The Dinosaurs Off I-25 Aren't the Strangest Thing Happening Behind Wagons West
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
If you've driven Old Denver Road toward Baptist Road any time since late last year, you've probably slowed down for the same reason everyone else has. There's a field between the highway and the road, dotted with shipping containers, and standing among them are dinosaurs. Not small ones. A Spinosaurus. A T-Rex. A Barosaurus. For a few months, nobody quite knew why, and the mystery was good enough that people started pulling over to take pictures.
The dinosaurs turned out to be the least complicated part of the story. What's actually happening on that stretch of Old Denver Road is four separate development projects landing on the same half-mile at nearly the same time, and if you live in Wagons West, you're not watching any of it from a distance. The community sits just off Old Denver Road, close enough that the construction, the rerouted traffic, and yes, the dinosaurs, are part of your regular loop rather than something you'd drive out of your way to see.
The dinosaurs belong to Lost Island II Monument, a sister location to the Lost Island Adventure Park already operating on North Academy Boulevard in Colorado Springs. The Monument version is planned to run roughly twice the size of that original park, with four themed 18-hole mini golf courses, a 40,000-square-foot indoor playground and trampoline park, a full-service restaurant, and a tiki bar. It sits between I-25 and Old Denver Road, close enough that it's directly across the highway from Lewis-Palmer High School.
General manager Kyle Martin told the Colorado Springs Gazette his company had held the property for about two years before finally closing the deal in late 2025, which is why the dinosaurs seemed to appear out of nowhere. They'd been assembled and hidden behind the shipping containers while the land deal was still being finalized. In August 2026, the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department issued permits for a 42,000-square-foot building on the site, and construction is now underway. The park is targeting a spring 2027 opening.
Lost Island II isn't sitting alone out there. Within the same corridor, three other projects are moving through construction or approval at once:
Four different approvals, four different timelines, all inside walking distance of each other. If the corridor feels like it's changing shape overnight, that's because it is. It's just changing in four directions simultaneously.
If you've lived in the area long enough, you might remember a much angrier version of this story. Back in 2021, the same swath of land east of Old Denver Road was proposed as the Alpine Distribution Center, an industrial park with six warehouses ranging from 69,000 to 335,000 square feet. The project needed a new taxing structure, the Conexus Commercial Metropolitan District, to fund $32 million in infrastructure debt. Hundreds of residents packed Family of Christ Lutheran Church to oppose it, and the town board denied the metro district service plan on a 6-0 vote.
What's rising now is what survived that fight. The industrial component shrank from roughly 80 acres to about 16. In its place came apartments, townhomes, a mixed-use commercial park, and, eventually, a mini golf and entertainment complex with dinosaurs in it. That's not the outcome anyone would have predicted from a warehouse fight five years ago, but it's the version of this land that made it through.
Not everyone watching it happen is thrilled. Melvin Powell, an Air Force veteran whose property has bordered the development zone for two decades, told the Gazette in January that he's disappointed with the overall direction, even with the more residential mix. He said he's waiting to see how the new development affects both his home's value and the character of the area. It's a fair thing to sit with. A corridor that was agricultural land not long ago is now hosting apartments, retail, and a theme park all at once, and that kind of change doesn't land the same way for everyone who's watched the fields empty out.
For residents, the most immediate effect has been the road itself. Old Denver Road immediately north of Baptist Road saw intermittent lane closures through the start of July 2026, with the northbound lane fully closed and both directions sharing the southbound lane while flaggers directed traffic. The Colorado Department of Transportation has also been reshaping the nearby Baptist Road and Terrazzo Drive intersection, adding a roundabout meant to keep commercial truck traffic and commuter traffic moving through that interchange without the backups a standard signal creates.
None of this is finished. The Conexus apartments are still working toward a construction start, Terrazzo-Baja is moving from approval into build-out, and Lost Island II has a spring 2027 target that still leaves a full construction season ahead. If you're driving Old Denver Road this fall, expect the dinosaurs to stick around a while longer, and expect the corridor to keep looking unfinished before it looks like anything in particular.
What's worth understanding, whether you've lived in Wagons West for ten years or moved in last spring, is that this isn't background noise. It's the same quarter-mile doing four jobs at once, shaped directly by a fight residents already won once. The corridor you're driving today looks the way it does because people showed up to a meeting in 2021 and said no to one version of it. What got built instead is still being decided in real time, just down the road from your front door.
If you're curious how any of this might affect what your home is worth, or you're weighing whether now's the right time to make a move in Monument, I'm always happy to talk it through. Reach out to Lauren Trent and let's connect.
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