Drive out through the gate on Garden Drive and look west. For as long as most Cedar Heights residents have lived here, that view has included a pale, terraced scar cut into the hillside above Williams Canyon, the leftover face of a limestone quarry that stopped operating in 2015. In 2026, for the first time, that scar is supposed to start looking like a hillside again.
The city calls it Black Canyon Quarry, though longtime locals know it as Snyder Quarry. It sits on 163 acres directly west of Cedar Heights and Garden of the Gods Park, and the city has been slowly, deliberately turning it from a mining scar into public open space since 2020. What's happening on that land right now is real, funded, and dated. What it does not mean, at least not yet, is a new trail out your own back gate. Those are two different questions, moving on two different clocks, run by two different agencies. Confusing them is the easiest mistake a Cedar Heights resident can make this year.
What the City Actually Bought in 2020
Colorado Springs finalized the purchase of Black Canyon Quarry in September 2020, using money from the Trails, Open Space and Parks (TOPS) program, the 0.01 percent sales tax voters approved back in 1997. The same purchase bundled in 152 acres of frontage land east of the separate Pikeview Quarry, near Blodgett Open Space. The 100-acre Pikeview pit itself was not part of the deal. The city left the door open to accept it later as a donation from Castle Concrete, but only if the state signs off on that company's own reclamation work first.
TOPS generates roughly $9.5 million a year citywide, and the program earmarks $3 to $3.5 million of that annually just for buying new open space. That funding structure matters here because it explains why this project moves the way it does: reclamation and acquisition compete for the same modest pot of money every year, alongside every other open space project in the city.
Two Years of Grant-Funded Grading
Buying the land was step one. Making it safe and stable was the harder, slower part, and it's the part that's actually visible right now.
In October 2024, the city was awarded a $300,000 grant from the Department of Local Affairs' Energy and Mineral Impact Assistance Fund, earmarked specifically for reclaiming and revegetating the quarry. The scope is grading, earthmoving, surface compaction, reseeding, and erosion and stormwater control on a mine site that had sat untouched since it closed.
By January 2026, that work was visibly underway. David Deitemeyer, the city's TOPS senior program administrator, told the Colorado Springs Gazette that crews were making solid progress and that the goal was to finish reseeding sometime this year.
"Crews are making great progress on reclamation. Hopefully, we'll have that re-seeded and work completed this year."
Read that sentence carefully. It is a grading and revegetation timeline, not a trail-opening timeline. Nothing in the current funding covers a trailhead, a parking lot, or new public trail construction on this specific property. The city's own 2026 outlook for parks and trails confirms as much: for Black Canyon Quarry, 2026 means earthwork, drainage improvements, and reseeding. That's the whole scope.
Two Different Clocks, Same Stretch of Hillside
The confusion gets worse because a genuinely fast-moving trail project is happening elsewhere in the same city open-space system, on a different property with a different name and a different funding source. It's easy to hear "new trails near Garden of the Gods this year" and assume it's about the quarry behind Cedar Heights. It isn't.
| Project | Location | What's actually funded for 2026 | Public access this year? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black Canyon Quarry (Snyder Quarry) | 163 acres directly west of Cedar Heights, adjacent to Williams Canyon | Grading, drainage, and reseeding under the 2024 DOLA grant | No trail or trailhead construction funded yet |
| Blodgett Open Space | South of Pikeview Quarry, west of Allegheny Drive and the Oak Valley Ranch neighborhood | 14 miles of new and improved trail plus a new 50-vehicle trailhead, per the 2024 master plan | Yes, targeted for close to summer 2026 |
Deitemeyer told the Gazette he expects the Blodgett trail work, including several mountain-bike-only segments, to wrap up close to summer 2026, with a new 50-car trailhead at the base of the old quarry there. That's a real, near-term trail opening. It's simply not the one connected to the hillside Cedar Heights residents actually look at every day.
Why Finishing Reclamation Doesn't Open a Trail
Here's the mechanism that actually governs the timeline, and it's the part most people miss: Black Canyon Quarry isn't valuable to the city because of what's on it today. It's valuable because of what's on the other side of the ridge.
The city's own description of the property is explicit that its long-term appeal is regional, not local: the land "offers future potential to provide trail access to the Pike National Forest's Waldo Canyon area." Waldo Canyon has been closed since the 2012 wildfire that carries its name. As of the U.S. Forest Service's own current recreation page, the Waldo Canyon Trail and its trailhead parking area remain closed to all use, and no reopening date has been established.
That closure sits entirely outside the city's authority. Waldo Canyon is federal land managed by the Forest Service, not city parkland managed by TOPS. The Forest Service has been running its own multi-year public process, Re-Imagine Waldo Canyon, to figure out what a reopened trail corridor should even look like. That process predates the current quarry reclamation work by years and hasn't produced a firm reopening timeline of its own.
So even in the best case, where every acre of Black Canyon Quarry finishes reclamation exactly on the schedule Deitemeyer described, that only clears the city's side of the ledger. It gives Colorado Springs a stable, green, city-owned parcel that could someday host a trailhead. It does nothing to change the Forest Service's own closure order on the trail that parcel would actually connect to. Two agencies, two approval processes, two separate and currently undated timelines. One doesn't move the other.
What This Actually Changes If You Live Here
For 2026 specifically, expect to watch the hillside change color. Grading and reseeding work is funded and underway, and the city's stated goal is to have that work substantially finished this year. That's a visible, welcome shift after a decade of looking at a bare quarry face.
What you shouldn't expect this year is new foot or bike traffic on Garden Drive, a new public trailhead near the neighborhood gate, or reopened access into Waldo Canyon. None of those pieces have funding or a schedule attached yet, and the piece that matters most, the federal trail closure itself, isn't the city's decision to make.
If you're looking for an actual new trail nearby in 2026, Blodgett Open Space is the one to watch, not the quarry. And regardless of what happens next door, the more than 300 acres of open space, parks, and trails inside the Cedar Heights Community Association's own boundary aren't affected by any of this. That private network, reachable straight from the neighborhood's own gated entrance, remains the reliable option it's always been.
For a fuller picture of what daily life looks like inside the gate, from the trail system to the foothills setting itself, see our Cedar Heights living guide.
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