If you search for updates on Juan Tabo Hills Park right now, the city's own project page will tell you the dog park is still in the design phase and the new slide is "nearing completion." Neither of those things is true anymore. The dog park opened in April 2025. The slide has been open long enough that a parent's Yelp review already complains about the tube slide breaking down. The paperwork just hasn't caught up with the neighborhood.
That gap matters if you live here, because it means the easiest way to find out what's actually available a few blocks from your house is not the official channel. It's talking to someone who has walked the loop, checked the trailhead, and knows which slide is working this month.
The Dog Park Is Older Than the City's Page Suggests
When Juan Tabo Hills Park first opened south of Central in 2020, the ribbon-cutting coverage from KRQE described a playground, a dog area, and multi-use space, with a much bigger slide promised for a later phase. That original dog area was modest. What residents have now is something else entirely.
By February 2025, KRQE reported that construction was underway near Juan Tabo and Monachos on a dedicated dog park with separate large and small dog play areas, with a spring opening targeted. That opening happened. In April 2025, the city marked the ribbon-cutting for Juan Tabo Hills Dog Park as the city's 28th park overall and the third to open that year.
Meanwhile, the Council District 9 project page still describes the Phase III dog park as a design that is "ready for the construction to begin." That copy was accurate at some point. It is more than a year behind the actual facility now. If you own a dog in this neighborhood and haven't checked the separated play areas near Monachos, you're working from the same outdated picture the city's website gives everyone else.
The Slide Changed Between the Announcement and the Build
The 2020 coverage promised something specific for phase two: an 80-foot slide, billed at the time as the largest in the metro. What eventually got built and described on the city's own project page is a fifty-foot slide. A visitor review from March 2025 puts a number on what that height means in practice: about 97 stairs to climb before you get to ride down.
Somewhere between the announcement and the finished structure, the plan changed. The city's project page never explains why, and neither will this post, because that's not a fact anyone has published. What's useful to know is simpler: the slide people talk about is the fifty-foot version, the climb is real, and as of that same spring 2025 visitor account, the second slide, a tube slide, was out of service. If you're planning a trip with kids expecting two working slides, it's worth a quick look before you promise anything.
Elena Gallegos Changed How You Pay to Get In
A short drive north up Juan Tabo Boulevard toward Tramway puts you at Elena Gallegos Open Space, and if it's been a while since your last visit, the entry process has changed. The city's own page for the park now states plainly that payment happens at the trailhead pay stations rather than through the older envelope drop box at the front. Regular visitors report a small posted fee, generally around a dollar on weekdays and closer to two dollars on weekends, though the exact rate at any given kiosk can shift. For anyone who visits often, a thirty-dollar annual pass shows up consistently across visitor accounts as the option that pays for itself within a handful of trips.
The park itself covers 640 acres at roughly 6,500 feet of elevation, with views that stretch to Mt. Taylor, the Jemez Mountains, and south across the Tijeras Arroyo. None of that has changed. What changed is the mechanics of getting past the gate, and it's a small enough shift that plenty of longtime visitors haven't noticed yet.
The Trails Worth Actually Knowing by Name
Elena Gallegos and the surrounding foothills aren't one trail, they're a network, and the options branching off from Juan Tabo Hills differ enough in distance and difficulty that it's worth knowing which one you're actually walking into.
| Trail | Distance | Best Season | What It Offers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cottonwood Springs Trail | Short, self-guided | Year-round | Accessible path with rest-stop artwork by Margie O'Brien, leading to a pond and wildlife blind |
| Michial M. Emery Loop | 5.5 miles | Year-round | Moderate loop with about 626 feet of elevation gain, connecting to the broader Emery trailhead |
| Trail 365 | Roughly 6.5 miles one way | Year-round | The backbone route running from near the Tram south almost to I-40, maintained jointly by the city's Open Space division and the U.S. Forest Service |
| Juan Tabo Canyon Loop | 5.9 miles | September through May | Challenging climb with steep sections in the final two miles, rated hardest of the group |
That last line matters right now. August in the foothills is not the Canyon Loop's season. Its rated window opens back up in September, which is just a few weeks out from today, making this the point in the year when the trail shifts from a heat-exhaustion risk back to a reasonable weekend option.
The timing lines up with two programs the city has already scheduled at Elena Gallegos this fall. A Foothills Wild guided hike departs from the Cottonwood Spring Trailhead on September 20, covering the area's history, geology, and ecosystem over a two to three hour walk. Six days later, on September 26, the Open Space Division is running a Leave No Trace and trail etiquette workshop covering wilderness safety and e-bike use on Open Space trails, a session that matters more each year as the trails get busier.
Where the Loop Actually Ends
Ask anyone who hikes out of this end of the foothills regularly where they go afterward, and the answer tends to be the same: Flying Star Cafe on Juan Tabo. It's not a hidden find, it's a habit, the kind of stop that's become part of the loop rather than a separate errand. A counter-service breakfast and a full bakery case after a morning on Trail 365 is close to a neighborhood ritual at this point.
That's really the throughline here. The dog park, the slide, the trailhead payment system, none of these updates got announced with much fanfare, and the official pages describing them are running behind what's actually on the ground. The neighborhood keeps adding to itself quietly, and the people who benefit most are the ones paying attention in person rather than trusting whatever comes up first in a search.
If you're already living in Juan Tabo Hills, none of this requires you to do anything differently, aside from maybe checking on that tube slide before your next trip to the park. But if you're the kind of person who notices when a neighborhood is being underserved by its own paperwork, that instinct tends to be useful well beyond dog parks and trail maps. The Lovely Home Company spends its time in exactly these kinds of details across Albuquerque's neighborhoods, the ones that don't show up cleanly on a city website but shape what it's actually like to live somewhere. If you'd like to talk through what's changing in your corner of the city, schedule a free consultation and we'll walk through it together.
