The Lake Trail Is Down Through Winter. Here's Where Sammamish Is Walking Instead.

A single 600-foot stretch of pavement just took an 11-mile trail out of commission for the rest of the year. That is not a typo. King County Parks confirmed the East Lake Sammamish Trail closed a short section starting June 1, 2026, between Louis Thompson Rd NE and NE Inglewood Hill Rd, and the closure will last through the rest of 2026. There is no official detour around it.

If you have spent any summer evening walking that lakeside stretch between Redmond and Issaquah, this is the kind of news that rearranges your week. But if your daily loop has never actually touched the lake, this closure barely registers, and that split says something real about how this city actually moves.

What's Closing, and Why

The short answer is culverts. The City of Sammamish and King County are partnering to replace aging, non-fish-passable culverts on George Davis Creek with new 17-foot box culverts, one at Shore Lane Northeast and one under the trail itself, plus a short-span bridge replacing the culvert under East Lake Sammamish Parkway. The work is expected to run from this spring through late fall 2026. It is not just a trail closure. Shore Lane and stretches of the Parkway are involved too, though the city has said the Parkway itself will stay open, with lanes closing one at a time and traffic directed around the work rather than the road shutting down outright.

The goal is habitat, not convenience. George Davis Creek currently runs through underground pipes at this crossing, which blocks fish from reaching upstream spawning habitat. When the work wraps, the creek will run in the open air again, and King County has said the finished trail section will include a new creek overlook, part of an effort to help recover local Kokanee salmon populations.

Why a 600-Foot Gap Closes Eleven Miles

Here is the part that surprises people who don't ride or walk this route daily. The trail's one obvious backup route, East Lake Sammamish Parkway, runs right alongside it at this exact spot, but the Parkway is not a bystander here. It is getting its own new bridge as part of the same project, replacing a culvert that sits under the road itself. When the detour road is torn up for the same construction as the trail, there is no unaffected route left to send people onto, which is exactly why King County has been upfront that there is no official detour. If you are trying to get from the Issaquah side to the Redmond side on foot or by bike, you now have three options: turn around, climb up into Sammamish's plateau street grid, or loop around the west side of the lake on ordinary roads. None of those routes come with the trail's protected, flat, waterfront experience. Seattle Bike Blog, which has tracked the project closely, put it plainly: neither workaround has the protection or accessibility of the trail itself.

For a lot of Sammamish residents, though, that tradeoff never comes up, because the lake trail was never the trail they used most.

Where the Plateau Actually Walks

Most of Sammamish sits up on the plateau, well above the lake, and the parks that carry the bulk of daily foot traffic are up there too. Soaring Eagle Regional Park alone covers 790 acres and threads together 12 miles of multi-use trail, including the Pipeline Trail, a route wide and flat enough that it is common to see families pushing strollers through it. None of that mileage touches the closure.

Here is a quick look at where that daily traffic tends to go instead:

For mountain bikers, the plateau's real draw sits just across the Issaquah line at Duthie Hill Mountain Bike Park, 120 acres of dense forest laced with built trails like Bootcamp, and neighboring Grand Ridge Park, 1,200 acres with 7 miles of trail. Neither is technically inside Sammamish city limits, but both function as part of the same local trail network residents already treat as home turf.

None of this is a workaround for the closure. It is simply where the plateau's daily walking, running, and riding traffic already lived before a single culvert made news.

If You Actually Live Near the Lake

Some households do feel this closure directly, especially along East Lake Sammamish Parkway and the shoreline neighborhoods where the trail functions as a front-yard sidewalk, and anyone who regularly bikes between Issaquah and Redmond for work or errands. For that group, the trail is still usable up to the closure point on either side. You can walk or ride the Issaquah-side segment south of Louis Thompson Rd NE, or the Redmond-side segment north of NE Inglewood Hill Rd, right up to where the fencing starts. Getting from one side to the other for the rest of the year means climbing into the plateau street grid or taking the long way around the west side of the lake, and neither comes with a bike lane or a water view. Budget extra time if that crossing is part of your regular route, since King County has been clear there is no official detour being built.

The Trade Being Made

It is worth sitting with what this closure is actually buying. A creek that currently runs invisible, through pipes under a trail, will run in daylight again by the time the work finishes, with fish passage restored for a salmon population the county has specifically called out as a recovery priority. The trail itself gets a permanent upgrade in the process, a creek overlook where hikers can watch the water King County spent the better part of 2026 giving back its bed. That is a longer horizon than most road projects offer, and it is the kind of detail that only shows up when you follow a project past its ribbon cutting.

For now, the lake trail is split in two, and the plateau keeps doing what it was already doing. Soaring Eagle's Pipeline Trail does not care about a culvert on George Davis Creek. Neither does Beaver Lake's loop, or the meadow stretch at Evans Creek. The closure is real, it runs through the rest of the year, and for a meaningful share of Sammamish, it changes nothing at all.

If you are weighing what it actually means to live near this trail network, whether that is the shoreline stretch along the Parkway or a plateau neighborhood five minutes from Soaring Eagle, that is the kind of on-the-ground context Pacific NW Houses builds every listing around. Explore Pacific Northwest Homes to see how a specific address connects to the trails, parks, and daily routines that make this part of the plateau feel like home.