On April 29, more than a hundred people stood at the northwest corner of High Note Avenue and Lyric Street and watched shovels go into dirt that Lone Tree residents had been arguing about, budgeting for, and waiting on since the year 2000. That's not an exaggeration for effect. The vision for a regional park on this stretch of RidgeGate was part of the original annexation vote residents cast when the area joined the city twenty-six years ago. Mayor Marissa Harmon told the crowd, "This place is going to come alive in just over a year." What she didn't spend as much time on, and what actually tells you more about how RidgeGate operates, is that the park's noisiest planned feature came with its own curfew before a single beer was poured.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live in Lyric, in RidgeGate East, or anywhere close enough that High Note Park is going to become part of your weekly rhythm. This isn't one project. It's at least three different kinds of infrastructure landing on top of each other across the same stretch of RidgeGate, each built to a different standard, and each telling you something different about what your neighborhood is turning into.
What Actually Broke Ground
Phase 1 of High Note Park, formerly called Lone Tree Regional Park, runs on roughly $31 million pulled from five separate sources. That funding split is worth looking at directly, because it tells you who has skin in this and why.
| Funding Partner | Amount |
|---|---|
| South Suburban Parks and Recreation | $13,000,000 |
| City of Lone Tree | $9,000,000 |
| Douglas County | $7,500,000 |
| Southeast Public Improvement Metropolitan District | $1,000,000 |
| Great Outdoors Colorado | $580,000 |
For that money, Phase 1 is building two lit synthetic multipurpose sports fields, an accessible playground, a splash pad, a dog park split into separate large-dog and small-dog areas, a food truck area, a small performance stage, a restroom building, a parking lot, and a 200-seat beer garden. The whole site sits along Happy Canyon Creek near I-25 and RidgeGate Parkway, close enough to the RidgeGate light rail station that South Suburban is billing it as a park you can reach without driving. The design team, led by OJB Landscape Architecture, is calling the connective path system running through the whole thing "The Braid," an interwoven promenade meant to link every amenity without forcing you back to a parking lot to get from the dog park to the splash pad. Construction is expected to run through 2026, with the goal of opening for play in late summer 2027. Future phases, not yet funded, would add basketball and pickleball courts, outdoor fitness equipment, a climbing feature called Challenge Hill, a creek overlook, and three more multipurpose fields.
None of that is unusual for a regional park. What's unusual is what the city did before it let the beer garden through.
The Beer Garden Came With a Rulebook Attached
Before the groundbreaking, Lone Tree's City Council had to approve a Use by Special Review specifically to permit the beer garden and its parking. That approval process produced a set of conditions that read less like a party plan and more like a set of promises made to the houses nearby. The bar area sits about 700 feet from the closest residence. It's surrounded by landscaping on purpose. Live amplified music is restricted to special events only. Closing time is no later than 8 p.m. on weekdays, with a later cutoff on weekends. City staff described the whole setup, positioned near the dog park, as an "accessory amenity" to the park rather than a standalone destination, which is a technical distinction that matters if you're the neighbor deciding whether to worry about noise on a Tuesday.
Lone Tree Brewing Company is expected to operate the space. If you've watched a bar proposal get contested in an older, already-built neighborhood, you know how much friction usually shows up between "we want a beer garden" and "the beer garden opens." RidgeGate skipped most of that friction by writing the constraints into the approval before construction started, not after complaints came in. That's the advantage of building a park concurrently with the neighborhood around it instead of dropping one into a finished subdivision years later. It also means the rules you'll actually live under, the 8 p.m. weekday cutoff and the 700-foot buffer, were set by people who had never lived next to it, based on projections rather than lived noise complaints. Worth knowing going in.
The Trail Connection That Changes Your Range
The quieter change, and arguably the more useful one if you're already living in Lyric or planning your weekends around it, is what Happy Canyon Trail does once it's built as part of Phase 1. That new trail segment connects the park to Schweiger Ranch and ties into the existing East/West Regional Trail, a 26-mile route that already runs from the Highline Canal in Highlands Ranch to the Cherry Creek Regional Trail system in Parker. That regional trail isn't new. It's been complete for years. What's new is that High Note Park gives Lyric and RidgeGate East residents a direct, on-foot or on-bike connection into it, rather than requiring a drive to a trailhead somewhere else in the county.
Practically, that means a resident who lives in Lyric today has to drive or find an existing route to reach Highlands Ranch or Parker trail systems. Once Happy Canyon Trail is finished, that same resident can get on a bike at home and ride into either town on connected trail the whole way, no car involved. For a master-planned community that was built around I-25 access roads and a light rail stop, that's a meaningfully different kind of mobility than what existed before, and it's the piece of this project least likely to show up in a press release headline.
Two More Projects Are Landing at the Same Time
High Note Park isn't the only thing under construction right now that changes what a normal Saturday in RidgeGate looks like.
The Lyric Amenity Center, a 7,500-square-foot facility going up at the southeast corner of Lyric Street and High Note Avenue, the opposite corner of the same intersection as High Note Park, is expected to open this summer, ahead of the park itself. It will include a restaurant and welcome center, a fitness building, and a pool with a pavilion. Unlike High Note Park, this one isn't a public regional destination. It's built for Lyric residents specifically, which makes it the private counterpart to the public park going up a block away. If you live in Lyric, you're getting two amenities on the same corner within about a year of each other, one you share with the whole region and one that's yours.
A short drive away, Badger Gulch Park is doing something different again. At 3.36 acres in the RidgeGate Village Center, it's a fraction of High Note Park's size, and it's built around a quieter register entirely: fitness equipment, children's play areas, and a public art installation, reachable from Lyric by a pedestrian bridge along the Badger Gulch Trail. Construction started in 2025 with an opening targeted for 2026, likely well ahead of High Note Park's late-2027 completion. If High Note Park is the regional destination with a beer garden and lit sports fields, Badger Gulch is the small, walkable pocket park you'd actually use on a Tuesday evening.
Three different projects, three different rulebooks, three different timelines, all serving the same few square miles of RidgeGate at once. That's not typical for a suburb this size. It's a function of RidgeGate still being built out toward its eventual population, projected at roughly 30,000 residents and 50,000 jobs once complete, up from around 5,000 residents today. The park system is being built ahead of that growth rather than catching up to it after the fact, which is the same logic the city used when it planned High Note Park's design concurrently with Shea Homes' planning for Lyric back in 2020.
What to Actually Expect Between Now and Late Summer 2027
If you're in RidgeGate right now, in August 2026, here's the honest sequence. Badger Gulch Park should be the first of the three to open, given its 2025 construction start. The Lyric Amenity Center is close behind it, on track to open this summer if the timeline holds. High Note Park is the long game, with construction continuing through 2026 and an opening planned for late summer 2027, more than a year out. Each one is worth tracking separately rather than lumping them together as "the new park," because they're not interchangeable, and which one ends up mattering most to your household depends on whether you want a private pool, a quiet bench near public art, or a beer garden with a curfew and a trail out of town.
If you're weighing what any of this means for buying or selling in RidgeGate while these three projects are mid-construction, that's exactly the kind of local detail worth a conversation rather than a guess. J. Garland Thurman has spent years tracking how projects like this move Denver's southern suburbs, and we're glad to talk through what it means for your specific address. Let's Connect.
