Cycling the Newly Completed Poudre River Trail Between Fort Collins and Greeley
There are rides you plan carefully and rides that sneak up on you. This one was somewhere in between—a training ride that turned into something I hadn’t expected: a tour of some of the most pleasant (and occasionally grim) corners of Northern Colorado, all linked together by a trail I’d somehow ignored for 21 years.
The Poudre River Trail had been a work in progress since before I moved to Fort Collins. More than 50 years of fits and starts, land disputes, funding gaps, and general civic foot-dragging kept it perpetually unfinished. Then, on May 22, 2026, the final one-mile segment in Timnath opened, and 45 miles of uninterrupted paved trail from Bellvue to Greeley became a reality. I found out about this not from any local news alert, but from Strava: my friend Alex had posted a ride going all the way from Fort Collins to Greeley, with a note that the trail was finally complete. The algorithm works in mysterious ways.
The timing was convenient. I needed miles—my annual double century ride was a week out, a ride with some personal significance this year: it would mark 30 years since the 1996 Davis Double Century, which I’d originally planned to commemorate by pulling my Cannondale out of semi-retirement for the occasion. But before any of that, the Litespeed needed attention. A bar-end mirror had to be swapped from right to left, and a slightly bent derailleur hanger needed straightening—both souvenirs from last year’s London-Malton-London ride. So the Litespeed Archon C2—my early 2010s-era Super Bike—got the nod instead.
I was out the door at 5:51 a.m.
The morning was brisk enough that I was glad to have pulled on long cycling tights and arm sleeves—less for warmth and more for the sun protection I knew I’d want once the light came on strong. By midday, full sun had arrived and I was grateful for both the coverage and the early start.
There were few cars out in Old Town Fort Collins at that hour, and once the trail picked up along the river, the car count dropped to essentially zero for the rest of the morning. This is the deal with the Poudre River Trail: once you’re on it, you’re on it. The city falls away and you’re left with cottonwoods, the occasional great blue heron doing its best impression of a garden ornament, and a smooth paved surface that keeps going.
The trail is well-signed enough that I rarely had to think about navigation, which is good, because there were things worth looking at. Just off Harmony Road, I finally got eyes on something I’d heard about for years but never investigated: the Swetsville Zoo, a roadside attraction built by a farmer named Bill Swets who spent decades welding discarded machinery and farm equipment into an army of dinosaurs, dragons, and fantastical creatures that he set loose across his property for anyone passing by to enjoy—for free. I’d driven past the turnoff dozens of times on my way to somewhere else.
The zoo closed permanently around late 2022. Swets, citing his health and age, decided to sell—and the massive commercial growth that had crept up around his farm (a Costco and Walmart now flank the site) had, by his own account, made the area feel like somewhere he no longer recognized. The property is now boarded up and awaiting a large mixed-use development called Ladera. The developers have pledged to incorporate some of the sculptures into the new landscaping, which is either a heartwarming gesture or something that will look profoundly out of place next to a TJ Maxx. The remaining creatures standing on the property looked a little forlorn in the morning light—big steel dinosaurs waiting for a fate that’s entirely out of their hands.
I rode on through Timnath and into Windsor. Both towns impressed me. Timnath in particular has the feeling of a place that went from “small farming community” to “desirable suburb” at a speed that probably gave the zoning board whiplash, but the result is tidy neighborhoods, well-maintained streets, and an abundance of reservoirs that catch the morning light like mirrors.
Windsor was similarly appealing—new homes, recreational trails, golf courses, and a genuine sense that people here had decided to make things nice. The River Bluffs Open Space near town turned out to be a small gem, with the kind of thoughtful amenities—a steel sculpture bench, an archery range with an actual human practicing at it at 8 in the morning—that suggest a community genuinely investing in its public spaces.
All of which makes it a little sobering to know that Windsor sits in one of the more tornado-prone stretches of Colorado. On May 22, 2008, a mile-wide EF3 wedge tornado cut a 39-mile path through the area, destroying 78 homes outright, rendering nearly 300 more uninhabitable, and damaging more than 850 in total. It remains the costliest tornado disaster in Colorado history. The new homes and manicured parks exist, at least in part, because large swaths of the old ones no longer did.
Between Windsor and Greeley, the towns give way to open fields following the Poudre River east. Long’s Peak and Mount Meeker floated on the western horizon all morning—one of those views that never quite loses its effect no matter how many times you see it from different angles.
Greeley arrives without much fanfare. The city has a reputation in Colorado that requires some diplomacy to discuss. The Swift meatpacking plant gives the air a distinctive character on certain wind directions. The housing stock runs toward the weathered end of the spectrum. Around 2022, Greeley ranked among the worst metro areas in the country for auto theft—ninth worst nationally, with roughly 589 thefts per 100,000 residents. The city is aware of this reputation and, based on what I saw, is not entirely sure what to do about it. That said: the University of Northern Colorado is there, and the Greeley Stampede—a rodeo and country music festival—was just days away from opening when I rode through. The Poudre River Trail terminates right at Island Grove Regional Park, which hosts the Stampede, so I rolled up to the entrance of what would shortly become one of the largest rodeos in the country. As far as trail endings go, it has character.
Downtown Greeley was only a couple of miles away, but I’d been out longer than planned and turned around. The ride back west into the mountains—with Long’s Peak now directly in front of me and full sun on my back—was its own reward.
I finished just after noon, 82 miles on the Litespeed and a trail I should have explored years ago. The Poudre River Trail turns out to be one of the better things about living in Fort Collins that I’d been treating like a rumor. Next time, I’ll do it right—out to Bellvue, all the way to Greeley, and back. That’s close enough to a century that it would be embarrassing not to.
Ride Data
Distance: 82 miles
