Two New Trails Open on Animas Mountain

Durango's world class trail system is a little bit bigger. The new Merv and Lupine trails add to the extensive trail system at Animas Mountain. You're watching the Local News Network, brought to you by Denise Elliot, State Farm agent, and Sirious Texas Barbecue. I'm Connor Shrieve. Local nonprofit, Durango Trails, celebrated the opening with a group ride. The Durango Running Club got in on the action too, a nod to Durango Trails' effort to allow all disciplines to use the trails.

We want to build, maintain, and facilitate a multi-use of trails around our system. Aside from us doing our bike trip right now, we also just had the whole running club go up there, and they're going to be using a lot of our trail systems as well. So it's very nice to be able to get the whole community together. It doesn't matter what sport you want to do. Just get out here on the trails and have some fun.

The trails have been three years in the making. Durango Trails crew member, Kent Tweeten, says the timing of their opening couldn't be better.

So one of the cool things about Animas Mountain, it's a little bit higher above town. So as we're getting into these warmer months, it's about like a thousand feet above the rest of downtown. So as it is getting really hot, you can kind of cool off or what we got going on now is a nice afternoon ride, and so we can cruise right into it.

Well, Durango does offer all manner of trail style. Tweeten says there was an effort to differentiate these new trails.

So a lot of our trails are primarily single track. What's kind of cool about this one is that we worked really hard to kind of work more on the flow elements of getting down there, and so it's going to be more of a downhill trail. So we got a couple of climbs that we're going to be able to do. One of the ones we're going to be able to do is one we worked on lupine so we can get up there, and then once we get up there on the top, we're going to hit the very beginning and be able to just rip it right down the hill. So it's exciting.

Durango Trails relies on the work of many volunteers and the new opening of the single track marks three years of their effort.

What's been nice is that it has been a machine-cut original, and so we had somebody to be able to take a machinery up there, dig us out of track so that, then, we were able to follow behind and do a lot of the finishing work to try to smooth it out so that it would be a nice flow ride.

The group continues to solicit the help of locals in its goal of developing miles of new trails for users of all sorts. You can learn more about these and other stories online at durangolocal.news. Thanks for watching this edition of The Local News Network. I'm Connor Shrieve.