Walk the Riverfront Trail enough times and the murals under the underpasses start to feel like part of the concrete itself, permanent as the bridge decking above them. They are not. Somewhere between the day a design gets approved and the day CDOT signs off on the wall, every one of those panels is already counting down. The city repaints them on a two-year cycle, and this year's reset window closed on artist applications August 12 and runs through September 30. If you have walked past a stretch of trail art recently without giving it a second look, this is the month it changes under you.
Six walls, one coordinated season
The City of Grand Junction and the Grand Junction Commission on Arts and Culture confirmed the return of the aRT program, short for Art on the Riverfront Trail, for 2026, with nine paintable sites spread across six locations along the corridor. Selected artists are working now through the end of September, which means the trail is mid-transformation at this exact moment rather than waiting on some future unveiling.
The sites this cycle are:
- Redlands Parkway Underpass
- Lower No Thoroughfare Underpass
- Highway 340 Riverside Underpass
- Highway 50 and Fifth Street Bridge Underpass
- Monument Road and D Road Underpass
- Ridges Boulevard Bridge near Duck Pond Park
That spread matters more than it looks. This is not a downtown-only refresh. It touches the Redlands entry point, the Fifth Street crossing near the heart of the city, the D Road corridor, and the quieter Duck Pond Park stretch out toward the Redlands side of the river. Whichever section of the trail is part of your regular loop, there is a reasonable chance one of these six spots is on it.
The program pays $1,000 per mural commission and runs through a coalition that includes the Grand Junction Police Department, the Colorado Department of Transportation, the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, Mesa County Public Health, the Urban Trails Committee, and a local artist collective called Super Rad Art Jam. Every design facing the trail goes through committee review before a brush touches the wall, so what shows up in late September is not improvised.
The part most walkers never clock
The reason this is worth noticing at all is the two-year rule itself. The City of Grand Junction's own program page describes aRT as a deliberately fluid process, with murals changing on a schedule rather than sitting as permanent installations. That is a different premise than most public art programs run on. A courthouse mosaic gets restored when it cracks. A trail underpass here gets a new design on a clock, whether the old one is faded or not.
Practically, that means the six locations above are not simply getting art. They are getting art that was always scheduled to be temporary, which is also why the call for artists framed this round as a competition rather than a maintenance job. Artists submitted renderings, examples of past work, and a proposal for a specific wall, knowing the piece they made would likely be repainted by someone else in another two years.
There is a useful bit of history in that same set of locations. Back in 2017, three of this year's six sites, the Redlands Parkway underpass, the Highway 340 crossing, and the Highway 50 undercrossing, hosted a different round of aRT work, covered at the time by the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. One panel, painted by local artist Jeremy Velasquez under Highway 50, depicted a field worker bent over his work in the orchards, with a hidden profile in the landscape honoring a longtime Palisade agricultural worker named Fernando. Another artist, Nyssa Capps, used her panel to paint the entire Riverfront Trail in miniature, with a peach tree tucked into one corner as a nod to the valley's fruit country. Those specific panels were the product of that round's competition, not fixtures. Whatever comes out of this year's process at those same three spots will be its own thing, made by different hands under different rules, on the same wall.
That is the honest way to think about the trail's art. It is not scenery. It is a rotating commission with a two-year expiration date, and right now you are living through one of the changeovers.
Where to actually go look
If you want to see the work in progress rather than wait for a finished reveal, the trail is easy to access from a few points locals already use. The Las Colonias Amphitheater is the natural starting point heading west, with parking right off the lot. If you are covering the Audubon stretch toward Connected Lakes, Handlebar Tap House sits just off that section and is a reasonable place to end a walk with cowboy fries and a beer while the light changes. None of the underpass sites require a special trip. They are built into a trail most Grand Junction residents already use for a morning run or an evening dog walk, which is part of the point. The program exists specifically so that the ordinary parts of a daily route stay worth looking at.
The date to actually put on a calendar
Once the mural season wraps at the end of September, the next marker on the Riverfront Trail calendar sits at Las Colonias Park itself. The city has confirmed Water Lights at Night for Saturday, October 10, 2026, beginning at 5 p.m. at Butterfly Pond. A lantern release kicks the evening off, followed by the Grand Junction America 250 and Colorado 150 Drone Show, part of the statewide slate of events marking the nation's 250th anniversary and Colorado's 150th year of statehood.
Drone shows are not a regular fixture of the Grand Valley calendar, which makes this a genuinely one-off evening rather than an annual tradition you can catch next year on the same weekend. If the mural changeover is the kind of thing you notice mid-walk over the next month, the October 10 event is the kind of thing worth deciding in advance to actually attend, since Butterfly Pond gets crowded fast for anything staged after dark.
Why any of this is worth ten minutes of your attention
None of this changes property values or school boundaries or anything a listing sheet would capture. What it does is answer a question a lot of Grand Junction residents have probably had without chasing down the answer: why do the murals under some bridges look fresher than others, and who decides when they change. The answer is a genuinely local one. A city arts commission, a volunteer art collective, and a rotating slate of local painters are rewriting six specific walls on your trail this month, on a schedule that has been running since well before most of us started paying attention to it.
If you walk, run, or bike the Riverfront Trail, the next few weeks are as good a time as any to actually look at the walls instead of past them.
I spend a lot of my own time thinking about what makes a specific piece of ground in this valley worth paying attention to, whether that's an irrigation ditch on East Orchard Mesa or a stretch of trail that's about to look different than it did last month. If you're weighing a move into the Grand Valley and want someone who actually knows which underpass is which, reach out to Laura Black to schedule a consultation.
