Walk the Cross Kirkland Corridor south of Totem Lake this month and you'll still find steel plates bolted over sections of trail, chain-link fencing along the west shoulder, and a low mound of temporary pipe running parallel to the gravel. If you've lived here long enough to remember when this stretch closed the first time, back before the holidays, the gear sitting there in September might read as a project that never wrapped up. It isn't. The trail you're walking through right now is on its second repair, layered under a third, unrelated construction job that happens to share the same five and a half miles of old rail bed.
That distinction matters if you use this corridor the way most people who live near it do: as a commute, a dog-walking loop, or the flattest place in Kirkland to get five miles in before work. Knowing which closure belongs to which project tells you what's actually finished, what's still active, and when the fencing is likely to come down for good.
A Leak Nobody Was Supposed to Find
The corridor sits on top of the Eastside Interceptor, a King County sewer line that in this section runs through a seven-foot-diameter pipe carrying an average of 10 million gallons of wastewater a day in dry weather, on its way to the county's South Treatment Plant in Renton. In late July 2025, King County and City of Kirkland crews found that pipe leaking into a piped stream channel beneath the trail. Public Health for Seattle and King County was looped in and determined there was no public health risk, but the leak was serious enough that by September 2025 both governments had declared emergencies over it: King County's Department of Natural Resources and Parks issued a Declaration of Urgency, and the City of Kirkland filed its own Proclamation of Emergency to speed the repair along. Two separate governments moving on the same problem in the same month is not the normal pace of trail maintenance. It's the pace of something that couldn't wait for a normal permitting cycle.
What Reopening on February 23 Actually Meant
The section between NE 52nd Street and 108th Avenue NE closed hard going into 2026, with a brief reprieve in mid-December when crews found a natural pause in the work and reopened the trail for about two weeks, timed in part around the annual 12K's of Christmas run. It closed again as early as January 5. On January 13, crews diverted the wastewater flow into a temporary above-ground pipe, roughly 3,000 feet of 18-inch pipe, so repair work could happen on the permanent line beneath it without interrupting sewer service to the homes and businesses that depend on it. By February 13, King County announced the underlying pipe repair was complete, and the trail reopened to the public on February 23.
That reopening is the point where a lot of residents reasonably assumed the story was over. It wasn't. Here's the sequence laid out together:
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| Late July 2025 | Leak discovered in the Eastside Interceptor beneath the CKC |
| September 2025 | King County and City of Kirkland both declare emergencies |
| Dec. 11, 2025 | Trail reopens for about two weeks around the holiday 12K run |
| Jan. 5, 2026 | Trail closes again between NE 52nd St and 108th Ave NE |
| Jan. 13, 2026 | Flow diverted to a temporary 3,000-foot above-ground pipe |
| Feb. 23, 2026 | Trail reopens; pipe repair declared complete |
| March 24, 2026 | One-day closure for soil testing ahead of summer work |
| Summer 2026 | Crews return to repair a rockery wall and culvert under the pipe |
The one-day closure on March 24, for soil testing, was the first sign that "complete" meant the leak itself, not the corridor.
The Equipment You're Seeing Right Now Belongs to a Second Job
The rockery wall and culvert sitting beneath King County's pipe needed their own repair, separate from the leak that triggered the emergency declarations. That work was scheduled for summer 2026, and it's the reason the temporary above-ground pipe and the excavated access points along the west side of the trail are still there rather than having been pulled out in February. The access points are covered with steel plates and fenced off, which is what you're seeing if you've walked this stretch recently. Once the culvert repairs are done, the equipment comes out and the county has said new trees will go in where the work disturbed the corridor's edge.
The practical read here is that the hardware you're seeing isn't a stalled cleanup from an emergency that ended in February. It's the visible footprint of a planned second phase that was always going to follow the first one, on a piece of infrastructure old enough and important enough that King County wanted to do more than patch the joint that failed.
A Third Project in the Mix, With Nothing to Do With Sewage
Layer one more thing onto this. The City of Kirkland's own closures page for the corridor lists two active construction efforts side by side: King County's Eastside Interceptor repair, and a separate NE 85th Street shared-use pathway project. These are unrelated pieces of work that happen to touch the same corridor at overlapping points in the calendar, which is part of why the whole stretch can feel like one long, undifferentiated construction zone if you're only seeing it from a bike seat or a dog leash. One project is about protecting a regional sewer line. The other is about building a new walking and biking connection at NE 85th Street. If you hit a detour sign this fall, it's worth a glance at which project it names, because the timeline for one has nothing to do with the timeline for the other.
What Changes for You Between Now and Winter
If you're commuting through the Google campus segment or walking the wooded stretch south of Totem Lake, here's the version that actually matters day to day:
- The core leak repair on the Eastside Interceptor is done. That part of the emergency is closed.
- The rockery wall and culvert work is the active phase this year, and it's what's keeping fencing and the temporary pipe in place along the west shoulder.
- Tree planting happens after the culvert work wraps, so don't expect the corridor's edge to look restored until that stage is reached.
- A separate NE 85th Street pathway project may create its own detours in the same general area, unrelated to the sewer work.
- The City of Kirkland's Public Works Department maintains a closures page with current status, which is the most reliable place to check before a long ride or run rather than guessing from what you see on a given day.
None of this required the corridor to be broken for over a year. It required three different pieces of work, run by two different agencies, to land on the same five and a half miles in the same twelve months. If you've felt like this trail has been "under construction forever," you weren't wrong about the fencing. You were just looking at three different projects and reading them as one.
The corridor connects neighborhoods across Kirkland the way few other pieces of infrastructure do, from the residential streets above Market Street down through Everest and Rose Hill toward Totem Lake, and knowing what's actually happening under your feet is part of knowing this place well enough to live in it. If you're weighing what a home near this trail is really like day to day, or thinking through any other corner of the Kirkland market, Abby Quinto is glad to talk through it with you. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
