Samish Crest Trail in Bellingham: What Locals Use Now
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
Walk to the end of Racine Street on a Saturday morning in August and you will find a trailhead with no sign announcing anything historic. Gravel gives way to packed dirt, salmonberry brushes your shoulder, and somewhere past the first rise a Douglas fir canopy blocks enough sky that the trail feels older than it is. Dog walkers know this stretch. So do the mountain bikers who peel off toward the steeper cuts and the runners logging miles before the golf course gets busy. None of them are waiting on a permit.
That matters, because for the past year and a half, the City of Bellingham has been treating this same ground as something still being planned. In February 2025, the city council approved a $4 million purchase of 66 acres on the southern end of Samish Crest, funded through the voter-approved Greenways Levy. The sale closed on March 7, 2025. City officials described it as a step toward a goal the city has held since 1990: a formal north-south trail connecting Whatcom Falls Park to Lake Padden Park. What almost nobody outside the neighborhood clocked at the time is that the land the city just bought was already a trail. People have been walking it for years.
The 66-acre parcel sits between the existing North and South Samish Crest Open Space, land the city had already acquired in earlier phases. Before this purchase, those two pieces were separated by a scatter of private parcels, and the whole ridge, wooded terrain running between Interstate 5 and Yew Street Road, was already spiderwebbed with what city reporting has called unofficial social trails, used by dog walkers, birdwatchers, and cyclists long before any acquisition made headlines.
So the purchase did not create a trail system. It closed a gap in ownership underneath one that already existed. That distinction matters if you live here, because it explains why nothing about your weekend loop changed overnight and why the timeline for anything changing is longer than the press release made it sound.
City communications director Melissa Morin told Cascadia Daily News in early 2025 that no detailed plans existed yet for the new acreage, but that the city had budgeted for a master planning process to begin in 2026, one that would include wayfinding signage and formal trail design. That is where things stand as of this writing: budgeted, not built. If you are picturing new trailhead kiosks and marked junctions this fall, adjust that expectation. The planning process is the news. The physical changes come later.
Here is what exists right now, independent of any master plan. The Samish Crest Trail itself, the backbone route through the open space, runs a little under two miles one way from the Racine Street end into the heart of the Samish neighborhood, with roughly 355 feet of elevation gain and an average grade gentle enough that Washington Trails Association rates it easy. You can turn it into a one-way trip using Whatcom Transit at either end, except on Sundays. Beyond that main route, the broader Samish Crest Open Space holds more than twenty additional trails used for hiking, trail running, and mountain biking, with October logging the highest activity numbers of any month on record for the network.
None of that required a master plan. It required people showing up.
What the plan will likely formalize, based on the city's own Greenways Strategic Plan priorities, includes things the trail lacks today: consistent wayfinding, dog waste stations at more points along the route, and parking at neighborhood trailheads beyond the informal pull-offs people currently use. Those are real improvements. They are also, notably, additions to an experience that already works well enough that a 113-acre open space draws hundreds of recorded trips a year without any of them.
One piece of the ridge will not become trail no matter what the master plan says. A 111-acre parcel at the top of the Crest, long logged and long slated for housing development, sits on private land with what residents describe as an expansive view over Bellingham and the bay. David Stalheim, a former Whatcom County planning director and current board member of the Whatcom Environmental Council, has been watching that parcel closely as the city works through its once-a-decade comprehensive plan update, the process mandated by the state Growth Management Act that decides how Bellingham accommodates growth for the next twenty years. Whether that hilltop stays wooded or becomes rooftops is a live question, and it is playing out on a different track than the trail planning.
While the Crest waits on its master plan, the other end of the eventual connection, Lake Padden Park, is having one of its busiest stretches of the year. The 745-acre park, established in 1972, is already the anchor of daily life for a lot of Samish residents, and August has layered a full events calendar on top of the usual loop-trail traffic.
A few things worth knowing if you have not checked the calendar lately:
None of this is new infrastructure. It is the same 2.6-mile loop, the same off-leash area at the east entrance, the same non-motorized boat launch that have anchored the park since the 1970s. What is new is the density of organized activity layered onto that infrastructure this particular month, which is worth knowing if you are used to having the trail mostly to yourself on a Saturday morning.
The honest way to think about the Whatcom Falls to Lake Padden connection is that the city is not building a trail so much as it is legalizing and eventually formalizing one that residents already built with their feet. That is not a criticism. It is how a lot of good urban trail systems actually come together, informal use first, official recognition and modest infrastructure second. But it does mean the timeline for anyone expecting a dramatic before-and-after is longer than the 2025 land purchase headline suggested, and the value of the connection is already being realized by the people walking it today, master plan or not.
If you live in Samish, the practical takeaway is simple. The loop you already walk, run, or bike is not going anywhere, and it is not waiting on the city to catch up. The changes coming in and after 2026, wayfinding, waste stations, formal trailhead parking, will make an existing habit slightly easier. They will not create the habit. That already happened.
I live and work in this part of Whatcom County, and I pay attention to changes like this one because they tell you something about a neighborhood that a listing sheet never will. If you are curious what any of this means for your own property, or you just want a local read on the market from someone who actually walks these trails, reach out to Michelle Harrington any time. And if you're weighing a move of your own down the road, you can always start with a Get Your Instant Home Valuation to see where things stand.
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