Have you tried to find a parking spot at the Lunch Loops on a Saturday morning in the last year and been surprised when there actually was one? That's not random luck. Two separate organizations have spent the last two years fixing two different things that have bothered Redlands trail users for a decade, and they didn't do it together. One project just finished. The other is happening right now, this fall, a few hundred yards from where the first one ends.
If you've ridden or hiked out of the Tabeguache trailhead any time since the mid-2010s, you already know both problems by feel even if you never named them. The lot fills up before nine. The bike park at the base of the ridge has looked tired for years, built on a shoestring budget and never really updated. Neither of those things happened because nobody cared. They happened because fixing them required two completely different kinds of work, done by two different groups, on two different timelines.
A Trailhead That Outgrew Its Own Parking Lot
The Lunch Loops trailhead, officially the Tabeguache trailhead off Monument Road about 1.8 miles from Highway 340, pulled in roughly 227,000 visits last year alone. That's not a niche local secret anymore. It's one of the busiest pieces of public land access in the Grand Valley, used daily by Redlands residents on lunch breaks, after-work laps, and weekend family rides.
The small bike park near the trailhead was built about a decade ago on what COPMOBA's executive director Faith Rodriguez has described plainly: it was done on a very small budget, so it's been pretty deteriorated for a while. The jump features skewed toward BMX-style riding rather than the mountain bikes most people actually show up with. A community survey COPMOBA ran turned up the same complaint from local riders again and again: they wanted more jumps and better skills features, not just the same rocky singletrack the Lunch Loops is already famous for.
Meanwhile, the parking problem had a separate root cause entirely. For years, the only way to complete a full loop through the Redlands trail network meant riding a stretch of Monument Road itself, the one gap in what would otherwise be a continuous, car-free route. That gap pushed more traffic toward the single trailhead lot than the lot was ever designed to hold.
Fix One: The Loop Finally Closed
The first fix had nothing to do with bikes at all. It was a road project, in the sense that its whole purpose was to get people off one.
Colorado West Land Trust had been working on this specific gap for more than a decade, going back to its 2012 purchase of the Three Sisters property. The organization has partnered with the City of Grand Junction on nine separate land transactions since then, conserving 230 acres of open space along the Monument Road corridor and raising more than $5 million toward acquisition and trail construction.
The city broke ground on the final piece, a 1.6-mile paved connector linking the Lunch Loops trailhead to the Jurassic Flats trailhead, in October 2024. Grand Junction's transportation and engineering director Trent Prall called it at the time the city is proud to break ground on this missing 1.6-mile link that will create a 10-mile loop. A $500,000 grant from Great Outdoors Colorado covered the final segment.
The project wrapped with a completion event in April 2025. What it delivers is the full 10-mile Redlands Loop, a continuous route stitching together the Riverfront Trail, the Lunch Loops, Connected Lakes State Park, and the Audubon Preserve, without a single stretch on Monument Road. Colorado West Land Trust's executive director Rob Bleiberg put it this way: the Monument Trail represents what we can achieve when we work together to balance recreation with conservation.
The practical effect for anyone living in the Redlands west of the trailhead is that riding to the Lunch Loops no longer means driving to it. That single change, more than any parking lot expansion could have, is what's been quietly thinning out the crowd at the trailhead lot over the past year and a half. Jurassic Flats itself, a 16-acre parcel named for its proximity to the fossil beds at Riggs Hill by local paleontologist George Callison, is now the eastern anchor of that loop rather than an isolated pocket of open space.
Fix Two: The Bike Park Is Getting Rebuilt in Real Time
The second fix is the one you can watch happening right now if you drive past the trailhead this fall.
COPMOBA hired Spencer Rugland, a local rider and owner of Thunderbird Trail Works, to lead the rebuild. The first phase, a $10,000 dual slalom course, is already open. COPMOBA hosted an event on it this summer with the Grand Valley Youth Cycling Club and reported strong early feedback.
The bigger work comes this fall, when Rugland returns to build out the full jump park. The plan includes:
- Four jump lines, two rated green and two rated blue, with wood features built for trail bikes rather than dirt jumpers
- Jump heights starting around three and a half feet and progressing to about six feet on the largest blue line, engineered so each line's difficulty flows naturally into the next
- A dedicated skills zone for practicing technical moves in a lower-risk setting before taking them onto the actual trail system
- A rock garden built to mimic the terrain riders will find out on the Lunch Loops trails themselves
- Steel-frame features with rough-sawn lumber surfacing, built in-house for durability
There's also a possibility, still just a possibility, of a future expansion into an area called Painted Bowl for riders who want something more advanced than the current footprint allows.
The whole project carries a $225,000 price tag. COPMOBA has committed $85,000 toward it, split between a $35,000 down payment and a $50,000 matching pledge, and the organization has been raising the remaining balance through community donations rather than grants. The plan, as of this summer, was to keep fundraising through the season and have Rugland finish the build this fall.
Why It Matters That These Happened Separately
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only notice one project or the other: neither organization was solving the other's problem. Colorado West Land Trust spent over a decade acquiring land and building a road connection because that's what its mission is. COPMOBA is rebuilding a bike park because that's what its members asked for in a survey. Nobody sat down and said let's fix the parking situation together. It just happened that closing the loop pulled traffic off the trailhead lot at almost the exact moment the trailhead itself started becoming a more interesting place to spend an afternoon rather than just a place to park before disappearing onto singletrack.
If you rode the Lunch Loops in 2023, this year's version is genuinely different in two ways that have nothing to do with each other. You can get there without a car if you live in the right part of the Redlands, and once you arrive, there's finally a beginner-friendly reason to stick around at the base of the hill instead of grinding straight up Pet-Y-Kes because that was the only option. For a neighborhood built around exactly this kind of outdoor access, that's not a small thing. It's two different groups of people, on two different timelines, quietly making the same corner of the Redlands work better for everyone who already calls it home.
If you're curious how access to trails like these factors into what makes a Redlands address worth having, The Van Gundy Group knows this neighborhood block by block and is always glad to talk through what's changing here, on the trails and off them.
