A survey of Front Range towns and the mountain-bike nonprofits they work with. The pattern is the argument: among communities where singletrack is even geographically possible, the ones that partner build more, build better, and unlock money the parks budget can't reach on its own.
Nearly every mountain-bike trail nonprofit in this survey belongs to one umbrella group: the Colorado Mountain Bike Coalition (COMTB) — a statewide coalition of 20+ nonprofit trail organizations whose members include COMBA, Medicine Wheel Trail Advocates, and Boulder Mountainbike Alliance. When a town partners with one of these groups, it plugs into a statewide network of shared expertise, grant know-how, and political weight. See the full member directory.
Sort any column by clicking its header. Filter by partnership status or county. Singletrack mileage is the softest data here — towns report it inconsistently and often blend paved paths into the total, so treat those figures as estimates and check the confidence flag.
| Town / City ↕ | County ↕ | Partner? ↕ | Nonprofit partner ↕ | Singletrack mi. ↕ | Confidence ↕ |
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The case for working with a nonprofit trail organization — not just in Colorado, but as a pattern that has repeated across the country wherever trail networks have thrived.
A parks and recreation department can build trails in-house. The question is never whether it's possible — it's whether an in-house-only model can keep pace with a growing population, and whether it leaves money and labor on the table by refusing outside help. The evidence from communities across the country points one direction: the fastest-growing, best-regarded, most economically productive trail networks in America were almost all built through a public agency partnered with a nonprofit. Not one or the other. Both.
The reason is structural, and it comes down to four things a nonprofit brings that a municipal budget line generally cannot.
Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO), Colorado Parks & Wildlife trail grants, and county partnership funds are frequently written for — or scored higher for — projects with a community nonprofit partner. Medicine Wheel Trail Advocates was awarded a $45,000 GOCO grant to fund the planning process for a single one-mile connector near Monument. A contractor invoices the town; a nonprofit brings match dollars to the town.
COMBA volunteers contribute more than 7,000 hours of trail work every year. Boulder Mountainbike Alliance has logged over 24,000 volunteer hours across 150+ project days. For grant-match purposes that labor is valued at roughly $33 per hour — real, bankable capacity that expands what the department can deliver without expanding its payroll.
Purpose-built, modern trail design sheds water, resists braiding, and survives heavy rain. On Green Mountain in Lakewood, riders report that the COMBA-designed reroutes hold up dramatically better after storms than the old fall-line trails they replaced — less erosion, less maintenance, longer trail life. That's cost avoidance the town banks for years.
A nonprofit is an organized body of residents who show up to public meetings, write letters of support, and turn out for their trails. That converts trail-building from a line item a council can quietly cut into a visible community priority with a voting base behind it.
None of this replaces the parks department. This is the crucial point, and the one that disarms the usual objection. The strongest trail towns keep their staff, keep hiring professional contractors for the heavy machine work, and add a nonprofit partner on top. The three are additive. The question isn't "staff versus nonprofit" — it's whether to leave the third leg of the stool on the ground.
This isn't a Colorado quirk. The same public-plus-nonprofit structure appears wherever trail networks have grown into national destinations — and the scale it unlocks is hard to argue with.
A volunteer 501(c)(3) that develops and manages the entire regional network in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, county forests, local governments, and private landowners. The towns of Cable, Hayward, Seeley, and Namekagon didn't each build their own trails — a single nonprofit stitched a million acres of public and private land into one destination that anchors the local tourism economy.
Municipalities partnered with a regional nonprofit and the Walton Family Foundation to build 300+ miles of trail. Bentonville — a town of ~66,000, comparable to Castle Rock — now holds ~134 miles of singletrack inside city limits and bills itself the "Mountain Biking Capital of the World." Trails there are treated as economic infrastructure, not a recreation expense.
Jefferson County's countywide trails plan was built collaboratively with COMBA at the table, and the county runs a Trails Partnership Program that funds up to 25% of local and 50% of regional projects. Deer Creek Canyon Park, Green Mountain, Lair o' the Bear, and Floyd Hill are all COMBA-partnered. In Jeffco, going it alone is the exception — partnership is the default.
One more structural point makes the Colorado case especially strong: the nonprofits aren't isolated local clubs. Almost all of them belong to the Colorado Mountain Bike Coalition (COMTB) — a statewide coalition of more than 20 nonprofit trail organizations, with COMBA, Medicine Wheel Trail Advocates, and Boulder Mountainbike Alliance among its members and on its board. When a town partners with any one of these groups, it isn't just hiring a local volunteer crew; it's plugging into a statewide brain trust that shares grant-writing expertise, trail-design standards, land-manager relationships, and legislative advocacy for public trail funding. A parks department going it alone forfeits access to that entire network.
Castle Rock has roughly 40 miles of singletrack and a genuine asset in its foothills-and-mesa terrain — the kind of ground that rewards good trail design. It hires professional contractors like Timberline Trail Craft for construction, so the objection was never about trusting outside builders. Yet it remains one of only two Douglas County foothills communities in this survey — alongside Highlands Ranch, whose trails are run by a homeowners association rather than a trail-advocacy nonprofit — sitting on bikeable terrain without a COMBA or COMTB-member partner.
The consequence is capacity. An in-house-only pipeline can maintain what exists, but it cannot easily scale to meet a population and trail-use curve that keeps climbing. The communities that reached for the full three-legged stool — staff, contractors, and a nonprofit plugged into the statewide coalition — did so precisely because the third leg is what lets the network grow. The reframe that matters for a skeptical council isn't "your team isn't good enough." It's simpler and harder to rebut: partnership is how you stop leaving grant dollars, volunteer hours, and design expertise on the table — and it's what nearly every comparable community already does.
Sources & confidence. Partnership status is drawn from the organizations' own project pages and public agency records (Colorado Mountain Bike Coalition, COMBA, Medicine Wheel Trail Advocates, Boulder Mountainbike Alliance, Jefferson County Open Space) and is high-confidence. Singletrack mileage figures are estimates compiled from Trailforks, agency trail pages, and COTREX, and vary by source depending on how paved and soft-surface segments are counted — verify against current data before formal use. Castle Rock's 40-mile figure is per the project author. National figures: CAMBA (cambatrails.org, U.S. Forest Service), NWA economic impact (University of Arkansas 2023 study; Walton Family Foundation). Compiled for Post Millennium Renaissance MTB as a brainstorming and advocacy resource — data may have changed since compilation.