround that longtime riders use to bridge the 29 Road gap should eventually disappear once the new segment opens, but it's still the only way through for now.
The trail people already love, gaps and all
None of this stops people from riding the sections that already work, and there's plenty worth knowing about even with the gaps intact. Along the Audubon section, Handlebar Tap House has become a regular stop for riders looking for a burger and a beer before heading back into town. Near Las Colonias, Tacoparty rotates a new lineup of six taco combinations every week, along with a soft-serve selection that regulars talk about as much as the tacos. Out at Connected Lakes, more than 200 bird species have been documented, and Blue Herons wading in the shallows are common enough that most regulars stop noticing them after a while.
There's also a small, timely piece of trail news worth flagging if you're a local artist or just curious what's coming. Grand Junction's aRT program, which turns underpass supports along the trail into public murals, is taking applications through this Wednesday, August 12, for its 2026 round. Six sites are up for new work this year, including the Redlands Parkway Underpass, the Lower No Thoroughfare Underpass, and the bridge near Duck Pond Park on Ridges Boulevard. Selected artists get a $1,000 commission and complete their work between late August and the end of September.
None of this trail is waiting on either gap to close. It's already part of daily life for the people who live along it, which is exactly why the two missing pieces matter enough to track. A project this old, this community-funded, and this close to finished deserves more than a vague sense that "they're working on it." Knowing which half is bought and which half is still being negotiated tells you something real about how public land actually gets assembled in this valley, one parcel, one easement, one holdout landowner at a time.
If you're weighing a move to Grand Junction or anywhere else in the Grand Valley and want a local read on what a neighborhood is really like day to day, not just what the listing photos show, Laura Black has spent nearly two decades learning this ground. Schedule a Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
