If you've tried to walk or bike the lakefront stretch of the East Lake Sammamish Trail since June, you've hit a 600-foot wall with no detour sign pointing anywhere. King County Parks shut down the section between Louis Thompson Road NE and NE Inglewood Hill Road on June 1, and it stays closed through the end of 2026. No official workaround. No painted arrows sending you around the block. Just a fence and a construction crew.
Here's what the closure notice doesn't tell you: this is the last piece. Not a piece. The last one. When this segment reopens, the East Lake Sammamish Trail will be a complete, unbroken path from Issaquah to Redmond for the first time in its history.
Twenty Years to Close One Gap
The corridor started as a rail line in 1889, hauling coal out of Issaquah. Burlington Northern Santa Fe stopped using it in 1997 and sold the right-of-way to King County and the Cascade Land Conservancy, which set up the railbanking protection that let the county convert it to trail use without losing the corridor. The interim, unpaved trail opened in 2006. From there it came together in pieces: Redmond's segment finished in 2011, Issaquah's in 2013, and Sammamish's own stretches closed out in phases through 2015, 2018, and 2023.
That's a nineteen-year build-out, and the East Lake Sammamish Trail has been down to one remaining gap for a while now. The current closure at George Davis Creek is that gap. Once the culverts are replaced, King County says the creek will run open to the air instead of trapped underground, the trail gets a new overlook onto the water, and the corridor's fish-passage barrier for Kokanee salmon comes down for good. The frustrating summer you're living through is the reason the corridor finishes.
What's Actually Closed, and What Isn't
The 600-foot closure sits on the trail itself, and King County has been upfront that there's no official detour through it. If you've ridden the lakefront in past summers and expected a marked bypass, there isn't one this time.
What has changed since the initial notice: East Lake Sammamish Parkway NE, the road running alongside the trail, is not fully shut down. Sammamish Public Works confirmed crews are closing one lane at a time and running a flagger to direct traffic through, rather than closing the roadway outright. If you're driving that stretch, expect stop-and-go, not a hard closure.
The side effect worth knowing about if you have kids biking to school: with the lakefront trail broken, more cyclists and walkers are shifting onto 228th Avenue SE, which runs past several schools on a widened sidewalk that wasn't built to carry regional through-traffic. If your household bikes that corridor during school hours, this is the year to pay closer attention at intersections, not because anything has gotten more dangerous by design, but because more people are funneling through a route that used to carry mostly local trips.
Where the Plateau Already Rides
Here's the part that softens the blow more than the closure notice suggests. A lot of daily foot and bike traffic in Sammamish never touched the lakefront trail to begin with. Most residents live up on the plateau, and the plateau has its own trail network that runs independent of the lake corridor.
Soaring Eagle Regional Park is the main one. It's 600 acres of forest and wetland with 12 miles of trails, and the Pipeline Trail that cuts through the middle is wide and flat enough that families push strollers on it. There are three entrances: the main one off 228th Avenue SE and SE 8th Street to East Main Drive, a south entry off Trossachs Boulevard via SE Duthie Hill Road, and a third through Beaver Lake Preserve on West Beaver Lake Drive.
If you want a longer loop, the Beaver Lake to Soaring Eagle Perimeter route runs about 6.2 miles with roughly 470 feet of elevation gain, starting at Beaver Lake Preserve, heading north through the Steven and Rosina Kipper Preserve, and picking up the South Trail to complete the loop on the park's west side. Beaver Lake Park itself, up on the plateau and separate from Lake Sammamish, works as the shorter, flatter option if you just want a walk with its own lake view rather than a workout.
| If your usual route was... | Try this instead | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| The lakefront trail near Inglewood Hill Rd | Soaring Eagle Pipeline Trail | Up to 12 miles of connected paths |
| A longer lakefront loop | Beaver Lake to Soaring Eagle Perimeter Loop | ~6.2 miles |
| A short evening walk | Beaver Lake Park | Short loop, lake views |
None of this replaces the lakefront trail's specific draw, which is the water itself. But for anyone whose daily loop was really about getting outside rather than getting to Issaquah or Redmond, the plateau never closed.
The Market That Doesn't Care About Trail Conditions
While the trail sorts itself out, the other fixture of a Sammamish summer keeps running on its own schedule. The Sammamish Farmers Market opened its 2026 season on May 6 with a ribbon cutting at Sammamish Commons and runs every Wednesday from 4 to 8 p.m. through September. This year's lineup is more than 60 vendors backed by 24 sponsors, with roughly six food trucks and carts on the plaza each week.
The clearest sign of how much this market has grown is the Power of Produce program, which gives kids ages 4 to 10 a $2 voucher to spend on a fruit or vegetable of their choosing. Participation jumped from 300 kids in 2024 to 800 in 2025. That's not a marketing number. That's 500 more families showing up on a Wednesday night with young kids in tow than showed up the year before.
Chamber of Commerce CEO Julie Honn has framed the market's role in blunter terms than most civic boosterism, pointing to Sammamish's mix of cultures and noting that people "can sit in the grass, listen to music, and meet new people." Market manager Pam Saito, who also owns Five Hooks Seafood and runs a booth there herself, has held the role for several years.
Earlier this season, the special-event Wednesdays already showed how far the market has grown beyond a produce stand:
- May 20, Emerging Entrepreneurs Youth Business Day, where kids ages 11 to 17 set up their own booths after a market-readiness workshop
- June 17, Soccer Fest, tied to the region hosting World Cup matches this summer, presented with the Sammamish Chamber, the YMCA of Greater Seattle, and Sammamish Football Club, with skill challenges and a scavenger hunt on the lawn
- June 24, Pride Night, with vendors starting at 4 p.m. and community programming beginning at 5:30 p.m.
- July 1, Children's Business Fair, the younger sibling to May's entrepreneur day, for kids ages 7 to 11
None of that depended on whether the lakefront trail was open, and the market itself still has Wednesdays left this month and into September for anyone who hasn't made it out yet. It happens at Sammamish Commons, a few blocks from where the plateau's daily walkers and bikers already gather anyway.
What This Summer Actually Tells You
Put the two threads together and you get a clearer picture of how Sammamish operates than either story tells on its own. The lake trail closure looks like a loss this year, and for the households who genuinely used it to get somewhere, it is one. But it's closing because it's finishing, not because it's failing, and the plateau's own trail system was never dependent on it in the first place. Meanwhile the market at the Commons keeps drawing bigger crowds every season, growing on its own terms regardless of what's happening down at the water.
That's usually how infrastructure catches up to a place like this. Piece by piece, on its own schedule, mostly invisible until the year it finally clicks into place.
If you're weighing what it's actually like to live day to day in Sammamish, on the plateau or down near the water, Stephen Snee has spent years walking these same trails and knows which streets get quiet in August and which ones don't. Let's Connect if you want a longer conversation about the neighborhood beyond what shows up in a search result.
