A 30 Mile Asphalt Trail From Palisade To Fruita Where Cyclists Can Explore And Roam Free
Scott Winans has made his life about bicycling. He owns a bike shop in western Colorado, he helps engineer high end bike components for a competition bike company, and he even heads up an organization that forges new mountain bike trails in western Colorado.
It turns out his passion for free riding stems from his earliest encounters with personal freedom on two wheels.
"For me it goes back to childhood," Winans said in a recent interview. "I grew up in an agricultural community in Arizona, and for me, my access to the world was on bikes."
As president of COPMOBA -- which stands for The Colorado Plateau Mountain Bike Trail Association, Inc. -- Winans and his supporters are working to extend trails from a string of towns in the Grand Valley, across the border into Utah.
Closer to home, Winans' bike shop, Rapid Creek Cycles, does a swift business of renting cruisers and commuting bikes near the Riverfront Trail in Palisade, a town of 2,700 near the eastern end of the Grand Valley. Palisade is connected to the other towns on this stretch, a 30-mile long hard-top concrete and asphalt trail that is good for riders and explorers of all ages.
"One nice thing about a Riverfront Trail in its full scope - you can ride from the city of Fruita to Palisades which is about 30 miles – and you are on the Riverfront Trail for the mass majority of that distance," Winans said. "It links opposite ends of the valley - it serves as commuting pathways.”
The Riverfront trail was conceived about 30 years ago as a part of a bigger plan to provide public access to the Colorado River. Famed TV announcer John Madden shamed the community of Grand Junction by referring to it as Grand Junkyard on a Monday Night Football broadcast after he passed through on train and was non-plussed. This was the motivation the townspeople needed to clean up the river access.
“It was a junkyard, there was like 5000 car bodies” on one piece of private land, said Frank Watt, the co-chair of the Colorado Riverfront Commission and the public works director of the town of Palisade. “The citizens went to the city and said ‘if we raise the money to buy this land, will you help us develop the land?’”
The answer was “yes,” and the townsfolk of Grand Junction started a revitalization trail project that is still underway today. Thirty years later the inspiration and motivation of building out the trail system still exists in this remote part of Colorado. Besides being a recreational area, the Riverfront Trail serves as commuter lane between the towns in the Grand Valley – Fruita on the western end, and Palisade on the east. Watt said the commuting traffic is apparent around rush hour, as the number of bikes picks up along the Riverfront Trail.
The hard-top trail is about 80 percent complete, after 30 years of work. There are still some significant gaps where bikers and commuters must take alternative routes to get from end to end. The plan is to build out the entire trail, using state and federal funds to close the funding gap.
"The factors that affect our ability to build trail are cost,” Watt explains. “You are also building trail along the river which means it is subject to flooding - so there is design consideration there.”
The Colorado Riverfront Commission has put up $160,000 to help connect the Riverfront Trail to the Kokopelli trail, which is a dirt trail that begins on the far western end of the Grand Valley and runs all the way to Moab, Utah. The plan – which will ultimately cost millions -- is to extend the Riverfront trail by more than four miles to connect up with the Kokopelli, so that riders will have a clear shot all the way from Palisade to Moab.
Winans’ group is also working to develop an off-road component on the east side of the valley, called the “Palisade Plunge.”
“When the Palisade Plunge project is completed, this will add 30 additional miles of dirt single-track trail on the Palisade end of things, beginning atop the Grand Mesa to the east, and terminating in the Town of Palisade. With that addition, one could ride from the top of the Grand Mesa to Moab via a continuous route comprised of dirt single-track trail, paved trail, and primarily dirt road,” Winans explained.
All that off-roading might be too much for the average rider of Riverfront, but it goes to show how committed the developers are, even three decades after the initial stretch was forged in Grand Junction.
"Having a walkable, ‘bikable’ community is part of our goal - it is part of the vision of the town,” Watt said. “We recognize that people are going to live in Palisade and commute to Grand Junction or Fruita and - you want them to have those recreational opportunities when they‘re home - but as far as getting back and forth on bike, it is a motivational factor for completing the trail,” Watt said.
Visitors use the trails to connect up with the many wineries in the area. A casual ride down the Riverfront Trail through Palisade puts the aficionado in touch with a dozen wineries. Palisade hosts an annual wine festival here in the fall, in addition to a peach festival in late summer and a blue grass festival that is family-friendly and camping oriented.
In Palisade the trail terminates at the beautiful Riverbend Park, where the town hosts such festivals. The park, which faces a wildlife preserve across the river and is used for community events and running dogs off-leash, is considered one of the pearls of the Grand Valley.
In the end, the development of the Riverfront Trail is about recreation but also about commuting and river access, about giving the people of the Grand Valley a way to enjoy the beauty and wildlife of an incredible natural resource. That spirit continues to drive the development of the trail system, even as it faces challenges from funding, land owners, and infrastructure.
David Irvin
A graduate with a Masters Of Science from the University Of North Texas, David has written on many beats including crime and business for such outlets as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Montgomery Advertiser & USA. He enjoys RVing and surfing the Internet.
Make Sure To Stay At:
Grand Junction KOA, centrally located between the high desert and hiking trails of the Colorado National Monument and the tree-shaded lakes of the Grand Mesa, featuring fishing, ATV and hiking trails, and moose, elk and deer hunting.