On Bike to Work Day last year, a rider named Ryan White stopped at a city info table set up along the Cherry Creek Trail near the Country Club fence line and told a Denverite reporter what everyone who commutes that stretch already knows. He called it "the least safe feeling portion" of an otherwise very beautiful path. He wasn't describing some forgotten corner of the trail system. He was describing the mile that runs along the southern edge of the Country Club Historic Neighborhood, on 1st Avenue between Downing Street and University Boulevard, the exact stretch most residents cross to get anywhere on foot or by bike.
That's the part of the story that doesn't show up in the trail's citywide reputation. Denver markets the Cherry Creek Trail as one continuous 47-mile ribbon connecting downtown to the foothills. For most of its length, that's true: a car-free, creekside corridor that residents in Cherry Creek and beyond use daily. But for the one mile that borders the Denver Country Club golf course, the trail leaves the creek entirely and squeezes onto what amounts to a wide sidewalk running alongside 1st Avenue traffic. Cyclists and pedestrians share a narrow strip with rush hour cars on one side and a shrub-covered club fence on the other. The routing is a long-standing feature of the corridor, shaped by the golf course grounds that sit between 1st Avenue and the creek.
Why the Trail Takes the Long Way
The reason is an engineering constraint on the ground the trail would have to cross. A city traffic engineer described it in a 9News interview in 2022: routing the trail along the creek through that stretch would require fencing both banks of the waterway from Downing all the way to 1st Avenue, a solution that would look out of place cutting through a golf course. So the trail detours onto the street instead, and has for as long as most current residents have lived there.
The stakes of that detour aren't abstract. A Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure study found 31 crashes causing fatal or severe injuries occurred in the surrounding corridor between 2017 and 2021. The trail segment itself carries more than 600,000 trips a year, according to the city's own count, which makes it one of the busier pedestrian and bike corridors in Denver, funneled onto a path never built to carry that volume.
A Wider Sidewalk, Not a Creekside Path
The city is finally doing something about it. DOTI's 1st Avenue Redesign project, moving through the city's planning process for the corridor between Downing Street and University Boulevard, will widen the trail from its current 8 feet to 12 feet, the standard width for a Denver Parks and Recreation trail, and add a planted tree lawn on the south side of 1st Avenue to buffer riders and walkers from traffic. The project also includes safety upgrades at the Downing and University intersections and is being built to prepare the corridor for a possible future Bus Rapid Transit line.
Here's what the redesign changes, and what it doesn't.
| Current condition | Planned condition | |
|---|---|---|
| Trail width | 8 feet | 12 feet |
| Buffer from traffic | None | Planted tree lawn, south side |
| Route | Follows 1st Avenue, not the creek | Still follows 1st Avenue |
| Golf course frontage | No trail access along Cherry Creek through the club | Unchanged |
The redesign will make the mile safer and considerably more comfortable to ride or walk. The route itself stays on 1st Avenue, so this stretch remains a street-side path, and the trail rejoins the creek past University Boulevard.
Where the Neighborhood Actually Meets
If the trail isn't where daily life in Country Club actually happens, East 6th Avenue is. The short commercial row between roughly Race and University has functioned as the neighborhood's informal main street for years, and it just went through its biggest change in a decade.
Satchel's on 6th, at 1710 E. 6th Ave., opened in 2005 in Park Hill and moved to its current Country Club address in 2011. Novo Coffee sits next door at 1700 E. 6th. Oliver's Meat Market, at 1718 E. 6th, has been cutting meat for the neighborhood since 1923 and is now run by the fifth generation of the same family. A few blocks over, Buzz Cafe occupies a converted gas station at 1229 E. 6th, straddling the edge of Country Club, Cheesman Park, and Alamo Placita.
The bigger change is what happened at 1313 E. 6th Ave., the address that housed Fruition for eighteen years under chef Alex Seidel until it closed in January 2025. The space sat empty for more than a year. On May 7, 2026, it reopened as Madeline, the first restaurant from chef Quincy Cherrett, whose résumé includes Sushi Den, Izakaya Den, and Colt & Gray. Cherrett named the restaurant after his newborn niece and built the concept around his own family, with his sister leading project management and his father, a longtime hotelier, shaping parts of the design. Madeline inherited Fruition's wine cellar and kept the same 48-seat footprint, but the menu leans into the Japanese and Thai influences from Cherrett's own background: oysters with green apple mignonette, a beet carpaccio with Thai red curry peanut sauce, halibut with green curry over black forbidden rice. For a stretch of 6th Avenue that had one fewer sit-down option for more than a year, it's the first real addition to the row since Fruition's original run began.
The Small Work That Keeps the Neighborhood Running
None of this happens by accident, and a lot of it is tracked and pushed forward by the same volunteer group. The Country Club Historic Neighborhood Association, known locally as CCHN, has existed since 1973 and draws roughly 300 of the district's 375 homes into voluntary membership each year. It's run entirely by resident volunteers, and its recent activity says something about how closely this small neighborhood pays attention to its own infrastructure.
In April 2025, the CCHN board ran a survey of neighborhood priorities that drew 174 responses, 95 percent of them from CCHN members, a response rate most HOAs would envy. That June, the association hosted the first public meeting on the city's 1st Avenue Redesign project, giving residents a direct line to the same plans covered above before they became city policy. The same season, CCHN partnered with Denver Parks on a resident planting day at the 4th and Race triangles, small green spaces that don't show up on any trail map but get tended by the people who live around them. In January 2026, the association sent out a community reminder after a coyote was spotted in the area, the kind of low-stakes notice that only exists because neighbors are watching out for each other block by block.
None of that changes the mile of trail along 1st Avenue. But it's a reminder that the version of Country Club worth knowing isn't the one measured in trail miles. It's measured in a butcher shop that's outlasted four generations of ownership, a restaurant space that sat empty for over a year before finding its next chapter, and an association that shows up to a city planning meeting on a Wednesday night because the stretch of asphalt out front still isn't as good as it should be.
If you're already walking these streets and want to know what else changes on 6th Avenue, or how the rest of the 1st Avenue Redesign timeline plays out, Kelli Barton Real Estate tracks these updates as they happen in Country Club and the neighborhoods around it.
