If you have walked or biked the East Lake Sammamish Trail sometime this summer between Louis Thompson Road NE and NE Inglewood Hill Road, you already know the moment. The pavement just stops. There is orange fencing, some equipment, and the kind of quiet that makes you check your phone for a detour sign you assume must exist somewhere nearby.
It doesn't. King County has been direct about that: this 600-foot stretch is closed for the rest of 2026, and there is no official detour around it. Not a temporary sidewalk. Not a marked bypass. If you were walking the shoreline trail from Redmond toward Issaquah, or the other direction, you now have to make a decision about which half of the lake you actually want to be on.
That is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is the trail keeping a promise it made nearly three decades ago, and the reason is worth understanding if you live anywhere near this shoreline.
Why There Is Nowhere Else For The Trail To Go
The East Lake Sammamish Trail runs on a former Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail corridor that hugs the eastern edge of the lake for eleven miles. BNSF stopped running trains on the line in 1997 and sold the corridor to King County and a local land trust that same year; King County became the sole owner in 1998 when the trust transferred its share. For most of its length, the trail sits on a narrow strip of land with East Lake Sammamish Parkway on one side and private lakefront property on the other. There is no parallel street to duck onto, no adjacent right-of-way, no unused shoulder wide enough to reroute foot and bike traffic while crews work. The land that would normally host a detour belongs to someone's dock, someone's retaining wall, or someone's side yard.
That geography is also why this trail took so long to build in the first place. Waterfront property owners along the route fought the public trail for years, all the way to a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in. The court declined, and the City of Sammamish finally issued a construction permit in 2019, more than two decades after King County first bought the corridor. The interim gravel path opened in 2006. Paved segments followed in pieces: Redmond in 2011, Issaquah in 2013, and Sammamish across three separate stretches in 2015, 2018, and 2023. The last of those, a 3.55-mile segment between SE 33rd Street and Inglewood Hill Road, wrapped up in October 2023, with a ribbon-cutting that organizers scheduled to coincide with Issaquah's Salmon Days weekend.
The same narrow footprint that makes this trail feel private and scenic, glass-calm water on one side, quiet lakefront homes on the other, is exactly why a single 600-foot repair job can sideline the entire connection.
What's Still Reachable On Each Side
The gap sits roughly in the middle of the corridor, so both ends of the trail keep their usual access points. You just cannot walk or ride between them right now.
North of the closure, you can still reach:
- Marymoor Park and the Marymoor Connector Trail
- The Redmond Central Connector Trail into Redmond Town Center
- The Sammamish River Trail
- Sound Transit's Link light rail stations in Redmond
South of the closure, you can still reach:
- Lake Sammamish State Park, including its boat launch
- Tibbetts Beach and Sunset Beach
- The Issaquah-Preston Trail connection near Gilman Boulevard
- The Costco lot on East Lake Sammamish Parkway, a common parking start point for trail regulars
If your regular route lives entirely on one side, this closure barely touches your day. If you are used to covering the whole shoreline in one outing, plan on picking a half.
The Workaround People Are Actually Using
With no official detour, locals have been improvising with East Lake Sammamish Parkway itself, and the two directions are not equally forgiving. The southbound side of the parkway has decent shoulder width and has held up as a reasonable substitute for cyclists willing to share the road. The northbound side is a different story: narrower, busier, and without the buffer that makes the trail pleasant in the first place. Riders trying to complete a full loop around the lake this year are largely climbing through neighborhood streets up on the Sammamish plateau instead, adding both distance and elevation gain that the flat waterfront route never asked of them.
Walkers and runners have fewer options than cyclists here. If your route depends on crossing this exact stretch on foot, the honest advice is to treat the trail as two separate out-and-back routes until the closure lifts, rather than trying to bridge the gap on the parkway.
What The Closure Is Actually Buying
The project driving all of this is a fish passage fix on George Davis Creek. The creek currently runs through undersized culverts that block Kokanee salmon from reaching upstream habitat. The City of Sammamish, working with King County, is replacing the crossings at both the trail and East Lake Sammamish Parkway with new 17-foot box culverts, plus a short-span bridge where the creek passes under the parkway itself. Once that work is done, the creek will run open to the air through that stretch instead of trapped underground, and the trail will gain a new overlook where the culvert used to be. The city's own construction timeline has this work running from spring through late fall 2026.
It is a small footprint with a specific purpose: open water for salmon, not just pavement for people. That tradeoff is easier to accept once you know it's the last unfinished piece of a shoreline trail that took King County more than a quarter century to complete, one legal fight, one property line, and one culvert at a time.
What This Says About The Shoreline You're Standing On
None of this is really about a construction schedule. It's about what it means to build anything, a trail or a house, along a lake where every foot of shoreline already belongs to somebody. The East Lake Sammamish Trail has no detour this year for the same reason waterfront homeowners spent years in court over its route in the first place: there is no spare land here. Every parcel along this shore does double duty, holding a home, a dock, or in this case a public trail with zero margin for error.
That is worth sitting with if you live along the lake or spend your weekends on this path. The same shoreline conditions that make Lake Sammamish worth walking around, tight lots, private docks, water right up against the property line, are the conditions that shape everything else that happens here, from trail construction to which lots can support a rebuild. Understanding how the shoreline actually behaves, not just how it photographs, is the difference between appreciating this lake and truly knowing it.
The trail will reconnect. King County and the city have given late fall 2026 as the target, and the last three phases of this project all eventually delivered exactly what they promised, just slower than anyone would have liked. Until then, pick your half of the lake, expect some extra climbing if you're trying to loop the whole thing, and keep an eye out for that new creek overlook when the fencing finally comes down.
If you're curious what else the shoreline itself can tell you, whether that's about a trail closure or a property line, Margo Allan has spent years reading Lake Sammamish's edges for a living. Reach out anytime you want a local's read on what's actually happening along the water.
