You come around the bend past 108th Avenue Northeast expecting the usual gravel and native plantings, and instead there's a chain-link barrier and a City of Kirkland detour sign. If that felt like déjà vu, it should. This exact stretch of the Cross Kirkland Corridor, between Northeast 52nd Street and 108th Avenue Northeast, has now closed and reopened at least three separate times since January.
That's not a rumor passed along on a neighborhood app. It's the pattern King County's own project updates lay out in black and white, and it matters for anyone who treats the CKC as a daily route rather than an occasional weekend stroll.
A trail that keeps "reopening"
The county's Eastside Interceptor Section 14, or ESI-14, is a 7-foot-diameter sewer pipe that carries roughly 2.6 million gallons of wastewater a day during dry weather to the South Treatment Plant in Renton. In July 2025, King County and City of Kirkland crews found a leak where the pipe meets a culvert beneath the trail. No public health risk was identified, but the fix has turned into a stop-start project that's closed the same half-mile of gravel path four times in nine months.
Here's the timeline as King County has posted it:
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| December 11, 2025 | Trail temporarily reopens for about two weeks, timed around a Christmas 12K run |
| January 5, 2026 | Trail closes again between NE 52nd St and 108th Ave NE |
| January 13, 2026 | Wastewater diverted to a temporary above-ground pipe to maintain service |
| February 13, 2026 | County announces "pipe repair complete, trail opening soon" |
| March 18–24, 2026 | Trail closes again near NE 52nd Street |
| August 4, 2026 | County announces culvert construction "starting soon" |
| September 8, 2026 | Full three-month closure begins for culvert and retaining wall work |
The February notice said the pipe repair was complete and the corridor would reopen soon. About five weeks later, follow-up work closed the trail near Northeast 52nd Street again. Anyone who rebuilt a running route around the February news was likely back to detouring by late March, which shows how much of this work happens in phases.
What's actually broken this time
The September closure isn't a repeat of the January fix. It's a different scope of work. Crews are now repairing the culvert that runs under the ESI-14 pipe itself, building a retaining wall to support the slope at the culvert site, and stabilizing the stream nearby. That's civil engineering, not a patch job, which is why the county is calling this one a full three-month closure rather than a weeks-long detour.
Doing the math on the county's own estimate, a closure that started September 8 and runs three months points to early December for reopening. Given the February-to-March reversal earlier this year, that date is worth treating as a target rather than a promise.
Don't confuse this with the other closure that already got fixed
If you've been away from the corridor for a while, you may remember a different closure near NE 85th Street and assume the whole trail situation has been resolved. It hasn't, and it's important to separate the two.
The NE 85th Street closure was a Sound Transit-funded project to build a pedestrian and bike bridge as part of the I-405 Bus Rapid Transit work, managed by the City of Kirkland. It closed a short section of the CKC starting July 18, 2025, with two official detours, a longer ADA-accessible route and a shorter gravel path via NE 87th Street to 114th Avenue NE, with anyone unable to use either detouring down to 6th Street. That project wrapped up around May 2026.
The ESI-14 closure is a separate cause, a separate agency doing the work (King County rather than Sound Transit), and a separate stretch of trail. If you'd heard the corridor was "fixed" this spring, that news was about the 85th Street bridge, not the sewer culvert. The trail's own history this year is a good reminder that "closed for construction" can mean two unrelated projects sharing the same 5.75-mile gravel path.
There's a third piece of this too. East of Totem Lake, a separate crossing project at Slater Avenue has had its own delayed timeline, with a crosswalk mostly complete but the traffic signal held up by material availability. A short detour via the crosswalk at 124th Avenue NE has been in place there. None of this connects mechanically to the ESI-14 work near NE 52nd Street, but it does mean a rider trying to cross the entire corridor in one trip this year has had to account for closures in more than one place at more than one time.
The detour worth building into your routine
The City of Kirkland maintains a current closures page with maps for whatever detour is active at a given moment, and that's the source to check before you head out, since the specifics shift as work phases change. What's useful to know going in is the pattern the city has followed on past closures along this corridor: a shorter, sometimes gravel-surface detour for anyone who can manage stairs or uneven ground, and a longer paved alternative that loops out to a nearby street for those who need a fully accessible route.
For the current September-to-December closure between NE 52nd and 108th, that likely means routing around via nearby city streets rather than trying to pick your way through an active construction zone, no matter how tempting the gap in the fencing looks. The corridor's gravel surface and native plantings are the whole appeal on a normal day. On a closure day, they're also exactly what makes an unofficial detour through the work zone a bad idea.
What's still open, and still worth the walk
None of this touches the character of the trail on either side of the closed segment. The CKC still runs its full 5.75 miles as a flat, crushed-gravel corridor connecting the South Kirkland Park-and-Ride to the Totem Lake Business District, following the old Eastside Rail Corridor that the city bought for $5 million in a deal that closed back in April 2012. Trailside stops like Chainline Brewing sit along unaffected stretches, and the corridor's stretch past the Google campus keeps its usual mix of commuters and dog walkers on leash. If your routine has you crossing through the closed half-mile, this fall is the season to shift it a few blocks over rather than wait out a reopening date that's already slipped once.
Trail infrastructure like this rarely makes it into a listing sheet, but it shapes how a block actually lives day to day, which is exactly the kind of detail worth knowing before you commit to a routine, or a house, near it. If you're weighing a move near the corridor and want a read on how a specific block holds up beyond the trail map, Marianne Francis is glad to talk through it.
