13.1 miles through Agua Fría Village and the Santa Fe River corridor — from Romero’s Park to Reunity Resources Farm.
Why this course exists
In 2007 a conservation group in Washington published its annual list of America’s most endangered rivers. Top of the list — ahead of anything in the Everglades — was a river most people outside New Mexico had never heard of.
The Santa Fe River. Number one. A river that, for months of the year, wasn’t really there at all.
You’re going to spend your morning running beside it.
Back in the 1980s the city proposed encasing the river in concrete for flood control, and the people who live here said no. What they asked for instead took twenty-five years: a gravel mine moved out of the channel, erosion structures dug in, hundreds of cottonwoods planted along banks that had been collapsing for decades.
Nobody plants a cottonwood for themselves. They take too long.
So the middle miles of this race — roughly mile 4.9 out to the turnaround at nine, and back — run on the Santa Fe River Trail itself, the path the restoration built. You run straight through both of the parks that came out of it — San Isidro River Park, where the gravel mine used to be, and Agua Fría Park at mile 6 — in a valley farmed for a thousand years, on a corridor that carried traders between Mexico City and Santa Fe for four hundred of them. You finish at Reunity Resources, a working farm still doing the same work, and eat in the shade of their trees.
It is not the fastest course we’ve run. It climbs 651 feet to a turnaround at mile nine and makes you earn the way home. But it’s the one that best explains where you are.
Gold: the opening village loop. Plum: the river corridor, run out and back. Numbered pins are mile markers — gold ones are aid stations. Tap any pin for detail.
You start at Romero’s Park, loop through the village, then head out along the river to the turnaround at mile 9 and come back the same way to the finish at Reunity Resources Farm.
It climbs steadily from mile 5 to the turnaround at 6,883 ft — the high point of the day — then gives every foot of it back on the way home.
Detailed turn-by-turn course blueprint with key landmarks, support stations, and race day highlights at every mile.
The finish line is at Reunity Resources Farm, 1829 San Ysidro Crossing, Agua Fría. The detailed area map shows parking, gear bag collection, medical, and post-race celebration locations.
13.1 miles · GPS-measured · Loop and out-and-back
Start: Romero’s Park | Finish: Reunity Resources Farm
Team of 3 splits 13.1 miles across relay exchange zones along the route
5K loop course · Timed · Family-friendly
Non-competitive fun run · Free to enter · For young runners
Register now and experience 13.1 miles of Santa Fe’s most scenic landscape on September 20, 2026.