The city of Durango has received $400,000 from the Federal Transit Administration to extend the Animas River Trail one-half mile to its southern terminus.
The grant will fund final engineering, design and environmental work to push the hard-surface trail from its current terminus behind Home Depot to just short of Farmington Hill.
At that point, the trail will leap across U.S. Highway 160 but will be called the Smart 160 Trail, at least a couple stretches of which have been built, Kevin Hall said Wednesday. Hall is the city of Durango’s Natural Lands, Trails and Sustainability director.
Cathy Metz, the city’s director of parks and recreation, said the next step is to determine where the trail will cross Highway 160.
“According to conceptual planning, the trail will go over Highway 160 somewhere,” Metz said.
Several sections of the Smart 160 Trail, which eventually will allow joggers, bicyclists and walkers to go from the Three Springs neighborhood to near the Iron Horse Inn north of Durango, are built.
One of them is the 2,000 feet that the Colorado Department of Transportation included when it built the recently opened interchange in Grandview.
Hall said community comment will be sought on the latest trail extension this year. But probably nothing else will happen until 2013, he said.
By crossing Highway 160, the trail will make Bureau of Land Management property available to hikers and bicyclists, Hall said.
A plan by La Plata County to relocate its fairgrounds to 56 acres in the same Grandview area supports trail extension, Hall said. The current fairgrounds at 2500 Main Ave. has 32 acres, but part of the property is leased to the city of Durango for the recreation center.
“It will no longer be ‘get in your car and drive,’” Hall said. “A lot more will be available to other means of transportation.”
The Grandview land that the county has its eye on is owned by the BLM. It is being mined by the C&J Gravel Co., with work expected to last until 2017.
A missing link in the Animas River Trail behind the Durango Mall will open in late spring, Hall said. When the work is complete, the city will have seven miles of uninterrupted trail along the Animas, from 29th Street to Home Depot.
The Federal Transit Administration grant to Durango is part of $40.8 million the agency is awarding for 58 projects across the country.
Grants are earmarked to provide convenient access to parks, forest and wildlife refuges and modernize aging transportation infrastructures.
