The wife and I recently visited Santa Fe, and I was looking for a moderately difficult trail, that was at least partially shaded and had great scenery. Dale Ball Trails hit all of those. The trail has many options where you can hike for 10+ miles or less than two. We were planning on hiking about 4 miles, but someone (not me) got a little winded. The checkpoints along the trail allowed for detours or short cuts so it was perfect.

Went on the north trail categorized as easy. Was very well marked. Took about 1 hour 40 minutes, going slowly (we're old!). Highly recommended.

Great trails. All reviews say Well marked but we could not figure out the guide signs or the trail markers. Thank goodness for All Trails or we would have been the next people featured on I Survived..We did about 5 miles

Minutes from old town Santa Fe, Dale Ball trails lead you up above the town and gives you an escape from the people and traffic of the town for a couple of ours. There is a series of walking trails, each marked with placards making it easy to combine trails to adjust to whatever trail length you desire.

There is a lot of hiking to choose from when deciding which Dale Ball trail to hike. Thanks to a fellow TA poster we were able to narrow down the choices to suit our ability level and our need to adapt to the high elevation of Santa Fe. I was told that the North trails would be the easiest and also provide some shade so we opted to park at the Hyde Park Road trail head and do a short hike on our first day in Santa Fe. The trails are really well marked as others have pointed out. For our 2.33 mile hike that afternoon we started with marker 1 and were able to create a small loop by connecting with marker 2, then 3, and back to 2 and 1 . It was very green, very pretty and even though somewhat close to the access road it mostly did not feel that way.Wish we could have returned and done additional hikes on the central and south portions as well but we had plans for other areas outside Santa Fe and sadly not enough time to return.There is a wonderful trail map online that can be searched out to show the three different areas, north, central , and south. The online trail map shows the trail marking numbers and also how far it is from number to number. Very nicely done!!!Use this trail map as opposed to All Trails IMHO