"We're definitely hearing from residents that like mountain biking that they're having to drive to a lot of the adjacent communities to access it," Eden Prairie Parks and Recreation Director Amy Markle told the city council this spring. It's a strange admission for a city that maintains more than 1,000 acres of parkland and 225 miles of sidewalks and trails. Somewhere in all that acreage, there was room for baseball diamonds, disc golf, an archery range, and even natural springs where residents fill water jugs. There was no room, until this month, for a mountain bike.
That gap closes this September at Cedar Hills Park, a 40-acre property off Eden Prairie Road that most residents have driven past without a second look. The city hired a local trail-building firm, cleared roughly 15 of those 40 acres, and built the first mountain biking trail system Eden Prairie has ever had. A ribbon cutting is expected once the project wraps this month.
What makes this worth writing about isn't just that a trail opened. It's what the project reveals about how a suburb with abundant land still runs into hard limits the moment it tries to expand past its own property line, and about how a forgotten neighborhood park became the answer to a problem residents had been solving on their own for years by simply driving somewhere else.
The Park Nobody Was Watching
Cedar Hills Park sits along Eden Prairie Road between Pioneer Trail and Flying Cloud Drive, in a hilly stretch of southwestern Eden Prairie that used to be the Cedar Hills Golf Course and, in winter, a small ski hill. Before this year, its main features were a paved path, a play area, a scattering of picnic benches, and some unofficial trails through the woods that locals had worn in on their own.
That topography turned out to be the whole reason the city picked it. Markle has said the hills lend themselves naturally to bike trails in a way flat parkland doesn't, and the site had another advantage: it's the kind of park that gets used by the neighborhood around it, not by the whole city, which made it easier to design trails that wouldn't compete with ballfields or playgrounds for space.
The city ran the project through a genuine public process rather than announcing a finished plan. A bike committee met from fall 2025 into spring 2026 to shape goals before design work started. When the city held a public engagement session in May, more than 200 households in the surrounding neighborhood were invited to weigh in, and the response was largely positive. One family's feedback specifically shaped design changes to make the trail more accessible for people with disabilities, a detail that shows up in the final layout rather than just in a press release.
What's Actually There
The finished project includes a mountain biking trail running more than two miles, split into color-coded sections so riders can choose their difficulty: green for entry level, blue for intermediate, black for expert. Next to it sits a one-acre bike playground, sometimes called a skills park, where riders can practice rollers, jumps, and small obstacles in a controlled space before taking those skills onto the trail loops. The design philosophy, according to Markle, is that every obstacle has a way around it. If you're not ready for a bridge or a log crossing, you don't have to take it.
Pathfinder Trail Building, a local company, won the construction contract after the city solicited bids from six firms and received two. The winning bid came in at $420,800, just under the other submission's $443,129.52. Construction started this summer, and the park stayed open to visitors throughout, with signage marking active work zones.
Here's how the finished trail stacks up against the two options Eden Prairie riders have been driving to for years:
| Location | Trail Length | Home City | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cedar Hills Park | 2+ miles, plus 1-acre skills park | Eden Prairie | Opening this September |
| Lone Lake Park | 5 miles | Minnetonka | Established |
| Braemar Park | 6 miles | Edina | Established |
Cedar Hills is shorter than either of its neighbors, which makes sense for a first-generation trail built on 15 acres rather than a larger regional park. What it offers instead is proximity. For a rider who lives in Eden Prairie, the difference between loading a bike onto a rack and driving to Minnetonka or Edina versus riding to a trailhead down the road is the difference between an outing and an errand.
The Expansion the City Couldn't Get
The more interesting story sits just across Eden Prairie Road from the park, on land the city doesn't control. When Markle first pitched the Cedar Hills project in 2025, she floated a second phase that would extend the trail system onto adjacent property owned by Flying Cloud Airport. That land is owned by the Metropolitan Airports Commission, a regional authority bound by Federal Aviation Administration rules about what activities are allowed near airport operations.
The city has since held meetings with the Commission about that expansion. The answer so far has been no, at least for the specific parcel closest to Cedar Hills. Markle has said other areas of the city are still being discussed for additional trail mileage, but nothing is confirmed.
It's a useful reminder for anyone who assumes a city with this much parkland can simply annex whatever's next door. Eden Prairie has the acreage, the resident demand, and the budget to build trails. What it doesn't have is authority over land that belongs to a regional aviation body answering to federal regulators. The trail that opens this month exists entirely within land the city already owned. Anything beyond that is a negotiation with an agency that has no obligation to say yes.
Who Actually Pushed for This
Community pressure here wasn't abstract. Ray Samide, a 26-year Eden Prairie resident and retired avid mountain biker, was an early and vocal supporter of the project when it was still just a proposal. John Jarvis, another longtime resident, helped start a group called "Bike Eden Prairie" on Facebook specifically to build awareness and momentum around the city's lack of mountain biking infrastructure. Their advocacy, combined with the turnout at May's public engagement meeting, gave the city council the confirmation it needed that this wasn't a niche request.
It also explains something about the timeline. The idea was floated in an informal council workshop back in March 2025. Design work took shape over the following fall and winter. Bids went out in spring 2026. Construction started this summer. About a year and a half from proposal to ribbon cutting is fast for a municipal parks project, and the speed tracks pretty closely with how organized and specific the resident ask was from the start.
What This Means for Your Next Ride
If you've been mountain biking out of Eden Prairie for years, the calculus changes this month. You no longer have to choose between driving to Lone Lake Park in Minnetonka, Braemar Park in Edina, or riding informal paths through conservation land the city has spent years trying to protect from exactly that kind of unofficial traffic. Cedar Hills Park gives you a legitimate, purpose-built option inside city limits, with a difficulty range that works for a first-timer on the green loop and a rider who wants technical features on black.
It's also a small case study in how growth actually happens in an established suburb. Eden Prairie didn't build this by acquiring new land. It found an underused corner of a park it already had, listened to a specific and organized group of residents, and built something that fit the terrain instead of forcing the terrain to fit a generic plan. The parts that didn't work out, like the airport land, are still parts of the story. They just haven't been solved yet.
For more on what's changing across Eden Prairie this season, including the West 78th Street corridor and Flying Cloud Fields, see our Fall 2026 guide to the city.
If you're thinking about what it actually means to live in a suburb that keeps finding new uses for the land it already has, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches these decisions unfold in real time. Randy Kellogg has spent years tracking how Eden Prairie and its neighboring suburbs grow, one park, one corridor, one City Council vote at a time. Get 100% Randy on Your Side.
