Walk out to Cozens Ranch Open Space most afternoons this month and you will find kids looping the pump track while the aspens along the Fraser River start going gold at the edges. No lift ticket window to check. No line at a base area. Just a flat stretch of asphalt and dirt between Fraser and Winter Park that didn't exist a year and a half ago.
Fraser technically has two bike parks now, and after one full season of both being open, locals have stopped treating the new one as a warm-up lot for the real riding at Trestle. It's turning into something else: the place that keeps working after Trestle's season ends.
The Park Trestle Never Replaced
Fraser Bike Park sits on 120 acres of protected riparian land at Cozens Ranch Open Space, right off U.S. Highway 40 between the two towns. Construction started in July 2025 and took roughly four months. A pump track opened quietly that October so riders had somewhere to go while the rest of the park kept getting built. The full facility, with its dirt skills trails, connector trails, and jump lines finished, had its grand opening on May 30, 2026, drawing close to 300 people for a ribbon cutting, skills clinics, a bike parade, and jump-line demos.
What actually got built:
- About 1,800 linear feet of beginner-to-intermediate dirt skills trails
- Roughly 1,000 linear feet of dirt connector trails linking into the surrounding open space
- A 1,680-square-foot paved asphalt pump track
- Progressive jump lines and features built for adaptive riders
- A central trailhead hub with shade, seating, bike repair stations, and natural play structures
None of it costs a dime to use. Meara McQuain, executive director of Headwaters Trails Alliance, one of the five organizations that partnered on the project, called it "an exciting milestone for our community and a tremendous investment in outdoor recreation."
Two Bike Parks, Two Very Different Jobs
The mistake is comparing Fraser Bike Park to Trestle like they're competing for the same rider. They aren't built for the same afternoon.
| Trestle Bike Park | Fraser Bike Park | |
|---|---|---|
| Admission | Lift ticket required | Free |
| Terrain | 40+ miles of lift-served gravity trails on the mountain | Flat dirt skills trails and a paved pump track on the valley floor |
| 2026 season | June 12 through September 27 | No fixed closing date; runs until weather stops it |
| Location | On-mountain at Winter Park Resort | Cozens Ranch Open Space, between downtown Fraser and Winter Park |
| Built for | Experienced downhill and enduro riders | Beginners, families, and adaptive riders learning to progress |
Trestle needs a chairlift running, a base area staffed, and snowpack gone from the access roads. Its whole operation is tied to the resort's calendar. Fraser Bike Park needs none of that. There's no lift to maintain and no gondola schedule to work around, so its season isn't set by an operations team deciding when to power down for the year. It's set by whatever the weather does next.
The Grant Money Tells Its Own Story
Look at who paid for this and the picture gets clearer. Fraser Bike Park came together through a $389,000 grant from Great Outdoors Colorado and a $250,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Transportation's Revitalizing Main Streets program, alongside town funds. That's state and municipal money, not resort money. The project traces back to the town's 2018 Fraser River Corridor Master Plan, which had been calling for exactly this kind of recreation investment along the river for years before a shovel ever hit dirt.
That funding structure matters more than it looks like on paper. It makes Fraser Bike Park public infrastructure the town owns outright, not an amenity a private operator could someday restrict, reprice, or fold into a season pass tier. It sits alongside Trestle, which opened back in 2009 as the first project outside Whistler for the trail-building company Gravity Logic, as Grand County's second bike park. But where Trestle is resort infrastructure that happens to benefit the town, Fraser Bike Park is town infrastructure that happens to benefit visitors too.
Five organizations partnered to get it built: Headwaters Trails Alliance, Fraser Valley Metropolitan Recreation District, Fraser Valley Mountain Bike Alliance, Trestle Bike Park itself, and Skinny Traffic Trails. Trestle lending its trail-design expertise to a free public park a few miles down the highway is its own small statement about how the valley's two riding scenes actually talk to each other.
What This Means For The Weeks Ahead
Trestle's 2026 lift-served season runs from June 12 through September 27, according to the resort's own hours page. That's less than two weeks from today. When those lifts stop turning for the season, the mountain's 40 miles of gravity trails go quiet until next summer.
Fraser Bike Park doesn't share that expiration date. Its pump track and skills trails will keep drawing riders for as long as the dirt stays rideable and the asphalt isn't buried in snow, which in a typical Fraser Valley fall can stretch well past the first of October. For residents used to a hard stop between bike season and ski season, that's a real change. Last year's ski season opened October 31, though this year's opening date hasn't been announced yet. Whatever the gap between Trestle's lift closure and the first chairlift of winter turns out to be, Fraser now has a free, flat, no-ticket-required place to ride through most of it.
Where To Refuel Downtown
Cozens Ranch Open Space sits close enough to downtown Fraser that a lap on the pump track fits easily into an afternoon that also includes a stop back in town. Two names worth knowing if the new park is what's finally pulling you back downtown: Fraser Valley Distilling, the town's own spirits maker, and Fraser River Beer Company, which has spent this season serving as the plate pickup stop for two of the valley's Winter Park Classics mountain bike races.
None of this is new information to anyone who's lived in Fraser a while. What's new is having a reason to make the loop from the park back to town part of a regular fall routine instead of a summer-only one.
Fraser residents asked for a bike park they could call their own for years before this one broke ground. What they got wasn't a scaled-down version of Trestle. It was a different kind of investment entirely: public land, public money, and a season that doesn't answer to a lift operator's calendar. That's worth knowing whether you ride the pump track every week or just appreciate that the town put its money into something built to outlast a single season.
If you're watching how Fraser keeps investing in itself and wondering what that means for property here, Erin Life knows this valley from the ground up. Start Your Grand County Search whenever you're ready to talk about it.
