Walk or bike the loop around Southridge Golf Course this week and you'll notice the asphalt tells two different stories. Head south along Fossil Creek Trail toward Carpenter Road and the path is smooth, the bridges are back, and the detour signs are gone. Turn onto Trilby Road at the Southridge Greens Boulevard intersection and you're still routed onto Harmony or Carpenter, same as you have been since mid-March.
Both projects came out of the same city department. Both touched the same stretch of ground near the golf course. And they've landed on almost opposite sides of their own announced timelines. That gap is the actual story for anyone who lives near the course this year, more than either closure on its own.
What actually reopened, and when
The mile of Fossil Creek Trail between Trilby Road and Carpenter Road closed in November as part of the Fossil Creek and Stanton Creek Stream Rehabilitation Project, a joint effort between Fort Collins Utilities and the city's Natural Areas, Parks and Transportation departments. The goal was blunt and practical: rebuild the channel so it can handle irrigation flows and major storms without the bank erosion that had been building for years. Crews pulled out two of the five bridges crossing Fossil Creek and Stanton Creek in the project area and put them into storage for future city use elsewhere. A third crossing got shifted to a new alignment with a new bridge in its place.
The original completion date was March 31, 2026. The trail reopened February 27, a full month ahead of that schedule. For a public works project involving bridge removal and creek bank rebuilding, finishing early is the exception, not the rule, which is exactly why it's worth noting for anyone whose daily walk or ride depends on that connection.
What's still closed, and why the timeline slipped instead
The other project sits almost on top of the first one geographically but runs on a completely different clock. The City of Fort Collins started a $2.1 million culvert replacement on East Trilby Road between Saint Thomas Drive and Southridge Greens Boulevard on March 16, addressing a failing structure where the road crosses Fossil Creek. The initial window was through July. By spring, the city had pushed that estimate into September, layering it on top of a separate, larger reconstruction of the College Avenue and Trilby Road intersection that's been running since July 2025 and is also expected to continue at least through the end of September. Two projects, same road, overlapping seasons.
The detour advice hasn't changed since March: use Harmony Road or Carpenter Road, Highway 392, for east-west trips that would normally cross Trilby between Lemay and Timberline. If you've been taking the long way to get to the west side of town, that's not you missing an announcement. That's the timeline still doing what it said it would do as of this writing.
Here's the side-by-side, since the announced dates and the working dates diverged in different directions:
| Project | Original timeline | Status as of late August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Fossil Creek Trail (Trilby to Carpenter) | Reopen by March 31, 2026 | Reopened February 27, about a month early |
| Trilby Road culvert (Lemay to Timberline) | Reopen by July 2026 | Extended into September 2026, still closed |
| Fossil Creek Park pickleball complex | Groundbreaking hoped for late 2025 or early 2026 | Still awaiting CCIP funding renewal, no construction start confirmed |
The one thing that hasn't moved at all
While the trail and the road have been going in opposite directions, Mackenzie's Pub & Grill has kept doing exactly what it always does. The clubhouse restaurant at Southridge Golf Course, a public 18-hole course spanning roughly 128 acres off South Lemay Avenue, serves daily and doesn't require a membership to walk in. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Southridge is a municipal course run through the city, not a private club, which means the pub at the turn is genuinely open to anyone in the neighborhood looking for a burger and a beer after a round or a bike ride, not a members-only room tucked behind a gate.
With one route into the neighborhood detoured and another just reopened, Mackenzie's has been the fixed point. It's the kind of small consistency that matters more during a construction season than it would in a quiet year.
Why the pickleball courts are the slowest-moving piece
Fossil Creek Community Park has been the preferred site for a 12-court outdoor pickleball complex since the city compared it against Spring Canyon Community Park on acreage, parking, floodplain impact, and noise setbacks, and picked Fossil Creek. The Fort Collins Pickleball Club, a nonprofit with more than 1,700 members, funded the feasibility study through the city's City Give program. An open house in September 2024 and a follow-up survey drew real numbers behind it.
349 community members supported the complex. 19 opposed it. That kind of margin rarely shows up in a city feedback process.
Despite that support, the project has been sitting on a different kind of clock than the trail or the road. It isn't waiting on a construction crew. It's waiting on money. The city identified the pickleball complex as a proposed Community Capital Improvement Program project and tied its funding to a dedicated capital tax the city planned to pursue renewal on in November 2025. Estimated construction costs run between roughly $3.3 million and $4 million once the noise mitigation, ten-foot barriers, lighting, and shade structures are built in. As of the most recent city updates, there's no confirmed groundbreaking date. The trail crew didn't need voters to approve a tax measure. The pickleball complex does, and that's the difference between a project finishing early and one still sitting in a funding queue nearly two years after residents said yes.
What this actually means if you're in the neighborhood right now
None of this changes what Southridge is. It changes what a given week actually looks like depending on which part of the loop you're using.
- If your routine runs along Fossil Creek Trail between Trilby and Carpenter, that connection has been fully open and rebuilt since late February, ahead of what the city itself projected.
- If you're crossing Trilby Road between Lemay and Timberline to get to the west side of town, plan on Harmony or Carpenter Road as the detour through at least September, on top of the separate College and Trilby intersection work that's been ongoing since last summer.
- If you've been waiting on word about the pickleball courts at Fossil Creek Park, the community support has been in place since 2024. The construction timeline hasn't been. Watch for updates tied to the city's capital funding cycle rather than a fixed calendar date.
- If you just want a reliable place to land after using any of the above, the clubhouse at Southridge Golf Course and Mackenzie's Pub & Grill haven't changed at all this year, which under the circumstances counts as its own kind of good news.
We keep an eye on this stretch of southeast Fort Collins because it's part of how we track the neighborhoods we work in day to day, not because any of it requires action on your part. If you're curious about what else is shifting around Southridge or want a broader look at the neighborhood, our Southridge neighborhood guide has more on the area's layout, housing types, and amenities. And if a conversation about the local market ever turns into something more, At Home Realty is always happy to talk through it. Schedule a free consultation whenever that time comes.
