The Trails at Aspen Ridge is a 118-acre, 850-unit, master-planned community in southeastern Colorado Springs that was initiated in 2019. The community incorporates a variety of housing styles to accommodate the wide-ranging demographic of home buyers moving to the area and integrates various parks, pocket parks, and natural open spaces throughout. These amenities are of tremendous benefit to the community in providing access to a multitude of recreational opportunities and enhancing quality of life. The project size and density in a new growth area of Colorado Springs required collaborative work from civil engineers, landscape architects, and transportation engineers to master plan the extension of water, sewer, and roadway networks to the property, and process permitting through adjacent jurisdictions, El Paso County and Colorado Department of Transportation, to address aspects of future growth planning for the County. Problem-solving to identify and meet the surrounding community’s future needs while respecting the responsibility of the development was critical to successful project completion.

The Trails at Aspen Ridge site design required creative grading solutions to work with the challenging topography and provided an opportunity to incorporate a centrally located park with a construction budget of nearly $1 million for the development of a large, accessible playground, two pavilions, a concrete trail network, sodded-turf recreation area, numerous benches and seating areas, and an asphalt toddler pump track. Matrix worked closely with the developer and the El Paso County Parks Department to create a Parks Lands Agreement as part of the project approvals process.

As a new community development located in an area that was not surrounded by suburban growth, Matrix was able to alleviate El Paso County’s concerns regarding inappropriate structure density by creatively weaving the various recreational opportunities throughout developed areas. Matrix successfully met the primary challenge of conveying the idea, vision, and benefits of how the community would look and function by providing both 2D and 3D illustrations as part of the public hearing presentations and approval process. The approach was engaging, efficient, and informative and ultimately gained the El Paso County Parks & Recreation Department’s full support.