There is no parking lot at the end of Lehigh Street. There never has been. The Shanahan Ridge trailhead is just where the pavement stops and a dirt track climbs into ponderosa pine, and hikers who show up after nine on a summer Saturday park along Lehigh itself, or drift over to Cragmoor Road, or wherever a curb isn't blocking a driveway. That informality has worked for decades because the people using it were mostly on foot.
This month, the city is asking whether that should change. An old proposal to let mountain bikes ride a connector from Shanahan Ridge down to the Doudy Draw trailhead near Eldorado Springs is back in front of Boulder's Open Space and Mountain Parks department, and the public comment window on it closes August 30, 2026. Most of the coverage so far treats this as a familiar hikers-versus-bikers standoff. It isn't, not really. The thing that actually decided this fight the last time wasn't a debate about trail erosion or wildlife. It was a residential street.
What's actually on the table
The route being studied would begin at the Greenbriar Connector, run along Thomas Lane, pick up the South Boulder Creek West Trail, then follow the Mesa Trail south to the South Mesa and Doudy Draw trailheads, according to Boulder Reporting Lab's August 18 report on the proposal. None of this is new trail construction in the sense of cutting fresh single track through untouched ground. It is mostly a reroute and reclassification of paths that already exist, some of which currently function more like double-track service roads than backcountry hiking trail. The city's own draft solutions document confirms the same alignment and adds a detail that matters: the corridor runs through the Colorado Tallgrass Prairie State Natural Area, land set aside specifically because it holds rare plant communities and habitat for ground-nesting birds and several species of conservation concern.
That designation is doing real work in this debate. City staff, in their evaluation, have said the addition of bikes would likely increase overall visitation in ways that could affect wildlife movement and water access in the natural area. PLAN-Boulder County, a conservation group that has weighed in on open space fights across the county for decades, sent an email to its followers on August 7, 2026 urging opposition, arguing the connection would harm the grasslands and disrupt hikers and runners who use these trails specifically because they are pedestrian-only.
The Boulder Mountainbike Alliance sees the same geography differently. In an April post asking members to take the city's multimodal survey, the group put its case plainly:
This is about something simple: safe, connected trail access south of town.
Their argument is that cyclists living in South Boulder currently have to ride on Highway 93 or Eldorado Springs Drive to reach legal riding at Doudy Draw and Marshall Mesa, and that a trail connection would get them off pavement shared with cars.
The 2011 vote everyone cites, and what it actually decided
Anyone who has followed Boulder open space policy for more than a decade will tell you this exact question already went to a vote. During the city's West Trail Study Area process, a community working group could not reach agreement on whether to allow bikes on trails in this same corridor. The question went to the Open Space Board of Trustees, which voted 3 to 2 to recommend against the Shanahan connector, a recommendation the City Council upheld in March 2011, according to Boulder Reporting Lab and archived reporting from Boulder Weekly on the same process. That vote kept in place a bike ban on trails from Eldorado Springs to Mount Sanitas that had stood since 1987.
What that same Boulder Weekly reporting made clear at the time is that the deciding factor wasn't really the ecology. Residents of Shanahan Ridge and Greenbriar organized under the name SOSBoulder specifically because they worried a connector trail would bring more bike traffic within sight of their homes and change what one open space official at the time called a landscape neighbors had "traditionally focused on hiking." The vote that gets cited today as a settled environmental verdict was, underneath it, a neighborhood mobilization. Streets showed up. The board listened.
That distinction is the whole reason this is worth understanding if you live anywhere near the Greenbriar Connector or Lehigh Street today. The current proposal isn't asking whether the science has changed since 2011. It's asking whether a differently organized set of voices can produce a different outcome from the same starting conditions.
Why this keeps resurfacing
This is not the first time the idea has resurfaced since 2011. When the Marshall Mesa trailhead closed for reconstruction in the summer of 2024 with no cyclist detour planned, the Boulder Mountainbike Alliance flagged the Shanahan-to-Doudy Draw connection to OSMP staff as a possible fix. The city built a temporary trail from the RTD parking lot along Highway 93 instead, that detour did the job, and the Shanahan Ridge idea got shelved again without ever forcing a real decision.
What is different in 2026 is the process carrying it. City staff pointed advocates toward Priority Action 7c of Boulder's Citywide Strategic Plan, a multi-year effort to study multimodal access across the entire open space system rather than treating Shanahan-to-Doudy Draw as its own emergency request. That review has been moving through public meetings for over a year: an initial framing at the Open Space Board of Trustees in February 2025, a data update in September 2025, a more detailed roadmap in December 2025, and now a formal community questionnaire that opened August 14, 2026 and runs through the end of the month, according to the city's own August 14 announcement. The Boulder Mountainbike Alliance is also pointing to a planned 2026 reroute of the Lower Big Bluestem trail, already anticipated under the original West Trail Study Area guidance, as a natural opportunity to fold the bike question in alongside work the city was doing anyway.
City staff have been careful to say nothing has been decided. They've also noted that current plan guidance treats a reroute of the South Boulder Creek West Trail as permissible, but that adding bike access to it would run counter to what that guidance actually says. That's a narrower opening than advocates might like, and a real obstacle for anyone hoping this resolves quickly.
A short version of how we got here:
- 1987: Bikes banned on OSMP trails from Eldorado Springs to Mount Sanitas.
- 2011: West Trail Study Area process considers a Shanahan-to-Eldorado connector; Open Space Board votes 3-2 against it; City Council upholds the ban in March.
- 2023 to 2024: Marshall Mesa trailhead closure revives the idea as a detour fix; a temporary route along Highway 93 solves the immediate problem instead.
- 2025: The question moves into the city's Priority Action 7c multimodal review, with staff presentations in February, September, and December.
- 2026: A city survey in April draws renewed advocacy from cyclists; a public questionnaire opens August 14 and closes August 30.
What actually happens if you say nothing
The comment period closing August 30 is not a formal vote. It's the input staff have said they need before making any recommendation to the Open Space Board of Trustees. That means the loudest and best organized voices in this window carry real weight, the same way they did in 2011, just in the opposite direction if that's how it plays out.
If you live on or near Lehigh Street, Cragmoor Road, Bear Mountain Drive, or anywhere along the Greenbriar corridor, this is the version of the debate that actually touches your daily life. Not an abstract argument about trail miles citywide, but whether the dirt path at the end of your street becomes a shared-use corridor, and whether the informal street parking that has worked since before the 1987 ban starts absorbing a different kind of user on weekend mornings. The questionnaire closes August 30, 2026. Whatever the outcome, it will likely be decided the same way the last one was: by whoever actually shows up.
South Boulder residents who want the fuller picture on the ecological argument can also read the Boulder Mountainbike Alliance's own case for the connection, which lays out their side of the 2011 to 2026 timeline in more detail than any single news account.
For residents thinking about what this corridor of South Boulder looks like beyond this particular fight, from trail access to the neighborhoods that back up against it, Marybeth Emerson works this market year-round and is always glad to talk through what a specific street or block actually offers day to day. Reach out to schedule a consultation.
