This spring, a ribbon cutting near Lien Park celebrated a stretch of trail that didn't exist a year earlier.
For as long as most current riders can remember, the Sioux Falls Recreation Trail has meant one thing: the loop. Nineteen miles, give or take, tracing the Big Sioux River around the city, with familiar entry points at Falls Park, Sertoma Park, Yankton Trail Park. You pick a direction, you ride, you come back to your car. That habit held for years because the trail didn't really go anywhere else. This year it started to.
The Boardwalk That Ends The Loop's Monopoly
In late May, the city officially opened a new mile-long extension connecting Lien Park to Bahnson Avenue on the northeast side of town. The $2.7 million project includes something the rest of the 43-mile paved system doesn't have anywhere else: an elevated boardwalk that lifts riders up into the tree canopy over a rough stretch of the Big Sioux River's north bank.
In a Sioux Falls Live report, Brett Kollars, assistant director of the city's Parks and Recreation Department, described the effect at the opening. "You feel teleported," he said. "You hardly feel as if you're in Sioux Falls on this part of the trail." That's not marketing language from a brochure. It's a city official standing on a boardwalk describing what riding over it actually feels like, above rugged terrain, with sightlines up and down the river that the flat, familiar loop never offered.
Nearly half the project, $1.3 million, came from private donations rather than city funds, split between the Ashby family and Jeff and Tammie Broin. That's worth sitting with for a second. That’s a notable investment in a single trail extension.
The practical version: if you've ridden the loop the same way for years, out from Falls Park, around through Sertoma, back the way you came, there is now a genuine reason to detour toward Lien Park this fall and ride somewhere you haven't been. It connects through land that was previously closed off to the public.
The Other End Of The Map Just Opened Too
While the boardwalk was still under construction, a separate and larger shift was happening across town. Great Bear Recreation Park, long known in Sioux Falls as a winter destination for skiing, opened its first mountain bike trails to the public in October 2025.
Falls Area SingleTrack, a nonprofit that has been hand-building singletrack in Sioux Falls parks since 2010, partnered with the International Mountain Bicycling Association's Trail Solutions team to design the first phase: 4 to 5 miles of bike-optimized routes cut into Great Bear's wooded valleys and old-growth creek bottoms. RonPaul Dezell of FAST called it a generational project, thirty years in the making, with phase one only the start of a plan that eventually brings the total to 13 miles.
The opening weekend tells you how much this mattered locally. Saturday was open riding. Sunday was a ribbon cutting with guided trail rides, a kids' skills area, and demo bikes on loan from Spoke-N-Sport and Sioux Falls Bicycle Company, with the ski chalet open for food and drinks. Cyclists had never had legal access to these trails before. Now they do, and Great Bear's general manager has talked about the addition changing how the park functions year-round rather than just in winter.
Before Great Bear, FAST's singletrack lived in a specific set of city parks that longtime riders already know by name:
- Leaders Park, where FAST started building in 2010
- Tuthill Park
- Legacy Park
- Yankton Trail Park
- Pasley Park
- Spencer Park
- Dunham Park
Roughly 14 miles of hand-built and machine-built singletrack existed across those parks before Great Bear opened. Adding Great Bear's first phase pushes the region's off-road riding into new terrain that's unlike anything within 100 miles of the city, according to Dezell, old-growth forest that the paved trail and the smaller park trails never touched.
Why These Two Projects Are Actually One Story
The boardwalk at Lien Park and the singletrack at Great Bear are planned to connect to each other. They sit at opposite ends of a plan the city has been describing publicly for at least two years: link the paved loop all the way to Great Bear.
City park planners have described the Lien Park extension as a deliberate step toward that connection, with the eventual goal of running the trail another two to three miles out to Veterans Parkway, where it would meet Great Bear directly. Andy Patterson, CEO of the Sioux Falls Area Community Foundation, which helped facilitate the private donations for the boardwalk, put it plainly at the opening: ride this all the way to Great Bear, and suddenly you've got mountain bike trails waiting at the other end.
That means the boardwalk isn't just a scenic detour. It's the first physically built piece of a route that, when finished, turns a ride that starts on pavement into one that ends in singletrack, without a car in between. Right now there's still a gap between where the pavement stops past Bahnson Avenue and where Great Bear's trailhead begins. But for the first time, both ends of that gap have something real built on them, rather than existing only on a planning document.
The city has other pieces moving too. A separate extension along the west side of town, the Cherry Creek corridor, is working its way from Legacy Park toward Family Park and eventually up to the USD Community College for Sioux Falls, Discovery District, Jefferson High School, and Southeast Technical College, a stretch that would add roughly 7 miles and create a northwest bypass connecting back to the main loop. None of that touches Great Bear directly, but it's part of the same broader pattern: this is the year the loop stopped being the only shape the trail system had.
What This Actually Looks Like This Weekend
If you want to ride either of these additions before the season turns, the logistics are simple. The Lien Park extension is accessible through Lien Park itself, off Cliff Avenue, and the boardwalk section runs along the river's north bank toward Bahnson Avenue. The paved trail system overall stays open year-round from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., with Falls Park and the Downtown River Greenway closing at midnight instead.
Great Bear's trails are free to access, dawn to dusk, with the new mountain bike section clearly marked at the north end of the parking lot. It's worth remembering that the rest of the park, the ski runs, the nature trails, isn't open to bikes. FAST has asked riders to stay on the marked mountain bike routes specifically so the rest of Great Bear's trail network, including the Ralph and Doris Wallin Nature Trail, stays intact for hikers.
Neither of these additions replaces the loop. Most rides in Sioux Falls will still start and end the way they always have. But for anyone who's ridden the same 19 miles enough times to know every bench and bridge by heart, there are now two new reasons to point the bike somewhere unfamiliar this fall, one that lifts you into the treetops on the northeast side, and one that drops you into old-growth forest you couldn't legally ride through a year ago.
If you're out on the trail this season and find yourself thinking about what it would mean to actually live near a stretch like this, along the river corridor, close to Lien Park, or out toward Great Bear, that's a conversation CORE Real Estate is glad to have. We ride these same trails too.
