Walk the dirt south of the Black Mountain Recreation Center on any cool morning and you will find company. Runners cut across the volcanic rock on paths that were never surveyed, poured, or signed. Somebody widened them by walking the same line often enough. Nobody asked permission, because for years there was nobody to ask. The city owned the land and mostly left it alone.
That is about to change, though maybe not in the way a longtime hiker would expect. Henderson is not planning to bulldoze this ground and lay down something new. According to reporting from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the city intends to survey the paths that already exist and bring the best of them up to standard rather than cut a fresh network through untouched desert. If you already hike back here, there is a decent chance the trail under your feet becomes the official one.
The Mountain Everyone Points At Isn't the One With the Name
Start with the naming problem, because it says something about how loosely this corner of Henderson has been mapped. The ridge lined with radio and television towers overlooking the Water Street District, the one most locals call Black Mountain, is not actually named Black Mountain. According to Wikipedia's entry on the peak, that summit remains officially unnamed, while the real Black Mountain sits farther south in the McCullough Range, inside the Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area. The mix-up is old enough that a 2023 Review-Journal piece devoted an entire article to untangling it, and it persists today through references like the Black Mountain neighborhood and the Black Mountain Industrial Park, both of which sit closer to the unnamed tower peak than to the real one.
The preserve carries the correct name and sits near the actual Black Mountain, not the one with the antennas on it, with a planned trail connection into the Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area that surrounds it. That distinction matters if you are trying to picture where this project actually sits on a map: south of the recreation center, oriented toward Sloan Canyon rather than toward downtown.
A Parcel the City Already Owned
The footprint is not small. Lage Design, the landscape architecture firm leading the master plan, lists the project at approximately 1,372 acres of city-owned land, a figure press coverage typically rounds to 1,300. The city was not acquiring new territory when it announced this project. It was deciding what to do with rock and desert scrub it had held for years without a formal plan attached to it.
That decision followed a feasibility study and a Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act nomination, both of which Lage Design cites as the basis for the current design. The firm describes the terrain as defined by volcanic rock formations, the kind of geology that shows up in most photos of the site and explains why so much of it stayed undeveloped in the first place. Steep, rocky ground is expensive to build on. It is also, as it turns out, exactly the kind of ground people like to hike.
How the Grant Actually Works
The money behind this comes from a specific and slightly unusual source. The Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act channels proceeds from the sale of certain federal land around the Las Vegas Valley into conservation and public recreation projects, rather than into a general fund. Henderson's award for the Black Mountain Nature Preserve was approved at $5,608,540, according to a 2024 KVVU report, a figure the Review-Journal rounded to $5.5 million in its more recent coverage. The city put $100,000 of that toward hiring a design firm and moved the project into its master plan phase, which is where it remains today.
Amie Wojtech, the city's park planning manager, has been the consistent voice on this project since planning began, and her framing has not changed much in two years. She has been clear that the city's goal is not to impose a brand-new trail system on top of the land.
"We are really going to take into consideration, all of the trails that are out there."
That is not the language of an agency trying to reinvent the site. It is the language of one trying to formalize what residents already built through repetition.
The Trails Do Most of the Work Already
Here is what actually changes once construction happens, based on the plan as currently described.
| Feature | Today | After Construction |
|---|---|---|
| Trail surface | Informal dirt paths, unmarked and self-formed | Formal trails built largely from existing routes |
| Parking | None on site | Solar-powered parking facility |
| Restrooms | None | Public restroom |
| Wayfinding | No signage, no maps | Trailhead, overlooks, interpretive stations |
| Regional connection | Informal, word of mouth | Marked connections to Hidden Falls Park and Sloan Canyon NCA |
The 2024 KVVU report put the anticipated trail length at roughly four miles, a number that could shift as the design firm finalizes routes, but it gives a sense of scale. This is not meant to compete with something like the River Mountains Loop Trail, the 34-mile paved route that already links Henderson, Boulder City, and Lake Mead National Recreation Area. That loop was purpose-built as a destination trail. The Black Mountain Nature Preserve is closer to a neighborhood amenity finally catching up to how the neighborhood already uses the land around it.
Where the Loop Actually Goes
The connections planned for this preserve extend its usefulness well past its own boundary. Wojtech has described two links specifically:
- North, via the Amargosa Trail, to Hidden Falls Park
- South, via the McCullough Hills Trail, into the Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area, with a further connection toward Anthem East
For anyone who already threads together informal routes on foot or on a mountain bike to get from one side of southern Henderson to the other, this is the part of the plan worth watching. It suggests the preserve is being designed as a connector between existing destinations rather than a standalone park with a fence around it.
The Timeline, Realistically
As of this summer, the project remained in the design phase. The Review-Journal's June 2026 reporting put construction at a target start of early 2027, with city officials hoping for an official opening by the end of that year. Those are targets, not commitments, and the same reporting is careful to frame them that way. Senior landscape architect Doug Prouty, of Lage Design, described the ambition behind the project in a letter to city officials, writing that the preserve will become part of the region's open space network. Wojtech's read is more practical. She has said it will be a genuinely enjoyable amenity once it gets built, and left it at that.
If you live near enough to walk this land already, nothing about your access changes in the next few months. The design work continues, the city has maintained a public project page for updates, and the informal trails remain exactly as walkable as they were last week. What changes, eventually, is a restroom that does not exist yet, a parking area that does not exist yet, and a trailhead sign that finally tells a first-time visitor where to start.
For residents who have spent years explaining this stretch of desert to out-of-town guests by pointing and saying something like just follow that ridge, the preserve is less a new place than an old one getting a map.
If you are weighing a move within Black Mountain, MacDonald Ranch, or another part of southern Henderson and want a read on how a piece of land like this actually functions day to day, not just what shows up in a listing description, Dawn Balmer is a call away. Schedule a consultation and talk through the neighborhood the way someone who actually walks it would.
