In October 2023, King County Executive Dow Constantine stood at the north end of the East Lake Sammamish Trail in Redmond and helped break a ceremonial banner instead of cutting a ribbon, timed to overlap with Issaquah's Salmon Days so the crowds wouldn't collide with festival traffic. County officials called the moment 26 years in the making. Claudia Balducci, the King County Councilmember whose district includes the lake, told the crowd it was "a really big deal," as The Urbanist reported. The 11-mile paved trail, stitched together from an old BNSF rail corridor that King County had chased through court battles and property disputes since the late 1990s, was finally whole: Issaquah to Redmond, unbroken pavement, no gaps.
Nearly three years later, if you live along the plateau and ride or walk that trail on any kind of regular basis, you already know it isn't whole right now. A 600-foot stretch near the Sammamish and Redmond boundary has been closed since June 1, and King County says it will stay that way through the rest of 2026. The trail that took a quarter century to finish is, once again, two separate trails.
That is not a contradiction worth getting worked up about. It is worth understanding, because the reason behind this closure, and the workaround most people driving past the orange signs do not know about, both say something about how this corridor actually functions day to day.
The 600 feet that disappeared
The closed section sits between Louis Thompson Road NE and NE Inglewood Hill Road, a short stretch that happens to cross George Davis Creek. According to King County Parks, the closure splits the trail into two disconnected pieces with no official detour posted. It is worth understanding what that means before you plan your next ride.
The City of Sammamish's 2026 construction page frames the same closure differently: work on George Davis Creek started this spring and runs through late fall, and it is not really a trail project at all. It is a stream project that happens to run under the trail.
What's actually under the pavement
For years, George Davis Creek has flowed beneath the trail and beneath East Lake Sammamish Parkway through undersized culverts that block fish passage. Lake Sammamish is home to a landlocked population of kokanee salmon, sockeye that spend their entire lives in freshwater instead of migrating to the ocean, and that population has been shrinking for decades under pressure from lake conditions, blocked spawning streams, and predator fish. A group called the Kokanee Work Group formed back in 2007 specifically to keep the Lake Sammamish population from disappearing.
The current closure exists to fix one of those blocked streams. Crews are pulling out the old culverts and replacing them with new 17-foot box culverts under the trail, plus a short-span bridge where the creek passes beneath the Parkway itself. When it is finished, George Davis Creek will run in open air instead of through a buried pipe, and the last piece of the trail's puzzle, this one hydrological rather than paved, will finally be solved.
The city has been buying its way into this project for years. Sammamish previously paid roughly $4 million for the property needed to rebuild the stream corridor between the lake and Shore Lane, with about 65 percent of that covered by outside grants, including a $2 million King County Conservation Futures grant. The city has also applied for additional flood-reduction grant funding through King County's Flood Control District. None of this shows up if you just see the orange "trail closed" sign. It is the difference between a construction project and a restoration project, and it explains why this closure has an ecological deadline rather than just a paving schedule.
What "no official detour" actually means on the ground
Here is what the closure means for travel on the Parkway. Seattle Bike Blog, which covers Eastside trail infrastructure closely, reported in April that the trail and adjacent roadways would close "as early as May 2026 and lasting through the rest of the year," with no official detour. The report's wording may leave readers wondering whether the Parkway itself is shut down alongside the trail.
It is not. The same reporting found that King County is not closing East Lake Sammamish Parkway as a through road. Instead, crews are closing one lane at a time and using flaggers to wave traffic around the work zone. When the blog's writer rode through during an active lane closure, a flagger let him pass with no cars in sight. There is no official detour, but the Parkway remains open to through traffic.
For residents who use this corridor daily, that distinction matters. Your three real options right now are:
- Ride or drive around the west side of Lake Sammamish on the roads that parallel the lake from the other direction, which avoids the closure entirely but adds distance and loses the trail's separation from traffic.
- Take East Lake Sammamish Parkway itself through the closure zone, watching for the active lane closure and flagger, since the road stays open even when the trail alongside it does not.
- Climb the residential streets through Sammamish proper to reconnect with the trail north or south of the gap, the option locals who already know these streets tend to default to.
None of these have the protection or continuous pavement the finished trail offered. All three get you where you are going.
What you get back when it reopens
The payoff for a rough back half of 2026 is a trail segment that finally functions the way the rest of the corridor does. Once the culverts and bridge are in, the county plans to build a new, wider paved trail section over the restored creek, the kind of upgrade that has already happened on other segments of the East Lake Sammamish Trail over the years, most recently the 3.55-mile South Sammamish B segment between SE 33rd Street and Inglewood Hill Road, completed in October 2023 with wider paving, new retaining walls, and rest stops overlooking the lake. This closure finishes what King County calls the last section of the trail, the piece that was still running through a buried pipe instead of open water.
In the meantime, if you want lake access without dealing with the closure zone at all, Sammamish Landing Park at 4607 East Lake Sammamish Parkway NE remains the only public shoreline property within Sammamish city limits, with two docks, a picnic shelter, and interpretive signage about the old railroad that used to run where the trail now sits. It is a reliable fallback for a lakeside walk while the rest of the corridor sorts itself out.
The trail is never really finished, and that is fine
The 2023 ribbon cutting was a genuine milestone, and it is fair to call the trail complete in the sense that mattered most: paved, connected, open. But complete and finished are not the same thing when a live creek runs underneath your commute. The gap this year is not a sign the county's earlier celebration was premature. It is a sign that fixing an 11-mile trail properly sometimes means going back and fixing what is underneath it, one culvert at a time, long after the crowds have gone home.
If you are the kind of Sammamish resident who plans your evening ride around which segment of this trail is open this month, you already understand the plateau better than most people searching for a house here ever will. That kind of local knowledge, knowing how to plan around trail closures, is the same instinct that helps when it is time to buy or sell a home along this corridor. If you are ever curious what a house near this trail is actually worth in today's market, Jennifer Rogers can walk you through it, no orange signs required.
