The Riverfront Trail Gap By Eagle Rim Is Finally Closing. The One Near Clifton Might Not.

If you ride or walk the Colorado Riverfront Trail out of Eagle Rim Park with any regularity, you already know the spot. The pavement runs smooth along the river, past the pedestrian bridge to Las Colonias, and then it just stops. To keep going east you drop onto C½ Road for about 0.9 miles, turn onto 29 Road for another half mile, and pick the trail back up on the other side. It's not dangerous. Twenty-nine Road has a bike lane and a wide sidewalk, and C½ Road barely sees traffic. It's just the one place where the "trail" becomes "road" for a stretch, and every regular user has a version of the same story about getting turned around there the first time.

That gap is finally getting closed. Grand Junction, Mesa County, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife jointly purchased 12 acres of land in 2025 to connect the trail from Las Colonias Park through to 29 Road, with construction targeted for completion this year. It's real money and a real deed: the three agencies split roughly $1.7 million three ways, with the city holding title and about five of the twelve acres set aside specifically for the trail easement.

"This is a special night in the history of our riverfront. For over 40 years we've worked as a community to reclaim properties and transform the riverfront into a community asset."

The Grand Junction Sentinel quoted Transportation and Engineering Director Trent Prall after the Grand Junction City Council's vote to approve the purchase. The line about 40 years isn't an exaggeration. The push to stitch the Colorado and Gunnison riverbanks into one continuous trail goes back to the mid-1980s, when the corridor through here was closer to a junkyard and uranium mill site than a park system.

Two Different Gaps, Two Different Timelines

Here's the part that gets flattened in the "the trail is finally done" version of this story that's been circulating: there are two separate unfinished pieces, and only one of them is actually close.

The Eagle Rim to 29 Road piece is the one Orchard Mesa residents actually feel day to day, and it's the one with money, a deed, and a construction timeline behind it. The second gap, further east between Clifton and Palisade, doesn't have any of that. One Riverfront, the nonprofit that helps fund and coordinate trail work across the valley, has said plainly that securing those easements has been unsuccessful so far, and the current approach is exploring whether a frontage road can substitute for a route directly along the river.

So if you've heard someone say the Riverfront Trail is "getting finished in 2026" and pictured an unbroken ride from your driveway on Orchard Mesa all the way into downtown Palisade, that's not quite the shape of it. What's actually finishing is the piece closest to home. The piece further out toward Clifton and Palisade is a separate, open-ended project with no announced timeline.

What Closing The Local Gap Actually Changes

For someone doing a loop from Eagle Rim Park out toward Corn Lake or the Connected Lakes section and back, closing this gap means one less unpredictable stretch of road riding wedged into an otherwise river-side ride. That matters more than it sounds like it should, because that particular half mile on 29 Road is also one of the busier crossings on this end of the trail system, and it's the point where casual walkers and families with strollers have historically had to make a judgment call about traffic instead of just following pavement.

It's also worth knowing that the crossing at Eagle Rim itself has already changed once in recent memory. The zip line that used to carry riders from Eagle Rim Park across the river down to Las Colonias, a feature that got some attention when it opened, closed without public notice sometime in 2024 and hasn't reopened. The pedestrian bridge is still there and still does the job of getting people across on foot or bike. But if you've been away from that stretch for a couple of years and go looking for the zip line, it's gone.

None of this changes the calculus for anyone planning a longer ride east toward Palisade. Past 33½ Road in Clifton, you're still on surface streets whenever the trail work in that direction resumes, whatever form it takes. If you're headed to something on G Road in Palisade this fall, plan on driving or riding the shoulder, not gliding in on the trail.

The Fall Calendar On This Side Of The River

The trail work lands right as the neighborhood's fall calendar fills in. Carboy Winery at Mt. Garfield Estate, which local event listings place in Central Orchard Mesa even though its address technically sits just over the line in Palisade, brings back its Harvest Harmonies concert series this fall, with singer-songwriter Seth Walker on this year's bill. The venue itself has an origin story worth knowing: the concert grounds started as an old woodshed and a patch of retired vines that the winery cleared out and turned into a stage and a grassy listening area, which is why the shows there still feel more like a backyard gathering than a produced concert.

Carboy also runs a lighter, recurring calendar worth knowing about if you haven't been out that way in a while: Vin.Yasa yoga on Saturday mornings, a Pen and Glass open mic run in partnership with the Western Colorado Writers' Forum, and a rotating list of community nights that have included hat-making parties and game nights in the backyard.

Closer to home, the Orchard Mesa Farmers Market sets up Tuesdays at the Mesa County Fairgrounds on U.S. Highway 50, and the Fairgrounds themselves just wrapped their Friday Night Lights Cow Horse event on September 11, a reminder that the grounds stay busy well past the county fair's July run. On the food side, Pollo Azado opened a second location on U.S. Highway 50 in Orchard Mesa, a family-run expansion of the original North Avenue spot, giving residents on this side of the river the same grilled chicken and tacos without the drive across town. Orchard Mesa Lanes, the neighborhood's longtime bowling alley, keeps hosting the kind of community fixtures that don't show up in a typical visitor guide, from Western Colorado Special Olympics bowling to its recurring Bowl with a Cop Day. And Chipeta Golf Course remains the easy answer for anyone looking for nine or eighteen holes without leaving the neighborhood.

None of these are new discoveries. They're the same places regulars already have on rotation. The new connection will make getting between them easier, but the bigger promise, an unbroken ride all the way into Palisade, is still a ways off and depends on land negotiations that haven't gone anywhere yet.

Knowing the difference between those two timelines is the kind of detail that only comes from watching this corridor closely, which is exactly the kind of local read GSD Broker Team brings to conversations about property on this side of the valley, whether that's a home near the trail, a small business address on Highway 50, or land that touches the river corridor directly. Get a Free Business & Property Valuation.