Seven Equestrian Places Along Greenwood Village's Canal Trail

Walk south from the Orchard Road trailhead and the gravel underfoot stays the same crusher-fine surface for three miles, but the ground itself climbs 68 feet before it flattens out again at Belleview Avenue. That is more climbing than any comparable stretch of the High Line Canal one segment south in Cherry Hills Village, where the trail gains only 59 feet over a similar distance. The route overlooks what was once a working farm and is now the Marjorie Perry Nature Preserve, and the wildlife records for this stretch list foxes, coyotes, hawks, bats, and the occasional deer alongside the ducks and blackbirds working the ponds below.

That three-mile piece, officially Segment 12 on the canal's own map, is a small fraction of something much larger. The High Line Canal runs 71 miles total, from a point near East 64th Avenue on the northeast side of the metro all the way to South Wadsworth Boulevard in Littleton. Only 5.47 of those miles sit inside Greenwood Village, part of a local network of roughly 40 miles of trail spread across the city's 8.3 square miles. Most of what makes this particular stretch distinct isn't length. It's who else is allowed to use it, and how deliberately the city has kept that arrangement alive.

Two Segments Where the Gravel Changes Character

The canal through Greenwood Village breaks cleanly into two segments, and they don't read the same way underfoot.

Segment 11 has no parking at its northern end, so most people start at Orchard Road and go out and back. Segment 12 has restrooms at both ends, at the Orchard Road trailhead and at the Belleview Avenue trailhead a few hundred feet off the canal. Dogs are welcome on both, but they have to stay on leash the entire way. Neither segment is paved. That single choice, gravel instead of asphalt, is part of why this stretch still functions as a shared corridor rather than a bike commuter route.

Seven Marked Places Where Horses Still Have the Right of Way

The High Line Canal gets more urban the closer it runs to downtown Denver, where long paved sections function as bike infrastructure. Greenwood Village kept a different model. The city's own parks department maps seven distinct, named locations built specifically for horse traffic within its stretch of the canal corridor:

• Rollin D. Barnard Equestrian Park, 1001 East Orchard Road
• Alexander Lane Equestrian Park, 2501 East Alexander Lane
• Colorado Boulevard Equestrian Trail, accessible from the Orchard Road canal trailhead
• Monaco/Crestline Equestrian Trail, east of Monaco Street at Crestline Avenue
• Steele Street Equestrian Crossing, accessible by horseback only, north of Long Road at Steele Street, crossing Little Dry Creek
• Platte Avenue Equestrian Crossing, crossing Little Dry Creek east of Steele Street
• Marjorie Perry Nature Preserve Equestrian Crossing, crossing Greenwood Gulch

That's not incidental signage left over from an earlier era. It's a current, mapped system, and the trail rules reflect it. Bicycles on the canal within Greenwood Village are capped at 15 miles per hour, a limit that only makes sense if the city expects riders to regularly encounter horses, strollers, and dog walkers sharing the same narrow gravel. On a lot of the canal's other stretches through denser parts of the metro, that kind of shared-use friction has mostly resolved in favor of faster-moving traffic. Here it hasn't.

The Ponds Almost Ran Dry Over a Paperwork Gap From 1930

None of this is left to chance either. The High Line Canal itself carries an 1879 water right, junior enough under Colorado's system that Denver Water only runs water through it intermittently between April and October, depending on what's available from the South Platte River and how much irrigation demand is competing for it. Anyone who has noticed the canal running dry some weeks and full the next has been watching that seniority system play out in real time.

The Marjorie Perry Nature Preserve, the 59-acre former farmland and wetlands the city acquired in 1990, inherited a version of that same problem, just older. The ponds that give Segment 12 its wildlife habitat rely on a water decree dated 1930, and that decree never included a storage right. Without one, the ponds have no legal claim to the water that keeps them full between rain events, only whatever the city could truck in. In 2023 the city purchased water rights to fix that gap permanently. A well was drilled at the start of 2025, and the city has been building out the well house and distribution system since, with irrigation lines extending along the canal from Belleview Avenue down to Orchard Road to keep both the ponds and a new generation of cottonwoods watered without a truck.

The cottonwoods matter here specifically because most of the ones providing shade along this stretch are more than a century old and expensive to maintain. In 2021 the city committed to planting 250 new trees along the canal over five years, a $360,000 program that wraps up this year. The tree canopy that makes Segment 12 feel undisturbed is, in practice, actively engineered. The preserve's stillness isn't something the trail simply retained. It's something the city has spent the last three years rebuilding underneath the surface.

What's Left on the Calendar Before the Water Stops Running

Late September sits near the tail end of that April-to-October window when the canal actually carries water. Once flow stops for the season, the ponds and the visible stretch of canal through the preserve go quiet in a different way, less wildlife activity, less of the ambient sound that comes with moving water. The next few weeks are close to the last chance to see this stretch of Segment 12 the way it looks in the wildlife records, with water in the canal and the cottonwood canopy still holding its color.

On land, the city's own fall calendar centers on Fall Fest at Carson Park and City Hall, 6060 South Quebec Street. It's a resident-only event, with music, art projects, games, inflatables, a Pumpkin Patch Dash, and a costume contest built in. Registration for free tickets opened at 6 a.m. on September 9 through the city's special events page, and tickets are required to get in.

The well house at Marjorie Perry should be finished well before the ponds need another season of trucked-in water, and the canal itself will keep running past Segment 12 for a few more weeks before the seasonal taps close. Between now and then, this is the version of the trail worth walking.

Want to know more about what makes Greenwood Village work day to day, on and off the trail? Debbie Niedergerke has spent years learning this neighborhood block by block. Reach out anytime to talk about what's happening here.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.