Trails

Capital High School’s Outdoors Club works on a City trail in Tierra Contenta.

The Santa Fe Conservation Trust, in partnership with the Trails Alliance of Santa Fe, the City of Santa Fe, Santa Fe County, the Santa Fe National Forest, and the Santa Fe Fat Tire Society, engages volunteers — individuals, clubs, schools, businesses, and non-profits — as advocates for and stewards of the trails that make our community an outstanding place to live in or to visit.  Learn about the trails that the Santa Fe Conservation Trust has worked on in our Trail Guide to Santa Fe.

SFCT focuses on helping to maintain our city’s natural-surface trails and to promote their use by residents and visitors, through an agreement with the City of Santa Fe to provide “Trail Volunteer Coordinator” services.  As a result of this agreement, SFCT has stepped up efforts to assess maintenance needs, prioritize improvements, recruit, train, and manage volunteers, organize work events, and promote the City’s trails system, including organizing and guiding Field Trips to City Trails with additional support from private foundations.

SFCT’s Trails Program Manager, Tim Rogers, was hired in 2014 to fulfill our “professional services agreement” with the City and to seek ways to expand SFCT’s trail activities with the City and other partners.  Also in 2014, in keeping with our historic involvement in protecting Santa Fe’s foothill trails and open space, the Trust also adopted the Atalaya Trail on behalf of the Santa Fe National Forest.

Students from Nina Otero Community School enjoy La Tierra Trails

The Trust works with the City, Santa Fe County, the Santa Fe Fat Tire Society, the Santa Fe County Horse Coalition, the Trails Alliance of Santa Fe, and a wide variety of other partners to plan and implement a Grand Unified Trail System in and around Santa Fe.

Information on our promotional field trips and other trail projects is available at  Open Space and Trails Projects.

Since the Trails Program Manager started up work in 2014, SFCT has coordinated over 3,600 hours of volunteer work on trails, and taken a schoolchild on a field trip to local trails over 1,500 times!  Grand overviews of each of these activities are available here:

Summaries of SFCT Trails Program accomplishments are also available by year and by individual event:

For information on how you can help by serving as a trail volunteer, contact Tim Rogers at tim@sfct.org or (505) 989-7019.  Upcoming SFCT events are posted on our Events page. More trail work days for City, County, National Forest, and other trails in our area are posted through the Trails Alliance of Santa Fe.

Tim Rogers presented on legal issues around trails to the Santa Fe Neighborhood Law Center on Dec. 7, 2017.  Also read Margaret Alexander’s Neighborhoods and Trails: Resolving Issues to learn how trails benefit your neighborhood, and In case you were wondering… on liability concerns relating to public use of trails on private land.

Tim Rogers presented on Increasing Physical Activity through Trails for the New Mexico Diabetes Advisory Council on Dec. 1, 2017.

Read how our city streets could be more friendly to pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists in Tim Rogers’ “My View” submission to the Santa Fe New Mexican: Paseo de Peralta – Complete the Street (Santa Fe New Mexican, Oct. 2, 2016).

Tim Rogers presented on Rail Trails as Creative Heritage Trails at the “Building Creative Communities Conference” on Nov. 4, 2015.

SFCT hosted the 2012 Southwest Trails Conference. Presenters’ information for this event can be found here.