E.B. Rains Jr. Memorial Park — Attraction in Northglenn

My kids and I have been walking around this lake and playing at the park for over a decade now and it's great. There has been an uptick in drug use a year or two ago with paraphernalia just sitting on the sidewalk sometimes but they've mostly cleaned that up. There are still the occasional homeless person that is sleeping on the grounds if you get there in the early morning but this is infrequent as they have a patrol that comes through a couple times a night now a days.

Overall, it's a safe park with a pretty fun paddle boat thing on the lake and I see people fishing the lake all the time, so I imagine that is something that is allowed (I've never fished this lake, so I'm not sure if it's a good spot). The playground is great as well, my kids love the water feature and the spider web climbing thing. There is also a skatepark on the back side of the park so there really is something for everyone here. There are a fat stack of Pokestops for people who still play Pokemon Go and benches every couple hundred feet for people interested in sitting by the lake or taking a break. Additionally, there are various barbeque grills around the area, but they are public grills and if the person before you didn't clean up after themselves, then I don't think they have a staff that does that so grill at...

Abjectly miserable, La Junta-adjacent park filled with bizarre individuals engaged in creep activities.You have to have your eyes, ears, and sixth sense on alert at all times, especially to make sure no one steps on drug paraphernalia. Foil everywhere, and I'm guessing not from children's lunches. The only time it's safe or comfortable is peak park use time, season, day, so there's some strength in numbers of regular people--though as time goes on, that's less and less reliable as regular people stay away. Sometimes I'm forced by time constraints when it's either no walk for my dogs or this, the closest walk. The City seems to prize this park and pours resources into it, just not the right ones--which would be a 24 hour frequent police presence and some kind of park staff that cleans the trash out of it many times per day. Morning, noon, and night would not even be frequent enough. The time we saw a wild rat here was exciting, as I'd never seen a wild rat before. Yes, that's right, the second star is for the fun of a wild rat viewing. It honestly pisses me off that in Northglenn ever since about 2021, I have to drive further and further away just to walk anywhere that's not screwed...

The playground was cool for my son and his friends to play on. He's 4 and we live close by. But there were a group of kids ranging anywhere from like ages 10 to 15 maybe hanging around and like going bodies.. fighting each other. They were making their way into the actual playground area and literally running into little kids. One of them was carrying an enormous wrench. These were boys and girls. While I was holding my phone taking pictures of my son playing, I turned to look at the group as I was concerned about the safety of some other children. They confronted me and asked me why I was filming them. I was not filming them. But I did respond to them saying if they were concerned about someone filming their behavior and what they were doing, they should probably take their business elsewhere. I haven't been back to that park since. Too many older kids hanging around the playground.. being dangerous at that. Bummer... otherwise we would have had a better time and...