"People are reading this list and not so much seeing who's on there, but they're seeing who's not on there," said David Wiens, executive director of the International Mountain Bicycling Association, when the organization announced its first-ever Trail Towns designation this spring.
He was talking about all 28 communities on that inaugural list, spread across 20 states. But the comment lands differently once you notice which four Colorado towns made the cut: Breckenridge, Leadville, Salida, and New Castle. Three of those are recognizable ski-and-mining names with decades of tourism infrastructure behind them. The fourth is a town of a few thousand people fifteen miles west of Glenwood Springs, best known until recently for the coal seam that has been quietly burning under its namesake mountain since the 1890s.
New Castle didn't get here by building more trail than everyone else. IMBA's own criteria for the label call for a minimum of 25 miles of natural-surface trail within a 30-minute radius of town center, along with demonstrated trail funding, an active local trail organization, and consistent community engagement. Mileage is table stakes. What actually separates a Trail Town from a town with trails is the paperwork nobody driving past on I-70 ever sees, and in New Castle's case, that paperwork goes back further than most riders realize.
The Decade Nobody Watched
The network didn't appear this year. It was assembled in pieces, mostly by volunteers, mostly without fanfare:
- 2003 — The Bureau of Land Management designates the original Colorow Trail, the three-mile loop that becomes the seed of what's now the New Castle Extensive Recreation Management Area.
- 2015 — At the BLM's encouragement, the Roaring Fork Mountain Bike Association forms New Castle Trails as a standing committee. Adam Cornely leads it for the next decade.
- 2016 — IMBA's Trail Care Crew spends a weekend in town, bringing national trail-building practice to a local volunteer effort.
- 2017 — The BLM completes its Colorow Environmental Assessment, formalizing reroutes on Sweet Mother and Jasper and approving a major new trail, Stairway to Heaven.
- 2019 — Garfield County funds a berm rework on Jasper, done with the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, which brings professional trail builder Dante Harmony into the New Castle Trails fold.
- 2020 — VIX Ranch Park gets its big bike park expansion: a dirt pump track, wood ramps, a whale-tail bridge, all volunteer-built.
- 2022 — The Talbott family, through Burning Mountain Land & Cattle LLC, grants the private easement that finally makes the Burning Mountain loop possible.
- 2026 — IMBA names New Castle a Trail Town, one of 28 in the country.
Read that list straight through and the 2026 announcement stops looking like an arrival and starts looking like a receipt. Every year on it represents a negotiation, a grant application, or a volunteer shift that had nothing to do with press coverage. The recognition didn't create the trail system. It just gave outsiders a name for something that had been running on Wednesday-evening dig days and BLM meetings since before some current riders learned to clip in.
Mike Pritchard, RFMBA's executive director, put the practical version of this into words when the designation came through: "It's only 11 minutes, 17 minutes, or half an hour to get to a lot of the trails we have in the Roaring Fork Valley." That's not marketing language. That's a description of what living here actually does to your Tuesday afternoon. Back in 2017, when the town unveiled the VIX Ranch Bike Park as the newest addition to its trail network, then-Mayor Art Riddile made a similar point about the whole valley's relationship to its trailheads: "One of the neat things about this town is that you can take your mountain bike off your car and be on an exceptional trail in seconds." Nine years and one national designation later, that's still the closest thing New Castle has to an official motto.
Where the Riding Actually Sits
The network breaks into three geographic pieces, and knowing which one you're headed to changes what you'll find.
West of downtown, the Burning Mountain Trail System strings together Talbott's Burning Mountain Trail, Ward Peak Trail, Fire in the Mountain, and Back to School into an 8.2-mile loop, a route that only exists because a private landowner chose an easement over a fence line in 2022.
North of town, reached from I-70 Exit 105 by heading north on Castle Valley Boulevard about a mile and a half, sits the BLM's Extensive Recreation Management Area. Two trailheads, VIX Ranch Park and Alder Park / Lariat Loop, feed into Colorow Trail East and West, the original 2003 loop, along with Stairway to Heaven, Sweet Mother, and Jasper. A separate connector, the Lookout Trail, runs on an easement from Lakota Ranch and the Romero Group.
Further east, the Highland trails add Sallee Key Flow, Uncle Joey's, and Dante's Flow to the mix, all approved in the rounds of BLM environmental review that followed the original 2017 Colorow assessment.
And at VIX Ranch Park itself, separate from the singletrack, is the bike park: a free, volunteer-built pump track with wood ramps, lilypad features, and drop-in lines sized from beginner to expert, plus a gentler Skills Loop, Trail 1, Trail 2, and a Tot Track for the youngest riders still finding their balance. The park also hosts two of the town's recurring events, Rides & Reggae and the Downvalley Dirty Dozen, New Castle Trails' annual fundraiser race weekend.
It's worth separating this from a different, older designation that sometimes gets confused with it. The Roaring Fork Valley, covering Aspen Snowmass down through Basalt, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, and New Castle, holds Colorado's only Gold Level Ride Center rating, a distinction Steamboat Springs and the Vail Valley hold at the silver tier. Ride Center measures the depth and variety of a whole valley's trail system. Trail Town, the new one, measures something narrower: whether one specific community has built the organizational machinery, funding, and stewardship habits to keep improving what it has. New Castle earned both, but they're not the same test.
The Trails That Close This Winter, and the Ones That Don't
Here's the part that actually matters for a ride planned this month rather than a headline read in April. Trails above the gate on the BLM's backcountry network, the ones reached from VIX Ranch Park and Alder Park, close every year from December 1 through April 15 to protect wintering mule deer, elk, fox, and mountain lion. In-town trails, including the bike park and the Alder Park connector loops within town limits, stay open all year.
Mid-September puts backcountry riders roughly eleven weeks out from that gate closing. That's the real window for a full Burning Mountain loop or a push out to Stairway to Heaven before the seasonal closure takes effect. After April 15 rolls back around, the riding doesn't disappear, it just concentrates on the valley floor loops that never needed a closure notice in the first place.
None of this changed because of a press release. The gate has closed on the same schedule for years, protecting the same winter range for the same animals, regardless of what national list New Castle happened to land on this spring.
What the designation actually records is the list of people who made the riding possible in the first place: the BLM staff who ran three separate environmental reviews since 2017, a private ranching family that signed an easement instead of putting up a fence, a county government that funded a berm rebuild, and a volunteer crew that still shows up with shovels most falls. For anyone who's already spent an evening lap on Jasper or pushed a toddler around the Tot Track at VIX Ranch, that list of names is probably more familiar than the designation itself. The recognition just gave the rest of the country a word for what was already happening here on a Wednesday night.
If you're weighing what it actually feels like to live somewhere with this kind of trail access built into the daily routine, not the vacation, the team at C&E Group can talk you through what that looks like from a specific New Castle address. Connect with the C&E Team when you're ready to see it in person.
