If you run, ride, or walk the Mary Carter Greenway with any regularity, you've hit the orange fencing near Reynolds Landing and had to guess which gravel cut-through gets you back to pavement. Most people treat it the way you'd treat a lane closure on Santa Fe Drive: annoying, temporary, gone the day the cones come down.
That assumption is wrong in a way that's actually useful to know. The detour routing you through the interior of Reynolds Landing Park right now isn't a workaround the city invented to keep you moving during construction. It's the shape of the fix itself. Understanding why changes how you think about this stretch of the South Platte for the next year and a half, and maybe longer.
What the Fencing Is Actually Doing
Reynolds Landing is a 13-acre parcel along the river that has spent years as a mix of open space, an abandoned house the city calls the Superchi property, and a degraded stretch of the South Platte itself. Right now it's an active construction site. The river through the park is closed for in-river work, and anyone paddling the corridor has to exit upstream and portage roughly a quarter mile around the site, according to South Suburban Parks and Recreation. On land, the Mary Carter Greenway itself has been rerouted to the interior of the park, and South Suburban has been direct about how long that lasts: the detour stays in place for the duration of construction, even though the work itself is intermittent.
That's the mechanical answer. It doesn't explain why the trail had to move at all instead of just fencing off a work zone and leaving the path alone.
The Conflict the Redesign Is Actually Fixing
Here's the part that doesn't show up on the detour signage. Before any of this construction started, the city ran public engagement on the Reynolds Landing project and learned something specific: the existing alignment of the Mary Carter Greenway through the park was creating real friction between walkers and cyclists, and the trail's position next to the river was acting as a barrier between the parkland and the water it was supposed to give people access to. Littleton's manager of grounds, open space and natural resources, Kelsey Stansfield, has described how the project's scope grew once that became clear.
"Additional recreational opportunities really presented themselves and the project just grew," Stansfield said. "Now, it's really a redesign of the whole space."
That's why the current detour matters more than a typical construction reroute. Pushing greenway traffic into the interior of the park isn't just how the city is managing dump trucks and excavators this year. It's a live demonstration of the design principle the finished project is built around: separate the trail from the river's edge so the two uses stop colliding. When Reynolds Landing reopens, don't expect the greenway to snap back to exactly where it used to run. The whole point of the redesign is that it shouldn't.
What's Actually Getting Built
The project team includes Mile High Flood District, the City of Littleton, South Suburban Parks and Recreation, Arapahoe County Open Space, and the Colorado Water Conservation Board, with Merrick & Company and DHM Design Corporation handling design and Naranjo Civil Constructors leading construction, according to Naranjo's project page. The scope goes well beyond a trail fix. Planning documents describe:
- Vegetated terraces and banks meant to reintroduce native plant communities along the river
- Improved seating and gathering terraces
- Natural play areas built for kids rather than fenced-off overlooks
- In-channel features designed for kayaking and tubing rather than whitewater surfing, built to give paddlers something Littleton's stretch of the South Platte doesn't currently offer
The project has drawn enough outside attention that the Denver Architecture Foundation organized a members-only hard hat tour of the site this month, with the project team walking guests through the channel restoration work, the sequencing of construction in an active river, and the reasoning behind the redesign. That's not the kind of interest a routine drainage project usually generates.
The Timeline Slipped, and That's Worth Knowing Before You Plan Around It
When the city and its partners first went public with the plan in January 2024, phase one carried a price tag of about $15.5 million and an expected completion sometime in 2026. Part of that funding came from a $950,000 Great Outdoors Colorado grant, layered on top of contributions from the other partner agencies and an unnamed private donor.
That 2026 target has moved. As of Naranjo's most recent project update, the team's goal is now to complete phase one construction by spring 2027. Permitting was part of the delay. A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit for the in-river work wasn't issued until late 2024, well after the original fall 2024 construction start had been penciled in. None of that is unusual for a project coordinating this many public agencies around an active flood-control river, but if you've been telling yourself "it'll be done next summer," reset that expectation to something closer to two summers from now.
While You Wait, the Corridor Around It Has Changed Too
The detour isn't the only thing different about this stretch of Littleton this year. A few blocks off the greenway, Littleton Brewing Company opened in March 2025 in a converted auto body shop, and its rooftop patio with fire pits has become the kind of spot that fills up fast when the weather cooperates, dog-friendly beer garden included. It's an easy add-on if your usual loop passes anywhere near downtown.
Dirt Coffee, the hometown shop known for building its business around employing neurodivergent workers, moved into a larger space at 2506 W. Alamo Ave in late 2025. The new location includes an expanded café and what's described as Colorado's first drop-in Workforce Connection Center for neurodivergent job seekers, which makes it more than just a bigger counter to order from.
If your route runs closer to West Bowles Avenue, Snarf's Sandwiches opened a location near the Platte River that's become a reliable lunch stop for anyone who doesn't want to break stride for long. Farther along the greenway, River Run Park remains the trail's actual rest stop, with restrooms, a bike repair stand, and a shaded picnic pavilion, none of which are affected by the Reynolds Landing work.
The Takeaway for Anyone Who Uses This Trail
The easy read on the Reynolds Landing detour is that it's a temporary inconvenience you route around until the fencing disappears. The more accurate read is that the inconvenience is doing exactly what the redesign is meant to do: pulling foot and bike traffic away from the river's edge so the two stop conflicting once the park reopens. Plan around a spring 2027 finish, not a 2026 one. And in the meantime, the corridor around the closure has quietly gotten better, with a new brewery patio, an expanded coffee shop with a genuinely unusual mission, and another sandwich stop that didn't exist two years ago.
If watching this stretch of the South Platte change block by block has you wondering what it's doing to home values in the neighborhoods around it, that's the kind of question DeLUX Team fields regularly from Littleton neighbors. Request a Free Home Consultation and we'll walk through what's actually happening in your part of town, not just what the portals say.
