I flew Barefoot Lakes on the first Saturday of October, and I timed it for sunset on purpose. This is a neighborhood built around water, and water is at its most beautiful in the last hour of the day, when the low light runs gold across the surface and the islands turn into dark shapes floating in the glow.
I lifted off with the sun still above the Front Range, and by the time I brought the drone home, Longs Peak had become a sharp silhouette against a sky fading from gold to blue. In between, I watched the whole community change color beneath me. The cottonwoods along St. Vrain Creek were just beginning to turn, the trees along the streets had gone red and orange, and every pond and lake below me held a reflection of the sky.
Some neighborhoods take a few flights before they show you who they are. Barefoot Lakes showed me on the very first shot, when I rose over the park lawn, past a walker out with a dog, and the whole chain of lakes opened up in front of me, glowing in the sunset with the mountains stretched across the horizon.
The Barefoot Lakes reel in the vertical format, ready for Reels and Stories.
The lakes are the heart of the community. Barefoot Lakes was planned around about 100 acres of lakes, laid out as a chain of water with small islands scattered through it, and almost every view I took from the air ends up returning to them. At sunset the water caught the light so completely that the islands looked cut out of paper.
Peninsula Park sits on a point between the lakes. It is the signature spot in the neighborhood, a green point of land reaching out into the water, with shaded pavilions, open lawns, a dock, and paths that loop around its edges. From above, the paths trace soft curves through the grass, and after the sun went down they were the last thing still catching the light.
The Cove is where neighbors gather. The community's amenity center sits along the main boulevard, with its clubhouse, a large beach-entry pool, pickleball courts, and a half-court for basketball. When I flew over it in early October, the pool was covered for the season and read as a perfect blue shape beside the courts.
Barefoot Green is the park for everyday life. Its oval lawn, soccer field, playground, and looping path sit right in the middle of the homes, so families can walk out a front door, down a cul-de-sac, and onto the grass in a couple of minutes. The trees along these streets had just turned red and orange, and the long sunset shadows stretched across every lawn.
St. Vrain Creek runs along the edge of it all. A levee trail follows the creek between the lakes and a patchwork of ponds, lined with cottonwoods that were just beginning to go gold. From the air the creek winds through the trees and catches the sun in flashes, and the ponds beside it reflect the sky like a row of mirrors. Locals often call it the St. Vrain River, and it is known for its fishing.
The homes face the water, the parks, and the mountains. Curving streets and quiet cul-de-sacs wind between the lakes and the open space, and some homes sit right on the shoreline with the lake trail just beyond their back fences. One of my favorite clips follows a car up a tree-lined boulevard toward the lake and Peninsula Park, glowing in the sunset ahead. It looks exactly like coming home.
Barefoot Lakes is a master-planned community of about 1,300 acres, and more than 150 of those acres were set aside for parks, according to Builder magazine. That is an enormous amount of shared space, and it is the reason this neighborhood is so hard to capture from the ground. A listing photo can show a kitchen and a backyard, but it cannot show that the lake, the dock at Peninsula Park, and the trail along St. Vrain Creek are all a short walk from the front door.
That matters because buyers are choosing the community as much as the house. In the National Association of Realtors' 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 59 percent of buyers named the quality of the neighborhood as the most important factor in their decision. In a master-planned community, where many homes share similar styles and floor plans, the neighborhood is often what helps one listing stand out from the next.
From the air, the whole story fits into one shot. A buyer can see the homes, the water, the parks, and the mountains together, and they can picture the evening walk to the lake before they ever step inside.
And I want to add one more thing about this moment in marketing. So much of what we scroll past now is AI-generated, and people can feel when a place is not real. What I filmed over Barefoot Lakes is the actual sunset of an actual October evening, over streets where people actually live, and that kind of real footage is becoming rare and valuable.
The sun setting behind the Front Range and Longs Peak, with the lakes, islands, and Peninsula Park reflecting the twilight sky, in the horizontal format.
The Barefoot Lakes collection includes 36 aerial clips, 8 still photos, and four finished neighborhood reels, all flown in a single evening that moved from golden hour into twilight.
I shot the neighborhood in both vertical and horizontal formats, with 17 vertical clips and 19 horizontal clips, and the four reels also come in both vertical and horizontal formats, so you can grab the vertical for a Reel or a Story and the horizontal for a listing video, your website, or YouTube, with no cropping and no reshooting. The clips are 4K mp4 files, color-graded in Premiere Pro, and the reels come with licensed music and are ready to post exactly as they are.
Here are a few ways agents can use them this fall:
If you are listing in Barefoot Lakes this fall, or you farm Firestone and want to stay visible between listings, the whole collection is ready for you. You can see it at foothillsfilmandfootage.com/neighborhoods/barefoot-lakes.
And if there is a neighborhood you would like to see from the air that is not in the library yet, please tell me. I am still adding new communities, and I would love to know where you are working.
Barefoot Lakes is a master-planned community in Firestone, Colorado, in Weld County, with St. Vrain Creek running along its edge and views west to the Front Range and Longs Peak.
The community is built around a chain of lakes with small islands, and it includes Peninsula Park with its pavilions, lawns, and dock, The Cove amenity center with a clubhouse, a beach-entry pool, and pickleball and basketball courts, and Barefoot Green, a park with a soccer field and playground. Trails run along the lakes and along St. Vrain Creek.
Sunset is the most beautiful time to see Barefoot Lakes from the air. The neighborhood looks west toward the Front Range, so the setting sun reflects down the whole chain of lakes, and the twilight after sunset turns the lakes and ponds into mirrors of the sky.
Yes. Members of the Foothills Film + Footage Library can download the Barefoot Lakes clips, reels, and stills and use them in listing videos, social media posts, emails, and listing presentations.
Kyra Coates is an FAA-certified drone pilot and long-time marketing and communications director in Longmont, and the founder of Foothills Film + Footage, an aerial footage library of Boulder County neighborhoods built to help agents market the places they sell.