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 that they provide access to a multitude of recreational opportunities and enhance 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, as well as process permitting through adjacent jurisdictions, El Paso County, and the 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.

Site design for The Trails at Aspen Ridge 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, a sodded-turf recreation area, numerous benches and seating areas, and an asphalt toddler pump track. Matrix worked closely with the developer and El Paso County Parks & Recreation to create a Parks Lands Agreement as part of the project approval process.

Because it was a new community development located in an area that was not surrounded by suburban growth, Matrix had to alleviate El Paso County’s concerns regarding inappropriate structure density by creatively weaving the various recreational opportunities into 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 the approval process. The approach was engaging, efficient, and informative — and ultimately gained El Paso County Parks & Recreation’s full support.