Walk the trail this week and you'll notice the disconnect before you can name it. Fresh concrete under your feet near the Doubletree, wide and smooth with new railings, the kind of surface that makes you realize how bad the old asphalt actually was. Then, a mile or so north, orange cones and a taped-off spur where the path used to cut over toward Rio Vista Circle. Same trail, same year, two completely different states of finished.
That gap is the story. The city announced in August that the Animas River Trail had reopened between 29th Street and Demon Bridge, and the local coverage largely treated that as the good news of the summer. It is good news. But "reopened" and "walkable end to end" turned out to be two different claims, and the section that's actually in the best shape right now is the one nobody's been talking about since December.
Two rebuilds, running on different clocks
The Animas River Trail has been under partial reconstruction since early last year, in pieces, funded by the city's 2015 half-cent sales tax dedicated to trails and parks. The first piece to get the full treatment, wider concrete, new lighting, new railings, wraps the stretch between Santa Rita Park and the Doubletree Inn. That segment ran into unstable soil and heavy fall rain in 2025, slipped its November deadline, and finally reopened the Friday before Christmas. The city later confirmed the project came in under its $3.26 million budget, landing at $3.1 million.
That segment has now had eight months to settle in. It's done. No cones, no detour signage, no dust.
The second piece is where the confusion starts. This summer's Phase I rebuilt the corridor from Rank Park through Memorial Park, closing the section between the 29th Street lot and the Rio Vista Spur starting June 8 and rerouting foot traffic along 29th Street and Rio Vista Circle. Demon Bridge itself stayed open the whole time. That work wrapped in late August, and the city's Orange Cone Report, its weekly construction bulletin for exactly this kind of thing, confirmed the corridor between 29th Street and Demon Bridge reopened August 28.
Here's the part that doesn't make it into the headline: the spur trail connecting to Rio Vista Circle is still closed. Paving there finished, according to the same Orange Cone update, but the section stays shut until seeding and planting work is done. If your normal loop uses that connector, you're still on a detour, even though the main corridor a few hundred feet away has been open for weeks.
| Segment | Status as of mid-September 2026 | What it means for your walk |
|---|---|---|
| Doubletree Inn to Santa Rita Park | Finished, reopened in December | Best surface on the trail right now, no construction noise |
| 29th Street to Demon Bridge | Reopened August 28 | Main corridor is clear |
| Rio Vista Spur to Rio Vista Circle | Paving complete, closed for seeding and planting | Still detoured, use 29th Street or Rio Vista Circle as workaround |
| Demon Bridge | Open, but abutment work has started underneath | Expect this to be the next closure |
The bridge is the next domino
Phase 2 isn't just finishing the spur. According to the city's project updates, crews are already building new abutments for Demon Bridge, with the bridge replacement itself targeted for spring 2027. That's worth knowing now, in September, because it means this isn't a project winding down. It's a project moving its disruption from one river crossing to the next.
There's also a smaller, stranger detail tucked into the same update: vegetation clearing on the west side of the river is being timed and supervised specifically to avoid disturbing the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse, an endangered species with habitat along that stretch, before it goes into winter hibernation. It's the kind of regulatory footnote that never makes the ribbon-cutting photo, but it's part of why some clearing work happens on a schedule that looks arbitrary if you don't know the reason.
If you want a sense of how firm "spring 2027" really is, look at how the last segment went. City spokesman Tom Sluis, explaining last fall's delay on the Doubletree segment, put it plainly:
Seems like every time the ground in Durango is disturbed for a project, some new problem arises.
That's not a knock on the crews. It's just a pattern worth remembering before you plan next spring around a specific reopening date.
Where to actually go for fall color this week
None of this needs to keep you off the trail. If anything, mid-September through early October is the window locals wait for, when the aspens above 9,000 feet have already started turning and the cottonwoods along the river follow within a couple of weeks. The finished Doubletree-to-Santa-Rita stretch is arguably the best in-town color walk on the whole route right now, since it's got new lighting for early evenings, no construction noise, and none of the detour signage that breaks up the rhythm of a walk.
A few ways to use the trail well this week:
- Start at Santa Rita Park and walk south toward the Doubletree. This is the finished segment, and it's shaded enough that the color show holds up even midday.
- If you're coming from the north end, park at the 29th Street lot and head toward Demon Bridge. The corridor's open, just don't expect to loop back through Rio Vista Circle.
- Grab coffee first. Locals doing an in-town leaf-peeping loop often start with a cup from Crossroads Coffee before heading down to the river, since the trail is close enough to downtown to make it a genuine before-work or weekend-morning stop rather than a drive-somewhere outing.
- If you're walking a dog, note that off-leash animals remain the most common source of trail conflict according to Durango Trails, the nonprofit that helps maintain the corridor, so leash up even on the quiet stretches.
The bigger project nobody's finishing soon
It's worth zooming out for a second, because the 2026 construction season isn't really its own thing. City officials and longtime residents describe the Animas River Trail as a project that started in 1976 and still isn't finished, with the most obvious gap being the missing link between the trail's current southern reach and Three Springs, still tied up in land negotiations the city says will take time to resolve. A former city councilor, describing the trail to a local reporter earlier this year, called it Durango's "crown jewel," and that's not marketing language. It's a nearly 50-year infrastructure project that this year's Phase 1 and Phase 2 work is just the latest chapter of, not the ending.
So if you've been avoiding a section because you assumed it was still torn up, or avoiding the whole trail because you heard it's "under construction," the honest answer is more specific than either. One long stretch is finished and quiet. One stretch reopened but has an unfinished spur hanging off it. And one bridge is about to become next year's project. Walk the finished part while the light's good. The rest will get there, on its own schedule.
If you're the kind of person who tracks a trail's construction updates the way other people track a stock ticker, you probably already know that watching what a city invests in, and where, tells you almost as much about a neighborhood as any listing does. If you ever want to talk about what a home near this stretch of the Animas is actually worth, Judi Mora has spent more than twenty years reading exactly that kind of local signal, and a free home valuation is a good place to start that conversation.
