Sometime around September 7, the city shut off the water at Red-Tailed Hawk Park. A few miles south on Southlands' Main Street, Bloom Tea & Boba has been settling into its first full season at the G-102 storefront. Neither of these is a big event on its own. Together, they mark the same thing: the week Tallyn's Reach flips from its summer version to its fall one.
Most residents treat the neighborhood's parks as separate errands. Homestead is where you take the kids to swim. Red-Tailed Hawk is where you take them to splash and climb. Golden Eagle is where you walk the dog before dinner. What gets missed is that these aren't four unrelated stops you drive to. They sit on one connected trail system, and every September that system changes over in a single stretch of days rather than gradually. This year the changeover overlaps with something bigger and slower moving: Red-Tailed Hawk Park is partway through a public rebuild that reached its formal City of Aurora hearing back in March 2025, so the park residents are walking into this fall isn't quite the static space it used to be.
Homestead Is the Start of the Loop, Not Just the Pool
Homestead Park sits on ten acres and gets talked about almost entirely for its six-lane swimming pool. That undersells it. The park also carries trails leading toward Samuel's Point, a picnic plaza with a barbecue grill, and open sightlines to the Front Range that most residents only notice when they're not rushing to get in the water. Treated as an isolated amenity, Homestead is a decent neighborhood pool. Treated as the trailhead it actually functions as, it's the entry point to a longer walk that most people in Tallyn's Reach have never finished in one go.
Red-Tailed Hawk Splits in Two, and the Whole Park Is Mid-Update
Red-Tailed Hawk Park runs 35 acres and is really two parks stitched together. The north end centers on a wetland boardwalk, an open playing field, and a standard playground. The south end is where the activity concentrates: a water sprayground, six bocce courts, six horseshoe pits, and a sand volleyball court lit for play after dark.
| North End | South End |
|---|---|
| Wetland boardwalk | Water sprayground |
| Open field | Six bocce courts |
| Standard playground | Six horseshoe pits |
| Vault toilet, parking | Lighted sand volleyball, vault restroom, parking |
The park also functions as one of the main trailheads onto the Piney Creek Trail, the roughly nine-mile bike-friendly corridor that threads through this part of Aurora. What's easy to miss is how much of this park is still in motion. The inclusive playground on the site, with adaptive swings and a motion-activated musical area, traces back to a 2017 partnership between the Rotary Club of Aurora, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Arapahoe County open space funding. Separately, the city's Parks, Recreation and Open Space department ran a formal master plan update for the park, with the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board holding a public hearing in March 2025. That process is what's reshaping the park section by section. If your mental picture of Red-Tailed Hawk is from a few years back, it's worth walking it again rather than relying on memory.
The city's splash pads at Red-Tailed Hawk Park and Great Plains Park ran daily from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., from May 22 through September 7 this year, before shutting off for the season.
The Trail Is the Point, Not the Parks
None of this works as a loop without the connective pieces most people drive past without noticing. Kestrel Point Natural Area sits between the neighborhood's built parks and offers its own walking paths, and Golden Eagle Park, with its tot swings, picnic shelters, and open space, fills in another stretch of the same system. String Homestead, Kestrel Point, Golden Eagle, and Red-Tailed Hawk together and you get a walk that doesn't require a car between stops. Most residents drive to each park individually because that's the habit the neighborhood's layout invites, not because the trail doesn't exist. It does, and this is the time of year it's most pleasant to use, before winter and before the summer crowds fully clear out.
Southlands Is Changing at the Same Time
The same week the water goes off at the parks, Southlands has been shifting its own lineup for fall. A few recent and upcoming changes worth knowing about if you haven't been down Main Street lately:
- Bloom Tea & Boba opened this year at Southlands' G-102 storefront, adding a tea and dessert stop to the Main Street strip.
- Dolce Vita Ristorante, an Italian dining room from the team behind Pizza Pasta Villa, joined Southlands with wood-fired pizzas and handmade pastas, giving the Main Street strip a sit-down option it didn't have before.
- The Pond Ice Rink returns to Southlands for the winter season, typically running from late November through February, alongside the center's Hometown Holiday Parade later in the year.
None of this is dramatic on its own. Taken together with the park changeover, it means the entire stretch of the neighborhood that residents actually use day to day, from Homestead's trailhead to Southlands' Main Street, is turning over in the same few weeks.
Why the Turnover Matters More This Year
Most years, the shift from splash pad season to sweater-weather season is background noise. You notice the water's off, you notice a new storefront on Main Street, and you move on. This year the two overlap with a public planning process at Red-Tailed Hawk Park that's still working its way through the park, which means the loop residents pick back up this fall is quietly different from the one they left in the spring. The bocce courts, the horseshoe pits, the boardwalk, the playground, all of it traces back to decisions made at public meetings most residents never attended.
If you live in Tallyn's Reach, the useful thing to do this month isn't complicated. Walk the loop once, start to finish, from Homestead through Kestrel Point to Red-Tailed Hawk, and take in what actually changed rather than relying on what you remember. Then finish at Southlands and see what's new there too. The neighborhood didn't get bigger this year. It just finally lined up its changes to all land in the same week.
Gerlock Homes puts together neighborhood guides like this one because knowing a place well takes more than a market report. If you're curious what else has shifted around Tallyn's Reach, or you're thinking ahead to a future move in or out of the neighborhood, Gerlock Homes is happy to talk through it with no pressure attached.
