You come around the bend past Google's Kirkland campus, gravel crunching under your shoes, and there it is again: orange construction fencing, steel plates bolted over something in the ground, and a sign that explains nothing except that this section is closed until further notice. Ask a neighbor what's happening and you'll get two different answers depending on who you ask and when. Someone will say it's the sewer. Someone else will say it's the new bridge over 85th. Both are right, and that's the part nobody explains clearly: the Cross Kirkland Corridor has had two separate agencies running two unrelated projects along the same 5.75 miles of old railbed for more than a year, and they don't share a website, a timeline, or a reason.
If you've felt like this trail has been "under construction" since sometime in 2025 and never quite finished, you're not wrong. You're just describing two different stories as if they were one.
A sewer emergency, not a plan
The first story started as a leak. In late July 2025, King County and City of Kirkland crews found wastewater from the county's Eastside Interceptor Section 14 pipe, a 7-foot-diameter line that carries an average of 10 million gallons of sewage a day, entering one of Kirkland's piped streams. Public Health for Seattle and King County got involved and ruled out a public health risk, but the county still treated it as urgent enough to issue a Declaration of Urgency that September, matched by a Proclamation of Emergency from the city. That's not routine maintenance language. That's the kind of language that skips the normal queue.
The fix required a temporary bypass: a 3,000-foot, 18-inch above-ground pipe installed along the west side of the trail so sewer service to nearby homes and businesses wouldn't stop while crews repaired the joints underground. The trail segment between NE 52nd Street and 108th Avenue NE closed as the work ramped up in early January 2026, wastewater started flowing through the temporary line by mid-January, and King County reported the underground pipe repair complete in mid-February. The trail reopened February 23. It closed again for a single day in late March so crews could test soil conditions ahead of a second phase, then reopened that same evening.
That second phase is the part still sitting on the ground right now. According to King County's own project page, crews are scheduled to come back sometime this summer to stabilize a rockery wall and repair a culvert underneath their pipe, and until that work actually starts, the temporary above-ground pipe and the fenced, steel-plated access points stay right where they are on the west side of the trail. As of this writing in early August, the county hasn't posted a firmer start date beyond "this summer," which means the fencing you're seeing could be there for routine protection or could turn into an active closure with very little advance notice. If a ride or run depends on that stretch being fully open, check the county's page the same week you go rather than trusting what you saw last month.
A bridge project on its own clock
The second story has nothing to do with sewage. It's a pedestrian and bike bridge over NE 85th Street, funded by Sound Transit and managed by the City of Kirkland, built to connect the trail to the future I-405 and NE 85th Street bus rapid transit line. Construction closed a short stretch of the corridor around NE 85th starting July 18, 2025, while crews worked overhead to build the span. Seattle Bike Blog covered the closure when it began and noted two posted detours: an ADA-accessible route that sends trail users out to 6th Street, and a shorter, non-ADA gravel detour along NE 87th Street and 114th Avenue NE for anyone who can manage the uneven surface. At the time, the project's target completion was May 2026.
If that timeline held, this stretch has been open for months and you may not have noticed, because there's no ribbon-cutting for a pedestrian bridge over an arterial. If you've been avoiding NE 85th out of habit, it's worth a look before you plan a longer detour that's no longer necessary.
What that means for a ride this week
Two agencies, two reasons, two separate schedules, and neither one posts to the other's page. That's the actual state of the trail in August 2026, and it's worth holding both threads at once instead of treating the whole corridor as one undifferentiated construction zone:
- NE 52nd Street to 108th Avenue NE: open as of the county's last update, with fenced equipment and a temporary above-ground pipe still visible on the west side. Culvert and rockery repair is scheduled for "this summer" without a posted start date. Check the City of Kirkland's closures page before a ride that depends on it.
- Around NE 85th Street: targeted for a May 2026 reopening under the bridge project. Confirm current status if you've been detouring out of old habit.
- Everything else on the 5.75-mile corridor: unaffected by either project and rideable on the same crushed gravel surface it's had for years.
Why the detour is still worth it
None of this changes what makes the corridor worth using in the first place, and that's the part a status update alone won't tell you. Roughly halfway along the route, Feriton Spur Park sits inside a loop of Google's Kirkland campus, built as a public-private partnership between the company and the city, with an amphitheater, a basketball court, and a small collection of public art that turns a rest stop into an actual destination. The first piece the city installed on the corridor's public art budget was The Spikes, three columns of recycled railroad spikes standing six to eight feet tall on a metal base, welded in 2017 by Merrily Dicks, a student at Lake Washington Institute of Technology. It's a small, specific reminder that the gravel under your feet used to carry freight, not joggers.
Keep heading south and you'll pass Chainline Brewing sitting right on the trail, an easy excuse to turn a workout into an evening. Terrace Park shows up around mile 1.6, reachable by a short stairway if you want to break off the main gravel line. At the corridor's south end, the South Kirkland Park and Ride gives trail users actual parking and bus service on bike-rack-equipped routes, useful if you're starting a ride from somewhere other than home. At the north end, a pedestrian bridge finished in 2023 finally solved what used to be an awkward gap through the Totem Lake business district, where the trail threads past car dealerships and light industrial buildings before ending at Slater Avenue.
From there, the old rail line keeps going even after the CKC officially hands off. Head east on Eastrail and you're three miles from Woodinville, or you can peel off southeast on the Redmond Central Connector for another 4.4 miles. Head the other direction from the corridor's south end and Eastrail continues 2.3 miles past Bellevue's light rail station before ending at NE 4th Street, which means a rider who wants to string together a longer loop through two cities can do it entirely on repurposed rail bed.
Kirkland bought this stretch of former Burlington Northern Santa Fe railbed for $5 million in a deal that closed in April 2012, and the city adopted its master plan for the corridor two years later. More than a decade in, it's still doing the job it was bought to do: moving people through the middle of town without a car, whether that's a commute past Google's campus or a Saturday loop past a brewery and a piece of student-welded railroad art. The two ongoing projects are proof the corridor still matters enough for a county utility and a transit authority to fight over the same ten feet of gravel. Just don't mistake one closure for the other, and check the right agency's page before you plan around either.
If you're weighing what a house near this kind of infrastructure actually means for daily life and long-term value, that's a conversation worth having before you commit to a neighborhood. Tarek Moghrabi and the team spend their days tracking exactly this kind of Eastside detail. Let's find a time to chat.
