Drive south on Highway 115 past the Fort Carson gate and most people never clock that Cheyenne Mountain State Park is sitting right there, just off the shoulder, behind a stand of scrub oak. Colorado Parks and Wildlife's own regional manager has said as much: visitors regularly tell park staff they had no idea the entrance existed until they were already past it. For a neighborhood that backs directly onto that park, this is a strange fact to sit with. Broadmoor Bluffs residents have one of the best-kept outdoor amenities in Colorado Springs at their doorstep, and the state has spent the first nine months of 2026 trying to fix the part of it that keeps people from noticing.
Here's the thing that's easy to miss if you're not tracking it closely: the park is expanding much faster than its trail system is. That gap, not the acreage total, is the real story for anyone who already lives close enough to walk there.
Two Land Deals in Four Months
In January, Colorado Parks and Wildlife moved to acquire 357 acres at the park's Highway 115 entrance, a purchase funded through the state lottery and brokered through the Trust for Public Land. The City of Colorado Springs paired that with its own purchase of an adjacent 126 acres, transferring management to the state as part of the same deal. Together those two parcels pushed the park from its original 2,701 acres to roughly 3,184, a jump of about 18 percent in one transaction. The land in question sat between the existing park boundary and Highway 115 itself, ground that had been eyed for development for years and that officials wanted to keep undeveloped precisely because it forms the visual approach to the park.
Then in April, the city's Trails, Open Space and Parks working committee got a second proposal: two more parcels, roughly 40 acres each, on the mountain's upper, forested slopes near the Dixon Trail corridor. That land was appraised around $320,000 and was headed toward a parks board vote followed by City Council consideration that spring. Two acquisitions, four months apart, on opposite ends of the same mountain.
What connects both deals isn't just square footage. It's a decades-old plan that's finally getting funded. The lower parcel supports a long-planned 26-mile connector called the Chamberlain Trail, meant to eventually link the park to Blodgett Peak near Manitou Springs. The upper parcel feeds into an even bigger idea: the Cheyenne Mountain Heritage Trail, envisioned as a 30-mile loop that would stitch together roughly 21 miles of historic trail already on the ground into one continuous circuit around the mountain. Neither trail exists yet in a form you could hike end to end. Both require approvals from the U.S. Forest Service before they will.
"There's this potential connectivity not only to the trail system in the state park, but also looking at this bigger vision of a trail system around Cheyenne Mountain."
That's the pitch officials made to the TOPS committee this spring. It's a good pitch. It's also, as of this year, still mostly a map with dotted lines on it.
The Trails Haven't Caught Up Yet
Here's where the gap shows up on the ground. The park currently has 21 established trails covering a little over 27 miles, and that number hasn't moved even as the acreage has grown by nearly 500 acres. Park manager Jason Hagan has said plainly that there's no timeline yet for building new trail on the newly acquired land, because any addition to a state park triggers a lengthy planning process that has to run its course before a single new blaze mark goes up.
Practically, that means the trails Broadmoor Bluffs residents already know are still the ones worth using this season, and a couple of them deserve more attention than they get. Blackmer Trail is a 3.7-mile loop that starts at the Prairie Falcon Amphitheatre parking lot, climbs gently past old fence lines and ranch relics from the park's homesteading days, and stays mostly shaded in pine and oak, which makes it a better call than the more exposed Sundance Trail on a hot afternoon. It gains about 479 feet over the loop, nothing punishing, and it's consistently quieter than the trail systems on the city's north side because most hikers and mountain bikers still default to those instead.
For more mileage without the full Dixon Trail commitment, the Talon Trail system out of the Limekiln lot works as a figure eight. Talon runs about two and a half miles out from a sun-splashed meadow before splitting into South Talon and North Talon, which loop back together over a rocky hogback with some of the closest views of Cheyenne Mountain's face you'll get without climbing it. Dixon Trail itself, for context, is the one that actually summits the mountain, and at 15-plus miles round trip it's a different kind of outing entirely.
A few logistics worth knowing before you go:
- Without a Keep Colorado Wild plate, expect a $10 to $12 per-vehicle entrance fee.
- Dogs aren't allowed on most trails in the park, including Blackmer and Talon, though a handful of shorter paths near the entrance do permit leashed dogs.
- The park is open daily from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., which covers both early alpine starts and evening light after work.
The One Weekend Everybody Shows Up Anyway
For a park that people drive past without noticing, Cheyenne Mountain State Park has one weekend a year when it's anything but quiet. The Cheyenne Mountain Run, now in its 11th year, returns on August 15, 2026, with 5K, 10K, and 25K distances that all launch from inside the park. The 25K, which climbs the Dixon Trail's narrow, two-way switchbacks, caps registration at 400 runners for safety reasons and doubles as a qualifying race for the Pikes Peak Ascent. Proceeds support the Friends of Cheyenne Mountain State Park, the nonprofit that funds trail maintenance and stewardship work on the land the state and city keep adding to.
It's a small event by Colorado Springs standards, but it's the one morning a year when the park's usual solitude gets traded for a starting line, and it's worth marking on a calendar if you're the kind of neighbor who likes knowing when your usual trail is going to be busy versus when it's going to be yours alone.
What the Gap Actually Means for Right Now
Put the pieces together and the pattern is this: the park is being expanded well ahead of the point where that expansion becomes usable trail. That's not a complaint. It's useful information if you live close enough to walk there. The Highway 115 land buy and the upper-slopes proposal are both about protecting terrain now so it doesn't get developed before the trail planning can catch up later, sometimes years later. Which means the current window, this year and probably the next several, is the version of Cheyenne Mountain State Park where 21 established trails serve land that's already grown by nearly 500 acres, without a corresponding jump in foot traffic to match.
If you already live in Broadmoor Bluffs, that's a genuinely good position to be in. You're not waiting on a trail system to get built. You already have Blackmer and Talon and Dixon a few minutes from your driveway, on a mountain that's quietly getting bigger every few months while most of the city still doesn't know where the entrance is.
If you're the kind of neighbor who tracks what's happening at the edge of the neighborhood, Broadmoor Bluffs has had a few other gateway moments worth knowing about this year, including the entrance changes happening a few miles over in Broadmoor Hills. Different projects, same instinct across this part of the city to rebuild what people walk through before they rebuild what they walk on.
For deeper background on the January land acquisition, the Colorado Sun's coverage lays out the funding and the reasoning in full, and the Gazette's April reporting on the upper-slopes proposal is worth a read if you want the fuller picture of where the Heritage Trail concept stands.
Eric Scott has spent his career paying attention to the details that make Broadmoor-area neighborhoods what they are, from the trails behind them to the market that surrounds them. If you're weighing a move in or around this part of Colorado Springs, Eric Scott is a phone call away for a private consultation.
