Walk the canal north from Three Pond Park on a September morning and nothing marks the moment you leave Cherry Hills Village and enter Greenwood Village. No sign, no change in the crusher-fine gravel underfoot, no shift in the cottonwood canopy that's been shading this stretch for a century. The trail reads as one continuous thing, because physically it is. Denver Water still owns and operates the canal itself, and the service road beside it has carried horses, joggers, and dog walkers across that invisible seam for decades without anyone needing to notice where the boundary falls.
But the people paying to keep that seam intact do notice. And this year, for the first time in a while, both sides of the line finished enough work at once that a longtime resident walking the loop would actually see the difference.
The Boundary Nobody Marks, Except in the Budget
Greenwood Village alone maintains a little under five and a half miles of the canal within its borders, and Cherry Hills Village maintains its own separate stretch just to the south, but the two cities don't share a maintenance department, a capital budget, or a timeline. Each city funds its own stretch, applies for its own grants, and answers to its own council. The High Line Canal Conservancy coordinates projects across all six jurisdictions the trail passes through, but the money and the permission still come from whichever city happens to own the ground you're standing on.
That split explains something a lot of residents have half-noticed without quite naming it: certain stretches of canal get new trees, new signage, and smoother crossings years before the stretch a half mile away does, even though both sides look equally in need of it. It isn't neglect. It's two separate governments running two separate projects that happen to intersect at a property line.
Cherry Hills Village's Canal Work This Year
The most visible work sits around Quincy Farm, just south of Quincy Avenue. Cherry Hills Village and the Conservancy dredged the farm's 1930s irrigation pond in the fall of 2025, after decades of sediment had left the pond, a popular spot for viewing wildlife, too shallow to function well. Replanting around the pond wrapped up in the spring of 2026. At the same time, the city replaced the wooden pedestrian bridge connecting Quincy Farm to the canal, rebuilding it to match the character of the original footbridge rather than swapping in something modern.
Further along, Cherry Hills Village is extending its canal-side irrigation line north of Belleview Avenue this year, with new tree planting happening alongside it in partnership with the Conservancy. It's a straightforward project by comparison: run a pipe, plant trees, water them without trucking water in. The city has been doing versions of this work for a few years now, and 2026 is simply the next segment north.
What Greenwood Village Spent Three Years Building Toward
Greenwood Village's biggest project this year looks smaller from the trail but took far longer to get there. At the Marjorie Perry Nature Preserve, a 59-acre stretch of wetlands and former farmland south of Belleview Avenue and west of Holly Street, the ponds that define the preserve never had a legal right to store water. The original 1930 water decree for the property covered irrigation, not storage, which meant the city couldn't simply pump canal water into the ponds to keep them full.
Fixing that took until 2023, when Greenwood Village purchased the water rights needed to sustain the ponds and irrigate new trees along the canal. Only after securing those rights could the city start drilling a well, which finally happened in early 2025 and reached more than 1,270 feet deep. The next phase, a well house and water distribution system running from Belleview Avenue down to Orchard Road, is what's finishing through 2026. Once it's online, the city stops trucking water out to the cottonwoods that line this stretch, some of them over a century old, and starts watering them the way Cherry Hills Village already waters its own trees just across the line.
Greenwood Village is also finishing safety upgrades where the canal crosses Yale Avenue, which it does four times, more than any other road along the entire 71-mile trail. Two of those crossings are getting ADA ramps and rectangular rapid flashing beacons, the pedestrian-activated lights that force drivers to actually stop. And a few blocks over, the long-planned underpass at Yale Avenue and Holly Street, a $16.9 million project funded by Denver's 2017 bond program, Arapahoe County open space dollars, and an $11.7 million federal grant, has been under construction since September 2025 and is set to finish this year.
Two Different Timelines, Converging This Fall
None of these projects were planned as one initiative. They're separate contracts, separate councils, separate budget cycles that happen to be landing in the same season. If you walk the canal this fall, here's what that convergence actually looks like on the ground:
- A rebuilt pedestrian bridge at Quincy Farm, styled to match the original
- A deepened, replanted irrigation pond nearby, no longer choked with sediment
- New RRFB signals at two of the four Yale Avenue crossings
- Ongoing underpass construction at Yale and Holly, expected to wrap this year
- Trees at Marjorie Perry Nature Preserve on track to be watered by well instead of truck for the first time
- A new irrigation line stretching north of Belleview Avenue on the Cherry Hills side
Greenwood Village's Tri-Our-Village Kids' Triathlon drew families to Westlands Park and Club Greenwood on September 13, right in the middle of this stretch of visible progress. The city's Fall Fest at Carson Park closes out the calendar later in the season, the kind of event that's become a fixture for households on this side of the canal. Neither event has anything to do with pond dredging or well permits, but they're happening against a backdrop that looks noticeably more finished than it did a year ago.
Where to Stop Along the Way
If your route takes you past the Cherry Hills Village line, Lavender Coffee Boutique opened its second café on Hampden Avenue in February, right on the northern edge of the village, open daily from 6:30 in the morning. It's become the kind of stop where the shop staff can tell you which mornings the trail is busiest just from who walks in the door first.
Further north, near Running Fox Park and the Marjorie Perry Nature Preserve, the Landmark Theatre in Greenwood Village offers six screens and a full bar for anyone extending a canal walk into an evening out, with Jing and Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen both within easy reach for dinner beforehand.
None of this changes what the canal is. It's still the same crusher-fine path under the same old cottonwoods, still shared by runners, cyclists, and the equestrians who've used this segment for generations. What's changed is that two cities, working on two different timelines for two different reasons, both happen to be finishing work on their halves of it at the same time. Walk it this fall and you'll feel the difference even if you can't point to exactly where one city's stretch ends and the other's begins.
If you're curious what a well-maintained trail corridor like this one means for property values or timing a move in Cherry Hills Village or Greenwood Village, the Nichols & Lee Team knows this stretch of Denver as well as anyone. Reach out to schedule a free consultation whenever the conversation moves from the trail to the market.
