For more than a year, if you tried to ride or walk out of southeast Fort Collins on the paved trail system, you hit a wall. Not literally, but close enough. The Power Trail, the city's main north-south paved corridor, simply stopped near the Union Pacific Railroad tracks between Harmony Road and Trilby Road, and nothing on the other side picked it back up without a detour through neighborhood streets. If you live in Fossil Lake and have ever tried to string together a long ride toward Old Town or a walk down toward the Loveland trail system, you already know the workaround: cut over to Keenland Drive, pick up South Lemay Avenue, loop back through Southridge Greens Boulevard, and hope you timed it before dark.
That gap is gone now. Two separate infrastructure projects, one finished in December and one finished in February, quietly reconnected southeast Fort Collins to the rest of the city's trail network for the first time in years. If you haven't been out on the trail since last winter, the route you remember is not the route that exists today.
Where the Trail Used to Just Stop
The break in the system sat almost exactly halfway between Harmony and Trilby, at the point where the Power Trail needed to cross the Union Pacific tracks. There was no safe way to do that on foot or by bike, so the city routed the Mail Creek Trail, which opened in 2024 and runs from the intersection of Zephyr and Tilden past Bacon Elementary and through the newly built Schoolside Park, right up to the edge of the tracks and stopped. The Power Trail picked up on the other side. In between sat a gap that the city's own engineering department described as a long-standing problem for nearby neighborhoods, schools, and businesses that had no safe crossing.
To close it, the city built the Siphon Pedestrian Overpass. Construction started in late February 2025 and required closing the existing Power Trail segment between Keenland Drive and the Southridge Greens Boulevard and Trilby Road intersection, which meant that for about nine months, the detour wasn't optional. It was the only way through.
What It Took to Close It
The overpass itself is worth knowing about, because the numbers explain why this took as long as it did. The bridge is 195 feet long and weighs roughly 175,000 pounds. It was fabricated in four separate pieces by BCS Fabrication in Loveland at a cost of around $1 million, then trucked to the site, bolted together, and lifted into place in a single morning on November 4, 2025, by a 600-ton crane that reportedly cost about $100,000 a day to operate. Crews timed the lift around an active freight train that rolled through at 10:16 that morning. The full project carried a price tag of $4.7 million.
The overpass opened to the public on December 5, 2025. City project manager Jin Wang called it "a key investment in Fort Collins' trail network, offering a safer and more accessible route" for the cyclists, runners, and pedestrians who had been stuck routing around the gap for years.
The Other Closure Nobody Connected to This One
While the overpass was under construction, a second and unrelated closure was happening less than two miles south. The Fossil Creek Trail, a 5.17-mile paved route that runs through the Cathy Fromme Prairie Natural Area along Fossil Creek, had a full mile shut down between Trilby Road and Carpenter Road starting in November 2024. This one had nothing to do with the railroad crossing. It was a joint stream rehabilitation project between Fort Collins Utilities and the Natural Areas, Parks and Transportation departments, aimed at making Fossil Creek and Stanton Creek more resilient to seasonal irrigation flows and major storms. Crews removed two bridges outright, relocated and rerouted a third, and replaced the culvert under Trilby Road between Lemay Avenue and Timberline Road.
That closure was originally scheduled to run through March 31, 2026. It reopened on February 27, 2026, a full month ahead of schedule.
Line the two projects up and the overlap is bigger than most people realized. From late February through early December 2025, both routes out of southeast Fort Collins were closed at once, for entirely unrelated reasons, and the whole stretch of missing trail ran from November 2024 to February 2026, more than a year in total before both were finally whole again.
What You Can Actually Do With It Now
The internal paved trail that winds through Fossil Lake was always built to connect the neighborhood to parks and other communities across southeast Fort Collins. What changed is what that connection now leads to.
Head north through the Power Trail and you pass Collindale Golf Course and Kruse Elementary School before reaching Edora Community Park, which has a playground, athletic fields, tennis courts, a skate park, and restrooms, and sits right where the Power Trail meets the Spring Creek Trail. From there it's a straight, paved shot into the rest of the city's trail grid, no detour required, for the first time since the overpass closure began.
Head south and the Fossil Creek Trail carries you through Cathy Fromme Prairie toward Carpenter Road and Lemay Avenue, which is also where the Power Trail's own southern leg connects into the City of Loveland's trail system. That means a rider who starts in Fossil Lake now has a genuinely continuous paved option running from the Spring Creek Trail on the north end down into Loveland on the south end, something that simply was not true a year ago because one or the other segment was always torn up.
Worth Testing Before the Snow Flies
Early fall is a good window to actually go find out what this looks like in practice. The detours that were mandatory all through 2025 are gone, the creek work that closed a mile of the Fossil Creek Trail is finished ahead of schedule, and the days are still long enough to ride the whole stretch without racing the sunset. If your last trip out of the neighborhood ended at a barricade near Keenland Drive, it's worth going back.
None of this shows up on a listing sheet, and it won't move the needle on an appraisal. But it's exactly the kind of thing that makes a place feel different to live in day to day, and it's the sort of local detail I try to stay on top of for clients who are comparing Fossil Lake to other parts of Fort Collins. If you're thinking through what a neighborhood actually offers once you're past the median price and the square footage, I'm happy to talk through it. Reach out to Ryan Livingston any time. Let's Connect.
