Carey Harper spent the better part of two seasons burying a trail. In fall 2024 and again in spring 2025, he and a handful of volunteers cut a new stretch of singletrack through eroded ground on the La Tierra Trails, the public trail system that shares the same stretch of high desert as Las Campanas. When the new section was ready, he covered the old one over with rocks, sticks and underbrush so the land could rest.
By October 2025, someone had undone that work. Both trails were open again, and Harper, a former treasurer of the Santa Fe Fat Tire Society, was the one who noticed.
If you ride or walk out toward the Calabasas, Frijoles or La Cuchara trailheads, the ground under your tires or boots is part of an argument that has not been settled. The meeting that is supposed to settle it keeps not happening.
The reroute that was supposed to fix itself
The segment in question ran between Trail No. 1 and Trail No. 7, a stretch washed out by a series of monsoon rains. Harper, working under an agreement with the city's Parks and Open Space Division that barred cutting down large trees, built a longer, more winding replacement designed to shed water better and hold up over time. The city wanted this fix for a practical reason: the Parks and Open Space Division has no employees dedicated to trail upkeep. Across a city with hundreds of miles of trail, the only person maintaining them in a paid capacity is Tim Rogers, trails program manager at the Santa Fe Conservation Trust, which has held a maintenance contract for La Tierra since 2014.
La Tierra itself is not a minor amenity. It runs more than 25 miles through the northwest quadrant of the city, open to hikers, cyclists and equestrians, and reachable from Camino de los Montoyas or the Dog Park Connector Trail. It is public land, separate from the Club at Las Campanas' own private equestrian trails and open range, which means anyone in the surrounding community can walk out and use it without a membership.
What Harper found in October
Harper moved to Santa Fe from Baltimore during the pandemic and started visiting a different section of La Tierra almost daily. A dispute with other Fat Tire Society board members led him to leave the organization in 2025. When he went back to check on the old, buried trail section that October, he found it back in active use alongside the new one he had built.
He would rather see only one trail survive, he told a reporter, even if that means covering up the section he spent two seasons building. Alex Gibson, president of the Fat Tire Society, sees it differently. Asked about the reopened section, he said the nonprofit's work has stayed within what the city allowed:
"All work that we have done has been done with their approval."
Harper disagrees with how that approval was used. In a December 2025 email to city officials, he argued that the city's own process for these projects, known as Early Neighbor Notification, was never given the chance to work as intended:
"The ENN process is intended to secure community and staff consensus on a project before finalizing."
His point is that the plans were supposed to be preliminary until the public weighed in. By the time anyone outside the trail-building community noticed both trails were open, the work was already done.
The meeting that keeps not happening
The city did hold a public meeting about this project once before, an Early Neighbor Notification session in August 2024, held over Zoom, to introduce the reroute plan. That meeting came before the ground was disturbed. The one that's supposed to follow it, to let the community weigh in on what happened after, is a different story.
Melissa McDonald, the city's Parks and Open Space Director, said in December 2025 that a follow-up meeting hadn't been scheduled yet but would happen sometime in 2026. As of the Santa Fe New Mexican's report on January 20, 2026, that meeting still had not been added to the city's public calendar. Harper calls holding a input session after the fact "an abuse" of what the notification process is supposed to do. McDonald, for her part, has said she isn't concerned that both trail sections are open.
Neither side is wrong about the facts. They're arguing about sequence, whether public input came before or after the shovels went in, and that argument is still open.
What you'll actually find on the trail right now
The trail system itself remains fully rideable and walkable, and it hasn't gone anywhere. A few things are worth knowing if you're heading out from a trailhead near Las Campanas this month:
- Calabasas Trailhead sits on the western edge of the system and is the closest access point for most Las Campanas-area riders, with views west toward the Sandia Mountains at sunset.
- Frijoles Trailhead connects into the network's eastern and southern loops, popular with trail runners and horseback riders.
- La Cuchara Trailhead is the gentler entry point, with wider, easier terrain suited to a first ride or a walk with dogs.
- Both the old and new sections of the disputed reroute were open and being ridden as of the most recent local reporting on the dispute, from January 2026.
- Trail conditions change with erosion and monsoon season. Check the Santa Fe Fat Tire Society's own trail work updates or Trailforks' live status page before you head out, rather than relying on a status report from earlier this year.
None of this requires a Las Campanas Club membership. It's public land, maintained by a mix of one paid Conservation Trust staffer and volunteer labor from a nonprofit mountain bike club, sitting right against one of Santa Fe's most private residential communities.
Why one volunteer's shovel matters more than you'd think
It's tempting to read this as a small squabble between weekend trail builders. The more useful way to read it is as a preview of how trail decisions actually get made here. There is no large city crew planning La Tierra's future. There is one Conservation Trust employee, a volunteer nonprofit with its own internal disagreements, and a Parks Division that leans on both because it has no other option. When a plan changes on the ground, whether by accident or by someone quietly undoing another volunteer's work, the mechanism that's supposed to catch it and put it in front of the public is a meeting that can sit unscheduled for the better part of a year.
If you already live near this system, that's the part worth carrying with you past this one dispute. The trail map you rode last spring isn't a fixed document. It's the product of ongoing, informal, sometimes contested labor by people who care enough to argue about it in December emails. When the city finally schedules that follow-up meeting, showing up is the only way a rider's or a walker's preference actually counts for anything. Until then, both trails stay open, and the argument keeps riding alongside you.
Trail politics like this rarely make it into a listing description, but they're part of what makes daily life in and around Las Campanas feel the way it does. If you want more of what's actually happening in this part of Santa Fe, from the ground under your feet to the homes down the road, reach out to Destinee Tran. Let's Connect.
