Ask anyone who hikes the south side of Henderson before the heat sets in and they will tell you about a stretch of desert they have walked for years that has no official name, no trail signs, and no listing on the city's trail map. It sits on a 1,300-acre parcel wedged between Horizon Ridge Parkway and Interstate 11, backing up to some of the city's most established neighborhoods. People have been wearing in paths out there for years, one footstep at a time. The city just never called any of it a trail.
That is changing. Henderson has spent the summer moving that parcel through the design process to become the Black Mountain Nature Preserve, and the plan is not to build something new. It is to take the routes locals already use, most of them what park planners call "social trails," worn in by foot traffic rather than laid out by an engineer, and finally give them a front door.
The trail system was already big. This piece of it was invisible.
Henderson's official trail network already runs over 300 miles, one of the more extensive systems in the state. But the popular stretch of city-owned land near Horizon Ridge Parkway and Interstate 11, the one that backs up to several established neighborhoods and eventually connects toward the McCullough Range, was not really part of that mapped system. It existed the way a lot of good hikes do: word of mouth, a gap in a fence line, a path that got wider every year because enough people kept walking it.
Amie Wojtech, the city's park planning manager, put it plainly to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in June. Southern Nevadans have hiked the property for years, mostly on informal paths, and the city's approach now is not to lay down new trails but to formalize the ones already carved by use.
"We will be taking advantage of the trails that have been carved out from people just using the area. We'll bring those up to city standards and use those, as opposed to creating new trails."
That distinction matters more than it sounds. If you already have a favorite loop back there, the terrain under your feet is not about to change. What changes is everything around it: signage, lighting, a real parking area, and a route that finally shows up on the record instead of surviving on tips from other hikers.
What the connection actually looks like
The preserve's value is less about the acreage itself and more about what it stitches together. Right now, a resident who wants to walk from a neighborhood park into Sloan Canyon has to string together local knowledge of several separate paths. The formalized preserve is designed to make that a single legible route, linking:
- Hidden Falls Park, connected to the preserve via Amargosa Trail
- McCullough Hills Trail, which continues south toward Anthem East Trail
- Anthem East Trail, which already feeds into Bureau of Land Management trails inside Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area
In other words, a hike that today requires knowing which unmarked cut-through gets you from one segment to the next will eventually be one continuous, signed corridor from a city park to a federally protected conservation area. That is a meaningfully different experience for someone who lives nearby and wants to send a friend or a new neighbor out the door with directions instead of a mental map built over years of trial and error.
The trailhead is going in at a specific address, not a general area
Plans submitted to the city put the main trailhead at the end of Buckhorn Street, with two overlooks along the route. The trailhead is designed to include a solar-powered restroom, a proper parking lot, picnic tables, and water-efficient landscaping rather than the current situation, which is a handful of cars parked along a residential street because there is nowhere else to put them.
Doug Prouty, a senior landscape architect with Lage Design, the firm leading the master plan, wrote in a letter to city officials that the goal is a low-impact development that protects sensitive plant and animal life while opening the area up for exploration and learning. Wojtech has described the eventual result as an enjoyable amenity once construction wraps.
The timeline is slower than a trail announcement usually sounds
Here is the part that separates this from a press release you can act on this weekend. As of this summer, the project is still in the design phase. City officials are targeting the start of construction in early 2027, with Wojtech saying she hopes the preserve can officially open to the public by the end of that year. The funding, roughly 5.5 million dollars, comes from the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which channels proceeds from federal land sales in the valley into conservation and recreation projects rather than general city revenue.
So nothing changes on the ground this month. The social trails on that parcel are exactly as walkable, and exactly as unmarked, as they were last summer. What is different is that Henderson has now committed funding and a design process to turning them into something permanent, which is worth knowing if you have ever wondered whether that dirt path near your subdivision was going anywhere or just going to stay a rumor with good footing.
A practical note for anyone who wants to walk it now
If you are curious enough to go find the current, unofficial version of this parcel before the trailhead exists, the seasonal reality of hiking anything connected to Sloan Canyon is worth respecting. The terrain out there is exposed volcanic rock with little shade, and this part of the valley gets dangerously hot well before the calendar admits summer is over. Locals who know the broader Sloan Canyon area tend to save serious hiking for the cooler months, generally November through April, and go early if they go at all in the warmer stretch. That is not a change coming with the preserve. It is just the desert being the desert, preserve or not.
Why this is the kind of change that rewards people who already live here
There is a version of this story that gets written as "Henderson is getting new hiking trails," and that version misses what is actually happening. The city is not adding terrain. It is recognizing terrain that residents already claimed on their own, years before any planner got involved, and building the infrastructure that lets more people use it safely and more of the neighborhood benefit from it being on the record. The people who already know the unmarked routes between Horizon Ridge Parkway and I-11 are not being handed something foreign. They are getting a bathroom, a parking lot, and a name for the place they have been going all along.
That is a small thing to some people and a genuinely useful thing to others, particularly anyone who has ever tried to describe this hike to a visiting relative and ended up saying some version of "just follow the dirt path, you'll see it." Starting in 2027, you will finally be able to just give them an address on Buckhorn Street instead.
If you are the kind of Henderson resident who already knows this trail by feel rather than by name, keep an eye on the city's Black Mountain Nature Preserve project updates as design moves toward construction. And if watching Henderson's south side quietly formalize itself has you thinking about what else is changing in your own corner of the city, or what your home might be worth as neighborhoods like this one get more connected infrastructure, the team at Signature Edge knows this part of the valley on foot, not just on paper, and is always glad to talk through what's next, whenever you're ready and with zero pressure attached.
