Pull into the gravel lot off Queensgate Drive on a Saturday morning and you'll notice something before you even lace up: half the plates around you aren't from Richland. That's not an impression. It's a documented fact, and it says more about how this ridge actually functions than any trail map does.
City of Richland park rangers once set out to answer a simple question: who actually uses Badger Mountain? They interviewed almost 300 hikers at the trailhead and found that only 26 percent came from Richland itself. Pasco residents made up 32 percent of the count, Kennewick contributed 19 percent, and another 19 percent drove in from outside Benton and Franklin counties entirely. Richland residents, in other words, are a minority user of the mountain most identify as their own backyard.
What the Survey Found About Trail Users
That split changes how you read the crowded parking lot. This isn't a case of a neighborhood amenity getting discovered by outsiders. The mountain was built and funded as regional infrastructure from the start, with the City of Richland partnering with Benton County and a volunteer nonprofit called Friends of Badger Mountain to secure land parcel by parcel over more than a decade. Richland residents got the trailhead in their city limits. The rest of the Tri-Cities got equal claim to the trail.
If you've hiked here for years and always assumed you were sharing the ridge with fellow Richland neighbors, the math says otherwise. You're more likely standing next to someone from Pasco.
How Little Badger's Trail Network Is Expanding
The bigger shift this year isn't the crowd, it's the ground itself. Little Badger Mountain, the smaller peak northeast of the main preserve, finally got its first public trail to the summit in March 2024. The route starts on Morency Drive on the south slope and climbs less than a mile, passing the largest Ice Age Floods rock found on any of the local ridgelines along the way. The summit itself is the highest point inside Richland city limits, a fact that got lost for years because there was no legal way to reach it.
That trail was step one. Friends of Badger Mountain secured grant funding in March 2025 to design a formal trailhead on Little Badger and, more importantly, to build a pedestrian crossing over Queensgate Drive that will finally connect Little Badger to the main Centennial Preserve. By fall 2025 the group had brought on Alta Engineering to design the trail across Little Badger's steep north face, described as the last piece needed to open the preserve fully. This spring, they hired Ellison Earthworks to build the Queensgate crossing itself, with construction running through 2026.
Once that crossing is in, you'll be able to walk from the Little Badger summit, across Queensgate Drive on a real pedestrian path, and straight into the main Badger Mountain trail network without touching a road shoulder. Right now, you can't.
The Detour You'll Actually Hit This Month
That construction has a direct, practical consequence for anyone hiking this week: the Upper Skyline Trail is currently under a partial closure tied to the crossing work. It's not a full preserve shutdown, and the lower sections remain open, but if your usual route takes you up toward the ridge's north end, plan on a detour or a different trail entirely until the work wraps.
Five Trails, One Ridge: Sorting Out Which Is Which
Across the two mountains, five crushed-rock trails offer distinct routes, and they're not interchangeable. Here's how they actually differ:
| Trail | Length | Elevation Gain | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canyon Trail | Under 1 mile | Modest | Foot traffic only, starts at Trailhead Park on Queensgate Drive |
| Badger Mountain Trail | 3.3 miles | 800 ft | Moderate loop, popular with runners and birders, about 1.5 to 2 hours |
| CSS Loop | Varies | 895 ft | Second-highest gain in the preserve |
| Skyline Trail | 6.8 miles | 1,095 ft | Longest route, ridgeline knife-edge section near the Summit Overlook |
| Little Badger Summit Trail | Under 1 mile | Steep, short | Accessed from Morency Drive, south slope |
Four of the five are open to hikers, runners, and mountain bikers together. Canyon Trail is the exception, reserved for foot traffic only, which matters if you're used to sharing gravel with bikes everywhere else in the preserve. If you're coming from the west side of town, the Westgate Trailhead off Dallas Road gets you onto the network with its own parking and a restroom, a detail worth knowing since facilities elsewhere on the mountain are limited.
No Shade, No Exceptions
None of these trails offer real shade, at any point, in any season. That's not a minor caveat here in August. The preserve sits fully exposed to Columbia Basin sun with no tree cover along the ridge, which means a midday hike in summer heat is a different experience than the same trail at 6 a.m. Longtime hikers here have learned to treat sunrise starts as the default rather than the exception once temperatures climb, and to carry more water than the mileage alone would suggest.
The trails stay open year round, but they're not maintained through winter, so conditions can shift fast after storms even though the desert climate means snow rarely sticks for long.
The Race That Turns a Neighborhood Trail Into a Regional Event
If you needed more evidence that this ridge draws well past Richland's borders, look at what happens here every March. The Badger Mountain Challenge, now in its 15th year, ran this past March 27 and 28 with seven separate race distances, from a 15K up through a new 100K and a full 100 miles, plus ruck divisions where participants carry weighted packs. An event drawing ultra-runners from across the region for a two-day race isn't something that happens on a trail nobody outside the neighborhood knows about. It happens because the mountain has already built a following that has nothing to do with which city issued the trailhead's address.
Why This Ridge Works the Way It Does
Put the pieces together and the picture is consistent. The survey data, the Little Badger expansion, the cross-county race field, all of it points the same direction: Badger Mountain was never really a Richland trail that other cities happened to visit. It was built, funded, and used as shared Tri-Cities ground from the start, and the 2026 Queensgate crossing project is a step toward physically linking the two mountains.
Next time you're at the trailhead scanning the parking lot, you'll know why the plates look the way they do. And if the Upper Skyline detour catches you off guard this month, at least you'll know what's coming once the crossing opens.
Living near a trail system this well used is one of the small, real reasons people put down roots in Richland in the first place. If you're weighing a move that puts a trailhead like this one closer to your front door, or you're already here and thinking about what's next, Gavin Vargas knows this stretch of the Columbia Basin from the ridgelines down to the closing table. Reach out when you're ready to talk through it.
