06/08/2026
One continuous river trail.
Most people who move to Farmington discover the Animas River trail system one segment at a time. They find Berg Park first, or Animas Park, or the Riverside Nature Center. Eventually they piece together that the whole thing connects, that there are more than eight miles of trail running through the heart of the city, that it is a certified National Recreation Trail, and that more than a hundred bird species have been identified across it.
What’s less well known is that the city is in the middle of stitching the last gaps together.
Two extensions are in design right now. The first is a 1.66-mile segment of the North Animas Extension, picking up behind Middle Fork Square and heading upstream to a new trailhead near Herrera Road, just south of the new Pinon Hills Boulevard Extension. The second closes the gap between the Among the Waters trail at the confluence and the Centennial Trail near Boyd Park.
When both are built, the river trail runs continuously from one end of the city to the other.
And the long-term vision is bigger. Farmington’s master plan has long imagined river trails extending east along the Animas all the way to Aztec, eventually creating a regional trail spine for the Four Corners. Each of these segments is one more stitch in that longer fabric.
A reminder that what looks like a quiet city is, in fact, building.
