Walk the paved path north of the Bay Trail bridge this week and you will hit a closure sign before you hit water. The barrier sits at roughly the 0.9-mile mark, and past it the trail is shut clear to the bay, Song Sparrow Spur included. Dump trucks are working a different route entirely, turning off Amphitheatre Parkway onto North Shoreline Boulevard and Crittenden Lane before cutting north onto Shoreline Park's service roads to reach the same stretch of levee from the inside.
None of this is new information if you follow the trail's Facebook updates or check the city's posted notices before a ride. What's easy to miss is that this isn't one project. It's three, running in three different segments of the same five-mile corridor, for three unrelated reasons, on three different timelines. And this Sunday, the Trailblazer Race has to fit its 10K, 5K, and kids' course into whatever's left standing.
Three Crews, Three Reasons, No Coordination
The northernmost work is the one closing the trail outright. Construction crews are repairing eroded levees at Pond A2W inside the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, a project that started in September and runs through November. The repairs sit underneath the Song Sparrow Spur, where crews are placing earthen fill and rip rap to stop pond-side erosion along the eastern and northern levee faces. That's why the detour routes trucks through Shoreline Park rather than down the trail itself: the equipment needs the service roads, not the paved multi-use path.
A few miles south, a second and unrelated repair is underway between Middlefield Road and Moffett Boulevard, alongside Whisman Park. The City Council approved this one back in early May 2026, and the price tag grew as the scope firmed up, from an initial estimate of about $3.6 million to roughly $4.6 million once four separate erosion sites were identified along the creek. One of those sites sits on land belonging to the German International School of Silicon Valley, which is why the Mountain View Whisman School District is chipping in about $1.3 million of the total under a cost-sharing agreement with the city. The engineering and construction support contract, worth $350,000, went to Geomorph Design Group.
The third piece of work isn't a closure at all anymore. Near the La Avenida and Moffett Boulevard entrances, a pedestrian and bike bridge now links the trail directly to the Ameswell Hotel property at 750 Moffett Boulevard. That bridge was a condition of the Ameswell development the city approved back in 2016, fully funded by the developer, with the city taking ownership once it was finished. It took nine years to get built, partly because Valley Water only permits creek construction between May 15 and October 15 each year. The installation itself closed a stretch of trail between La Avenida and Moffett for about two and a half weeks last summer. If you haven't ridden that segment since, the connection to Ameswell is worth the detour on its own.
Three crews, three budgets, three permitting timelines, and as far as the public record shows, no shared calendar between them. That's not a criticism of any single project. It's just what the trail looks like right now if you try to plan a ride from one end to the other.
The Extension That Took Longer Than the Trail Itself
While all of that gets built, the trail's biggest gap is finally moving, after sitting still for more than a decade. The existing path runs about five miles from Shoreline Park to the intersection of Heatherstone Way and Dale Avenue, and stops there. The plan to extend it another 0.8 miles to West Remington Drive in Sunnyvale, close enough to serve both Mountain View and Alta Vista high schools, has been on paper since 2015, when Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Los Altos jointly studied splitting the corridor into four buildable sections.
Mountain View's piece of that study sat unfunded and unstaffed for years. That changed in May 2026, when the City Council voted 6-0 to start the preliminary design process. Councilmember John McAlister recused himself, since he lives near the planned route. Mountain View will design and build up to West Remington Drive, with Sunnyvale responsible for continuing the connection on to Fremont Avenue.
Jim Meyerson of the Friends of Stevens Creek Trail put the pace of this kind of project bluntly: it takes ten years to get permission and six months to build. Rajiv Mathur, the group's executive director, has described the path as a jewel surrounded by concrete, glass, and brick, and argued that the corridor has to balance leaving the creek in its natural state against giving the community real access to it. That tension shows up in the timeline. A trail extension shorter than a mile took over a decade just to reach a design phase.
A Race Built Around the Same Squeeze
The Trailblazer Race returns this Sunday, September 27, for its 32nd year, organized by the same Friends of Stevens Creek Trail that has been pushing the Sunnyvale extension. This year the race starts and finishes at the Shoreline Park Kite Flying Area instead of its usual location, and the entire schedule has shifted an hour later than in past years. Registration opens at 8:30 a.m., the 10K and 3-mile walk start at 9:30, the 5K follows at 9:45, and kids' races close out the morning at 10:45.
Organizers attribute the later start to prior activity at the new site. Whatever the specific reason, the timing lands squarely inside the Pond A2W construction window, in the same stretch of Shoreline Park where levee repair trucks are already routed. A race that has run this course for three decades needed a new starting line and a new hour this particular September. The overlap may be coincidence. It's also exactly the kind of detail you'd only notice if you were watching both calendars at once.
The race itself still does what it has always done: a flat, scenic 10K and 5K out into Shoreline Park past the salt ponds, a 3-mile out-and-back walk in the opposite direction, and a morning of free kids' activities. Proceeds go to the Friends of Stevens Creek Trail, the same nonprofit now pushing the Sunnyvale extension through its design phase.
What Doesn't Change, a Few Blocks South
None of this touches the trail's in-town stretch or the streets around it. Music on Castro keeps its Wednesday, 5 to 6:45 p.m. slot through October, and the Sunday farmers market at the Caltrain station runs on its usual schedule regardless of what's happening at the creek's north end.
The blocks near the trail's downtown crossing have also picked up a couple of new stops worth knowing about. Lungo Thai Eatery opened this year at 137 East El Camino Real, in the former Vons Chicken space, from Somjed Wartrakchit, the former owner of Menlo Park's Farmhouse Thai. It's a fusion brunch spot by day and a more traditional Thai menu by dinner. A few blocks over, the longtime Los Portales space reopened this year as Il Portale, an Italian restaurant taking over a storefront that had been a fixture under its old name for years.
If the north end of the trail isn't worth fighting through this month, the downtown stretch gives you somewhere to redirect that morning walk or ride, and a reason to end it with breakfast instead of a detour map.
The corridor will settle back into one piece eventually. The levee repairs finish in November, the Whisman Park work has a defined budget and contractor, and the Sunnyvale extension has, for the first time in a decade, an actual design phase instead of a stalled study. For now, the trail is three separate job sites wearing one name, and the race that's run past all of them for 32 years just had to build its morning around that fact.
The Campi Group pays attention to details like these because they shape what daily life actually feels like on the ground here, not just what a map says. If you're curious how a specific block or stretch of Mountain View is changing this season, we're glad to talk it through.
