After a year with little visible progress, the Durango Mesa Park project is taking its next big steps forward in 2025. The park will contain “Colorado’s largest bike park,” which is “one of the biggest bike parks in the nation,” according to Hogan Koesis, Program Director for the Durango Mesa Park Foundation.
Gaige Sippy, Venue Manager for the Durango Mesa Park Foundation, took it one step farther in a 2023 interview, claiming it will be “the largest municipal bike park in the USA.”
Durango Mesa Park: a recent history
In 2023, Durango Mesa Park opened a 7-mile “demonstration project” to give the community a taste of what’s to come. The initial 7-mile trail development included the first purpose-built jump trails in the city of Durango, and they quickly became some of the most popular trails in the city.
From the outside, the Mesa Park saw very little visible trail development in 2024. This lack of development was due in part to a change in the planning leadership for the project.
The Katz family purchased the 1,850-acre parcel of land and subsequently created the Durango Mesa Park Foundation to own and manage the land. The Foundation has worked closely with both the City of Durango and La Plata County, and the county initially took the lead on the master planning process for the project. In 2023, “they determined that they had other priorities that they wanted to focus on, and so they stepped back from the project,” said Moira Montrose Compton, Executive Director for the Durango Mesa Park Foundation. This “step back” came during a wave of local political infighting between the county and the city, which continues to this day. The Foundation was forced to take over the reins for the master planning process, which is still ongoing in 2025.
During this time, the Durango Mesa Park Foundation recruited Hogan Koesis to help finish the master plan. Koesis has roots in Durango; he served as the Director of Mountain Biking for Mountain Capital Partners, the owners of Purgatory Mountain Resort, from 2017 to 2019. Most recently, Koesis lived and worked in Bentonville, where he oversaw over $175 million in trail and infrastructure development as the Director of Soft Surface Trails for the Trailblazers from 2019 to 2024.
Trail development is again underway in Durango Mesa Park
Trail development in the Mesa Park is again underway in 2025. A 1.4-mile traversing connector trail was finished in the spring of ’25. It runs from the Meadow Hub (built in the 2023 demonstration project) to the Crites Connect and Carbon Junction trails. This flowing, machine-built traverse is a joy to ride on its own, but it also opens up a plethora of new loop options with the trails in the Sale Barn area. Previously, the only connection between Horse Gulch and the Sale Barn trails was the historic Telegraph Trail, which climbs steeply over a rocky pass. The beginner-friendly connector provides riders with an easier option to access Sale Barn (and associated trails like Big Canyon), and it also creates fantastic loop options with Telegraph.
Above and beyond new loop combinations, the connector will prove to be a critical conduit through the future bike park development. The trail runs above the zone where the bulk of the bike park infrastructure will be developed.
In addition, four new trails in the upper reaches of the bike park have already been built, located above the new connector trail and below Crites Connect. Known as the “Upper Drop Zone,” the small batch of trails includes a dedicated climbing trail and green, blue, and black downhill directional lines.
While all the downhill lines feature berms and jumps, they retain a raw, enduro-style flavor. The black line, in particular, mixes wedge booter-style doubles with a steep rock garden and a wooden bridge step-down drop. The intermediate and beginner lines don’t include any rocks to speak of, and are easy, flowy lines.
Trail difficulties are inconsistent in the Mesa Park
Notably, the assigned trail difficulties in the Upper Drop Zone are dramatically different than those found on the jump trails in the demonstration project. The “Intermediate Downhill” trails (don’t get me started on these trail names) in the demonstration project include near-vertical lips up to 10 feet tall and tables stretching over 20 feet in some cases. Riders will also find massive hip jumps and a variety of tabletop shapes, and will often be forced to send to blind landings on these massive features.
In contrast, the blue/intermediate line in the Upper Drop Zone, known as “Yeti Run,” includes a couple of small lips built onto rollers in the trail, and doesn’t have a single tabletop to speak of. In fact, the jumps on the “Intermediate” trails in the demo project are dramatically larger than those found on the black diamond-rated “Hairball” trail in the new Upper Drop Zone.
While I’ve written extensively about how trail difficulty ratings don’t often align from one region to another, generally speaking, trail difficulties retain some semblance of parity within each individual trail system. That currently isn’t the case in Durango Mesa Park, which could cause some confusion (and crashes) for visiting riders.
Trail ratings aside, the latest trails built in the Upper Drop Zone offer a promising sign of what’s to come. With carefully crafted rock work and even a wooden feature (the first in the region outside of the Purgatory Bike Park), this first taste of the bike park development has left local riders excited and wanting more.
In addition to the bike trail development, a new hiking-only trail was constructed in 2025. It begins along the new Durango Mesa Park Connector Trail.
Ongoing development in 2025
Major infrastructure development is currently underway in the Mesa Park. An entire intersection is being built on the nearby highway, complete with a stoplight, which will allow substantial traffic to easily access the park. A waterline is being built into the park, connected to the City of Durango’s water and sewer system. Most notably, the road climbing up onto the Mesa is being completely rebuilt to accommodate the expected traffic, with the road’s grade being reduced from 12% to 8%. The Foundation expects this infrastructure work to conclude in late 2025.
The Foundation is currently working to finish the master plan and acquire permits for the next phase of work. “Immediately upon the notice to proceed with the bike park permitting will be the mass grading exercise,” said Koesis. Much of the property is “a big hillside that is a free extraction site, a gravel mine, and it’s terraced and stepped. We’re going to homologate, re-terraform, and revitalize the area so that it feels like it wasn’t impacted from extraction. It’ll feel like a park. It’ll look like a park.”
Once the mesa has been mass-graded, work can commence on the core of the bike park development. The first trails to be constructed will include key infrastructure and connectivity trails, such as a promenade loop trail that will encircle the park and anchor the area.
An ambitious vision for the future
The Durango Mesa Park Foundation’s vision is ambitious, and tapping Koesis to lead the project shows how serious they are. When complete, the bike park will be able to support high-level events “like Colorado League, US Pro Cup, etc.,” according to Koesis. “They will definitely complement what Fort Lewis needs for cyclocross racing, dual slalom, collegiate-level events.”
There’s also a plan to build a top-tier BMX racing and training facility capable of hosting national and world championship-level events, and it will be open 365 days per year. Shane Fernandez of USA BMX compared the planned facility to one built in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which generated $45 million of economic impact in its first two years.
Down the road, Mesa Park also plans to build an amphitheater capable of holding 20,000 attendees, but the plan is still conceptual. Infrastructure such as campgrounds and a disc golf course are also planned for the Mesa Park. Initially, Mesa Park planned to move the La Plata County Fairgrounds onto the property from its current space-confined location, but the breakdown in communication with the county appears to have put those plans on hold for the time being. The fairgrounds were notably absent from a presentation made by the Mesa Park Foundation in March of 2025, but Koesis did note that land has still been set aside for the fairgrounds if the opportunity arises in the future.
The Durango Mesa Park Foundation is considering a whole host of potential infrastructure and connectivity options as well, such as a cyclist and pedestrian underpass beneath Highway 3 to connect to the Animas River Trail — a paved bike path connecting the Durango area. They’ve also explored the idea of building a gondola to connect downtown Durango and Three Springs, built over the Durango Mesa Park property.
While some of these pie-in-the-sky developments, like a gondola, may never come to fruition, the scale of the trail and bike park development in the Durango Mesa Park is almost unprecedented. The Katz family and the Foundation are charting a new course with this ambitious project, with the Durango community — and everyone who visits — as the luckiest beneficiaries of their hard work.
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