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Twin Silo Park is scheduled to open November 9.

Twin Silo Park is scheduled to open on November 9, 2017, at 5552-5564 Ziegler Road. The park will open after 21 months of construction across the street from Fossil Ridge High School. The park will serve the southeast region of Fort Collins in a four square mile radius. It encompasses 50 acres and is modeled to reflect the concept of an agricultural theme.

Twin Silo Park, designed to pay homage to Fort Collins’s agricultural heritage, includes several features intended to recreate experiences found on a farm. It is with this idea in mind that the city included plans in the layout for an orchard, a community garden, a trellis garden, and landscapes complete with native grasses. The silos themselves originally came from the intersection at Timberline and Prospect and have been converted into the tallest slide in Fort Collins, serving as the piece de resistance of the park. However, the park also takes a modern spin on the agricultural inspiration, incorporating features such as agroponic gardens, and, of course, the eponymous silos.

Students at Fossil will discover abundant uses for the park, including a back deck with furniture, places to sit and lounge during lunch, sports fields, pickleball courts, walking paths, and even the playground. “It’s not just meant for little kids,” says park planner Craig Kisling for Fort Collins. “It’s got some high up things, like you can go up in the silo and slide down, so it’s just a little more unique,” he continues. As he explains, “I’ve had adults at the park be excited about (the playground) already and I can only presume that if they’re excited, the older kids would probably be excited too.” The playground at Twin Silo is custom made and themed to resemble a barn.

One of the park’s unique features is its gardens, which will be open to the public. “It’s got an orchard with fruit in it, so you can pick fruit from three different varieties of fruit trees. It also has a community garden, part of our gardens on Spring Creek program here. It also has a hops trellis,” explains Kisling. And while the orchard is kept by the horticulture staff, the community gardens will be maintained by local gardeners. “There is a program that we have; it’s a small fee people pay and they get a plot, and they can can manage that little plot,” Kisling adds. Participating gardeners will keep and maintain the area inside the garden, with designated cleanup times. Yet another unique aspect of this horticultural element is the agroponic gardens. “[The agroponic gardens] will be vertical gardens where you can grow vegetables, and that sort of thing, without having actual soil in a sort of a tube,” explains Kisling. The gardening program will initiate at the beginning of the growing season next year.

Another element of Twin Silo Park’s agricultural tribute is McClelland’s Creek, which flows through the heart of the park. The creek is named after an orchard farmer who grew apples in the area around the late 19th and early 20th century. Today, the stream has been rehabilitated to provide aesthetic features, as well as natural habitats, to the park. ““The creek before was very unhealthy. It had a lot of erosion happening, and they really needed to lay those banks back and allow it so it didn’t erode more,” provides Kisling.  In order to do so, the Fort Collins Utilities Department has created more wetland areas, cleaned and regraded banks along the creek, and added drop structures, all of which benefit the ecosystem and habitat. But besides the additions to the creek’s environment, features were added for use by families. A creek play area was built into the stream to serve as an alternative to the splash pads and water features present in many newer parks. ““It’s designed so kids and families can access down and play in the creek in a really shallow area,” says Kisling. The creek play area both serves to fit the agricultural theme of the park and save money on cycling and filtering water as would be needed for other sorts of potential water features.

Besides all of the features built into the park, Twin Silo contains one more distinct feature not shared with many other parks. One of the only remaining challenges facing the park is the establishment of local and indigenous grasses. As Kisling explains, “Quite a bit of the park has areas that are not irrigated, which is a way we are trying to be more sustainable and not use as much water. . .those areas are irrigated, so they take several years to establish native grasses.” The establishment of these grasses is managed by the Park Maintenance Staff. ““They have to go in and weed, as well as go in a lot of times and reseed areas. It’s a process that can take 3-5 years, for the grasses to fill in,” explains Kisling. This process will be ongoing while the park is open.

The main piece of the park is, of course, the two silos that lend their name to the park itself. But the story behind these structures is deeper than one may expect. “Our initial inspiration with that was that we really wanted to do something with some height vertically, and so we explored some options for play equipment and that sort of thing and we didn’t find anything we really liked,” offers Kisling. “What happened was that our Engineering Department got ahold of us. They were widening the road at Timberline, just south of Prospect, and they asked us if we had any use for a couple of silos because they had to widen the road . . . there were five existing silos. They were actually owned by the city,” he continues. The silos add a modern feel to the park, and their height allows them to serve as the main staple of the park. “[The silos] are really the main feature, but really it has a presence because of its vertical element, and it’s not like any other thing we’ve ever done in our other parks around town. It’s kind of in an open area. You can see it from a ways off,” says Kisling. Additionally, despite the pluralism of the silos, the park is very intentionally named “Twin Silo Park” instead of “Twin Silos Park”. “The two are really one connected together, and it just flows better, looking at it graphically,” Kisling provides.

Though the park’s theme is inspired by the agrarian background of Fort Collins as a whole, the land on which it was built has its own historical roots. The land which is now occupied by both Twin Silo Park and Fossil was once the Webster Farm. The barn at the corner of Sabercat Drive and Ziegler Road, therefore, is the old Webster Barn. The land was purchased by the city at the same time that PSD purchased the land where Fossil now resides, around 1999. From there, the city raised money for the development of the park through impact fees collected from housing development in the surrounding area. The land itself is ultimately enriched by its own history. “You have some history here, right on site,” states Kisling.

Though the park will be able to cater to both the students of Fossil and members of the local community, the nearby location of the park to Fossil offers the potential for some disruption. Prominently, the issue of teenagers misusing the park is ever looming. “I wouldn’t say I’m concerned, but talking with PSD staff and resource officers, that’s always a concern, just because kids can go off campus.,” explains Kisling. “Even our park rangers, they have some reservations, of course, about it being right next to a high school… the reason I say that is that historically they’ve had some issues about the park next to FCHS,” he continues. However, there are measures that will be taken to counter such possibilities. “There’s a partnership between our resource officers and our park rangers, and so they do have some sort of plan in place,” he provides.

Twin Silo Park is not the first park of this scale, nor is it the last. In the master plan, Twin Silo is park number seven out of nine total community parks, a level of park made to service the entire city. “Our city has a master plan for all of our parks, from here until the city’s completely built, so another 25 years or so. With that master plan, that park was part of it, the bigger picture on the community park level,” describes Kisling. Community parks are built approximately every eight to ten years, due to the fundraising involved. What, then, is next up on the master plan? The East Community Park will be built at Ziegler and Horsetooth in about eight to ten years. “There’s a big reservoir the city created a few years ago for water storage, and we have the property already purchased there, so that will be our next community park, but it’s probably eight to ten years out,” explains Kisling. It is also worth noting that the East Community Park is not the official name of this development, but rather a placeholder name- just as Twin Silo was originally referred to as the Southeast Community Park.

The ribbon cutting for the park will be Thursday, November 9, an event that will include light refreshments and a lumination ceremony for the lights in the park. Self-guided tours will start at 3:30 P.M. and the ribbon cutting ceremony will commence an hour later. However, this will not be the end of Twin Silo’s induction into the park landscape of Fort Collins. “We will do a bigger grand opening event,  probably next year, so probably summer, fall, next year we’re going to tie it in with a bigger event, kind of celebrate the opening of the park for the whole entire city,” claims Kisling. Ideas for such an event include concepts like a fall festival.

Ultimately, Twin Silo Park promises to make a sizable impact on the local community and provide abundant uses for the students of Fossil. It offers unique features befitting of its bucolic motif that can be enjoyed by many. “I hope the park is something the school can use and appreciate and respect,” Kisling offers.