In De Soto, Every Trail Leads Back To Riverfest Park

Drive past Riverfest Park on any weekend this fall and you will see a different use for the same stretch of parkland along the Kansas River. Disc golfers working the new course toward the tree line. A wine rally setting up folding tables for a lineup of Kansas breweries and wineries. Families walking the riverside path near the fishing pond. None of it looks connected to the two-and-a-half-mile stretch of fresh asphalt going down a few miles south, or to the vote the county commission took back in March to trade away half a park for a bigger one. But it is all the same project, just filed under different names on different agendas.

That is the thing worth knowing if you already live in De Soto: the city and county are not running four separate parks initiatives. They are building one river corridor, piece by piece, and the piece that will change your Saturday morning the most is not open yet.

The trail no one can walk yet

Crews are currently paving a 2.4-mile connector through part of the old Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant site in western Johnson County. When it is finished, it will join two trail segments that already exist into one continuous path, an 11-mile Kill Creek Streamway Trail running from the Kansas River all the way south to 143rd Street. The contractor, Mega KC, is also installing a new pedestrian bridge as part of the work. The city has been posting behind-the-scenes construction updates, but as of now the trail is not open to the public and access near the construction zone is limited.

Eleven miles is a number that means little on its own. What it means locally is that a resident who currently bikes the loop at Sunflower Nature Park, then has to load the bike back in the car to drive toward Gardner for a longer ride, will eventually be able to do both on one continuous surface. That is not a small quality-of-life shift for a city that has spent years being described as growing faster than its infrastructure could keep up.

Why the county traded away half a park to get a bigger one

The trail connector is only possible because of a land deal most residents have not had reason to follow closely. Johnson County Park and Recreation District is exchanging the 58-acre footprint of Sunflower Nature Park for 210 new acres located southwest of the current park, land that would eventually fold into what officials are calling the Greater Kill Creek Park Master Plan. The Board of County Commissioners approved the exchange unanimously in late March, though it still needs sign-off from the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks and the National Park Service because the original nature park land was a 1974 federal gift.

Brian Nowotny, JCPRD's superintendent of Parks and Golf Courses, put the reasoning simply: the neighborhood around the nature park is changing fast, and the county wants parkland that can grow with it rather than stay locked at 58 acres next to an expanding residential and industrial footprint. If the swap clears federal review, the new acreage has to be made available to the public within 12 months, and residents who commented at public meetings have already asked for walking and biking trails, plus a disc golf course, on the new ground. Some have also asked for something the county has not had to plan for before: interpretive signage explaining what the land was used for before it was parkland, since part of the new footprint sits on ground from the former ammunition plant that has never been open to the public.

The plan that got written from lawn chairs

While the trail and the land swap were working through approvals, De Soto quietly finished something else: an updated master plan for Riverfest Park itself, completed in 2025 after an eight-month process with the engineering firm Bartlett & West. The unusual part is where the city gathered its input. Instead of only running an online survey, planners set up shop at the Rhythm & Roots concert series that already draws crowds to the park on summer evenings and asked people what they wanted while they were sitting in the audience.

One answer already exists on the ground: an 18-hole disc golf course built along the river, with two basket options on every hole so the short layout runs about 3,766 feet and the long layout about 5,006 feet, giving both casual players and competitive ones a reason to use the same course. It joins an existing disc golf course a few miles away at Lexington Lake Park, which means De Soto now sits inside a small regional cluster for a sport that barely had a foothold in the county a few years ago.

The park's other recurring draw, the Kaw Valley Wine Rally, is a smaller but telling data point. It is not a one-time festival appearance. It returns to Riverfest specifically because the site can handle vendor tents, food trucks, and a river-adjacent crowd that a downtown block or a ballfield parking lot cannot. Riverfest is being used, deliberately, as De Soto's outdoor events venue, and the master plan is now catching up to that reality rather than the other way around.

The festival that already made this move once

If any of this feels like a new pattern, it is worth knowing that De Soto has run this exact play before. The De Soto Days Festival, the city's largest annual event, started in 1964 under the Jaycees and has rotated through several locations over six decades: both sides of 83rd Street, the old high school football field, Miller Memorial Park, and Riverfest Park itself, before eventually settling downtown where it is held today. This year's edition ran Labor Day weekend, September 3 through 5, with the city's previously postponed Fourth of July fireworks display folded into the same weekend.

The lesson from that history is not that Riverfest lost its biggest event. It is that De Soto has always treated its gathering places as flexible rather than fixed, moving the community's biggest party to wherever the infrastructure could support it at the time. Right now, that flexibility is running in the other direction. The river corridor is absorbing more of the town's outdoor life, not less, even as the festival itself stays downtown.

What's actually converging, at a glance

What it means if you already live here

None of this is a reason to buy or sell anything. It is a reason to pay attention to which meetings you are skipping. The federal review on the land exchange is the piece most likely to move slowly and most likely to actually change what is walkable from your street once it clears. The trail connector is the piece most likely to open on a timeline you can plan around, since paving is already underway. And the master plan is the one that already produced something you can go stand on this weekend, an 18-hole disc golf course that did not exist a couple of years ago.

If you have opinions about where the next round of amenities should go, disc golf, informational signage, more river access, the open house process JCPRD has been running is still the venue for that, not a city council agenda item you stumble across after the decision is made.

For everyone else, the practical takeaway is simpler. The next time someone mentions a new trail bridge, a land swap, or a disc golf tournament in the same conversation, they are not talking about three different things happening to overlap. They are talking about one long project along one river, and De Soto is far enough into it that the shape of it is finally visible.

If you are weighing a move within Linn County, the KC metro, or anywhere in between and want a read on how a specific street or property fits into what is actually changing on the ground, Dez Poole has spent two decades working these markets in person. Schedule a free consultation and get a straight answer before you make a move.