How Long Is the Redlands Loop Trail in Grand Junction?

Ask three people who ride the Redlands most weekends how long the loop is, and you will likely get three different answers. Ten miles. Eleven. Twelve and a half, if you are the kind of rider who tracks the whole thing on a GPS app. None of them are wrong exactly. They are describing different versions of a route that only became a true loop, in the sense of one continuous connected ride, a little over a year ago.

The instinct is to treat that as settled news. The trail got finished, so ride it and move on. But the Redlands loop still has moving parts. This spring the city tore out and repoured a stretch of pavement near the Blue Heron Boat Ramp. This month, a city arts program is repainting the underpass that ties two of the loop's segments together. Neither change closes the loop for good, but both are worth knowing if you are planning a ride through Connected Lakes or Lunch Loops before the weather turns.

Three Versions, One Name

When Grand Junction Public Works Director Trent Prall talked about the trail's completion in the spring of 2025, he described two versions of the same ride in one breath: a 10-mile loop if you tie into the riverfront trail system through Connected Lakes State Park, or an 11-mile loop if you stay on the north side of the river instead. Neither route is more official than the other. They just handle Connected Lakes differently, one dipping into the state park itself, the other staying on the free Blue Heron and Audubon sections that skirt the park's edge instead of paying the vehicle entrance fee to drive in.

Then there is the touring-cyclist version, mapped at 12.4 miles, which likely reflects yet another combination of connectors strung together by GPS rather than by the city's own count. None of this is a contradiction so much as a reminder that the loop is not one fixed shape. It is a mesh of paved segments you can string together a few honest ways:

• Lunch Loops to the Riverfront Trail through Connected Lakes State Park (roughly 10 miles)
• Lunch Loops to the Riverfront Trail via the north side of the river (roughly 11 miles)
• The full touring route through Redlands, including the Blue Heron and Audubon sections (roughly 12.4 miles)

Pick the version that matches how you actually want to spend your morning, not the one you saw quoted first.

The Piece That Took Twenty Years to Close

The version most people mean when they say the loop finally connects is specific: the 1.6-mile gap between the Lunch Loops Trailhead and the Jurassic Flats Open Space along South Camp Road, the last piece of a vision that traces back to the 2004 Redlands neighborhood plan. Colorado West Land Trust began assembling the land for it in 2012 with the purchase of the Three Sisters property along Monument Road, and kept at it for over a decade across nine separate real estate transactions, conserving more than 200 acres of open space and raising more than $5 million along the way.

Phase one, connecting Lunch Loops to the Riverfront Trail, finished in 2020. Phase two, the missing link to Jurassic Flats, broke ground in late 2024 and wrapped the following spring, funded in part by a $500,000 Great Outdoors Colorado grant layered on top of the $1.5 million GOCO grant that funded the first phase. The city marked the finish with a chain-breaking ceremony at the Lunch Loops Trailhead on May 20, 2025, food trucks and a group ride included. Along the way, contractors also installed Mesa County's first HAWK pedestrian signal at the Monument Road crossing, a three-stage light sequence built specifically because the old flashing-yellow setup was not cutting it for a trail crossing that busy.

If you have ridden the loop and never noticed the signal doing its work, that is the point. It is built to be obvious enough to stop cross traffic and quiet enough that most riders barely register it.

Finished Doesn't Mean Static

None of that means the loop stopped needing attention once the ribbon was cut. In April 2026, the city closed a roughly 0.3-mile stretch of the Redlands Parkway Trail near the Blue Heron Boat Ramp, the section where 24 Road becomes Redlands Parkway, after riders reported the surface had gone wavy. That stretch had been converted from asphalt to concrete back in 2023 using a machine the city bought for about $500,000, part of a broader push to replace roughly 10 miles of aging asphalt trail with concrete. City communications staff said this particular section met the original project specifications, but got redone anyway once enough riders complained about the ride quality. The materials cost for the fix ran around $100,000, and crews detoured cyclists onto the Redlands Parkway bike lane until the work wrapped at the end of May.

That is a small repair against a ten-plus-mile network, but it says something about how the loop actually gets treated. The city is willing to tear out concrete less than three years old rather than let a rough patch become the norm, which is a different posture than simply declaring a project done and walking away.

The Underpass Getting Painted Right Now

There is a second, smaller change happening as this piece goes up. The Grand Junction Commission on Arts and Culture opened applications in late June for its 2026 aRT program, a public mural initiative that pairs local artists with underpasses and retaining walls along the Riverfront Trail system. Six locations made this year's list across nine paintable sites, and one of them is the Redlands Parkway Underpass, the same corridor tied to the trail's Blue Heron connector. Selected artists are working between August 29 and September 30, so a lap through that underpass this month will likely catch work in progress rather than a finished piece. Each artist receives a $1,000 commission through the city's arts and culture program, separate from any trail maintenance budget.

Where the Loop Actually Ends

If you want a reason to finish a lap instead of just tracking the mileage, Ocotillo Restaurant and Bar sits inside Redlands Mesa Golf Course on West Ridges Boulevard, close enough to the loop's western stretch that plenty of riders treat it as an unofficial aid station. You do not need a tee time to eat there. The patio looks straight out at the Colorado National Monument and the Book Cliffs, and on a clear September evening that view explains more about why people keep riding this particular loop than any mileage count could.

None of this, the pedestrian signal, the repaved trail, the underpass mural in progress, changes what the Redlands loop fundamentally is: a stitched-together network that took two decades, nine land deals, and more than five million dollars in grants and donations to finish. It just means the finishing kept going after the ceremony ended, one repaved section and one repainted wall at a time. Nobody throws a second ribbon-cutting for a concrete patch job, but the people riding it every week notice anyway.

If you are weighing what it actually means to live near a trail system that gets this kind of ongoing attention, or comparing the Redlands to other corners of the Grand Valley, Kelley and Dane at The Griffin Team have ridden these same connectors long enough to talk through it plainly. Work with Kelley and Dane to start your Grand Valley search.