If you have ridden or walked the High Trestle Trail through Uptown Ankeny more than a handful of times, you already know its personality. It is flat. Almost aggressively flat, the way a converted rail line always is, because trains do not climb grades and neither does the pavement that replaced them. You settle into a cadence on this trail and it does not change for miles. That has always been part of the appeal and part of the limitation.
This fall, for the first time, that is changing on purpose.
Just east of SW Walnut Street, inside the section of trail corridor the city calls the High Trestle Trail Experience Park, Ankeny is finishing a nearly 900-foot paved path built specifically to introduce small rising and falling hills into a trail system that has never had any. City economic development director Derek Lord told Axios Des Moines the feature, known as the flowline, is expected to open by the end of summer 2026. It is designed to stay accessible the whole way through, built for families pushing strollers, wheelchair users, and kids on bikes, not just cyclists chasing terrain.
That detail matters more than it sounds. A flowline is usually mountain bike vocabulary, a purpose built undulating track meant to let a rider carry momentum through dips and rollers without touching the brakes. Ankeny is borrowing the term and the shape but not the exclusivity. The version landing here is paved and graded for anyone who uses the trail, which is the whole point of building it inside a park designed around access rather than athletic performance.
What you are actually walking into
The flowline is not an isolated add on. It is phase two of a project the city has been building in deliberate stages since last year, and understanding the sequence tells you more about what Ankeny is trying to become than any single feature does on its own.
Phase one cost roughly $1 million and reshaped the ground itself. Crews planted more than 147 new trees, added native landscaping and stormwater features, and used infill soil to sculpt terrain along the corridor. That phase also delivered the park's first real attraction: a 425-foot Glow Trail just east of Walnut Street, a side path that lights up after dark, funded in part through a public art grant from Bravo Greater Des Moines. If you have walked this stretch of trail on a summer evening and noticed a section that seems to hum with light after sunset, that is what you were seeing.
Phase two, the flowline, runs about $300,000 and picks up where the Glow Trail left off, just a short walk down the same corridor. Together the two phases turn what used to be a straight, flat, functional pass-through into something the city is explicitly designing as a destination rather than a commute.
The reasoning behind the hills
Lord's comments to Axios frame the project as a response to a specific gap. The High Trestle Trail is widely considered the most popular recreational trail in central Iowa, but the Ankeny side of it historically lacked anything that would make someone choose to start or linger here rather than simply pass through on the way to somewhere else. Every mile of flat pavement is functionally identical to every other mile. There was nothing that said stop here specifically.
The flowline is an answer to that. It does not change where the trail goes. It changes what it feels like to ride through this particular few hundred feet of it, giving Uptown Ankeny something the rest of the route does not have. Lord has described the broader ambition plainly: the city intends to keep adding onto this 14-acre park over time, with the long-term goal of turning the Uptown stretch into a genuine outdoor tourism draw rather than a connector segment people ride through on the way to Slater or Woodward.
The park's footprint itself gives you a sense of scale. It stretches roughly from West First Street down to the underpass at South Ankeny Boulevard, a corridor that runs alongside Uptown's restaurants and shops rather than around them. That geography is not incidental. It puts the new trail features within a short walk of Uptown's dining and retail strip, which is exactly the kind of overlap that turns a bike ride into an evening out.
What comes after the hills
The flowline is not the last piece the city has planned for this stretch. The next phase on the list adds pocket play areas scattered along the trail and new park benches, small interventions aimed at turning a corridor people move through into a place they might actually stop and sit. An interactive LED light installation is also planned for the underpass beneath South Ankeny Boulevard, intended to welcome trail users arriving from the south side of the city into the park more visibly than the current tunnel does.
None of these have firm completion dates yet the way the flowline does. City planning documents from 2024 flagged additional work continuing through 2026 and into 2028, which suggests this corridor is going to keep evolving in phases for at least another couple of years rather than wrapping up all at once.
What this actually changes about your ride
If you live within walking or biking distance of Uptown, the practical shift is smaller than the ambition behind it, and that is fine. You are not getting a mountain in the middle of Iowa. You are getting a few hundred feet of genuine elevation change on a trail that has offered exactly zero of that for its entire existence in Ankeny, positioned close enough to the Glow Trail that an evening ride can hit both features without adding meaningful distance to a route you already know.
For families, the accessibility framing from the city is worth taking seriously rather than treating as boilerplate. A flowline built for strollers and wheelchairs is a different design problem than one built for downhill mountain bikes, and the fact that Ankeny is explicitly building it that way means this is meant to be used by the same people who already use the AMP trailhead and the farmers market pavilion, not a separate audience of mountain bike enthusiasts driving in from elsewhere.
The honest way to think about timing is that late summer and early fall are when this becomes real. If the flowline opens on the schedule the city described, the first several weeks of use will happen right as the trail's evening light and cooler temperatures make an after work ride or walk genuinely pleasant, which is probably not an accident either.
Where this leaves the neighborhood
The specific number that stands out here is not the square footage or the dollar figures, though $1 million for phase one against $300,000 for phase two tells you the city front loaded the expensive groundwork before adding the more visible attraction. The number that matters is 900 feet. That is a small stretch of pavement to build an entire strategy around, but it is also the first time in the trail's history through Ankeny that the ground itself has changed shape on purpose. Everything else, the trees, the lighting, the benches still to come, is arranged around that one decision to stop treating flat as the trail's permanent identity.
If you want to see it before the crowds figure out what it is, the access point just east of Walnut Street is the place to start, and it is worth pairing the walk with a stop at one of Uptown's restaurants while you are already there. That is presumably the point.
For updates on how Ankeny's neighborhoods continue to grow and change, Jill Budden keeps a close eye on what is happening in Uptown, Prairie Trail, and the rest of the Des Moines suburbs. Live somewhere you love. Let's get started.
