If you walk or bike the St. Vrain Greenway from anywhere near Creekside, you already know the detour by heart. Since June 16, 2025, the stretch between Boston Avenue and Sunset Street has been closed, and anyone who uses that section of trail has spent the better part of fourteen months rerouting around it, whether that means backtracking to a different trailhead or just skipping that leg of the walk altogether.
This month, that changes. The City of Longmont's project page for Izaak Walton Reach 2 lists construction as scheduled to finish in August 2026, and the trail is set to reopen to bikes and pedestrians for the first time in over a year. But the fine print on that same page tells a more complicated story, one that matters if you're planning to fold this route back into your regular rotation without getting surprised again in a few months.
What Actually Reopens This Month
The closure was never just about trail maintenance. Izaak Walton Reach 2 is part of the Resilient St. Vrain Project, a partnership the city entered with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers back in 2016 to rebuild the St. Vrain Creek channel after the 2013 flood. Design work on this particular reach wrapped up in December 2022, and construction between Boston Avenue and Sunset Street began in March 2025. The goal is blunt: widen the channel enough to safely hold a 100-year flood event, which in turn protects lower downtown Longmont from future flood risk.
The Boston Avenue Bridge is being replaced as part of the same reach, funded by the city as its local match on the project. Once the work finishes, the reopened trail will be a 10-foot-wide concrete path with a 3-foot gravel shoulder, an upgrade from what was there before. That's the version you'll be walking on this month if you pick the route back up.
The Fine Print Almost Everyone Will Miss
Here's the part that's easy to overlook if you only skim the headline that the trail is "done." The city's own update notes that landscaping within the construction zone is being pushed to fall 2026 on purpose, to avoid planting during the hottest stretch of summer. That means the Greenway is likely to close again for a short window later this year so crews can finish revegetation work, which includes putting in roughly 50 new trees along the corridor.
In other words, August 2026 is the reopening for foot and bike traffic, not the final word on this stretch. If you're the kind of person who plans a weekly loop around this section, it's worth checking the city's trail status page before you assume it's settled for good once autumn rolls around.
A Quick Status Check
Here's where things actually stand as of this month:
- Open now, with occasional short closures: Izaak Walton Park, the Clubhouse, and the pond have stayed accessible through most of construction, though the city has flagged temporary closures at points along the way.
- Reopening this month: The Boston Avenue to Sunset Street trail reach itself, rebuilt to the new 10-foot concrete standard.
- Still closed, expected before winter: The sledding hill and disc golf tee box at Izaak Walton. Both were dismantled to make room for construction and are being rebuilt with soil relocated from Dry Creek Community Park, whose own sledding hill has been fenced off since June 30, 2025 and isn't expected back until April 2026. The city is, in effect, borrowing one park's winter hill to rebuild another's, which is why neither one has been available at the same time.
If you've been wondering why Dry Creek's hill vanished last summer while Izaak Walton's stayed torn up, that's the answer. The dirt moved from one to the other to help shore up the flood channel in between.
Why This Particular Reach Matters if You're in Creekside
For anyone living in Creekside near Pike Road and Main Street, the practical question isn't really about the whole eight-mile Greenway, which the city itself calls the "crown jewel" of Longmont's trail system for the way it links parks, schools, and commercial areas from Golden Ponds Nature Area on the west side of town all the way to Sandstone Ranch Nature Area on the east. It's about which piece of that system you'd actually use on a Tuesday evening.
Golden Ponds sits at Third Avenue, west of Hover Street, on the far northwest end of the route. Izaak Walton Park sits at 18 Sunset Street, on the reach between Boston Avenue and Sunset Street that just came back online, the same stretch most Creekside residents would reach first.
It's also worth clearing up a rule that trips people up. The only dog restriction on the entire St. Vrain Greenway applies to the far eastern mile between County Line Road and Sandstone Ranch, adopted by city ordinance to protect wildlife in that specific stretch. The Boston to Sunset reach you'll be using has no such restriction. If you've been avoiding this section with your dog out of caution, that rule doesn't apply here.
There's some history worth knowing at Izaak Walton itself, too. The nature area was donated to the city in 1989 by the V.V. Golden Foundation, after nearly half a century of use by the Izaak Walton League for sport fishing and skeet shooting. It sat mostly untouched until improvements began in 1999. Today the site covers 21.5 acres, including a 15.7-acre pond dedicated specifically as a youth fishing pond. If you walk to the southwest corner of that pond, you'll find "Gather Enough People Here," a mechanical art piece installed by artist Robert Tully the same year the park was improved. It's the kind of detail you'd only notice if you're actually out there on foot, which after this month, a lot more of us will be again.
The Takeaway for Your Next Walk
None of this changes anything about home values or market timing, and that's the point. This is simply what's different about the ground under your feet this month if you live near Creekside and use the Greenway the way most of the neighborhood does, as a daily habit rather than a special occasion. The detour you've gotten used to is finally lifting. The hill and the disc golf tee box are still a few months out. And there's a decent chance the trail dips into a short closure again this fall once the tree planting starts.
If you're curious about what else is changing in Creekside, whether that's a construction update, a shift in the local market, or just what your home might be worth in the current environment, Dwellings Colorado keeps close track of the details that don't always make it into the citywide headlines. Reach out any time you want a local read on what's actually happening in your corner of Longmont.
