Drive up Murray Road east of town and you'll pass two unmarked gates before you find the one that actually leads somewhere. There's no sign announcing you've reached 599 acres of public forest. There's no kiosk, no restroom, no paved lot. One of the gates runs on an electric timer. The other opens onto a gravel pull-off that still looks, to anyone who doesn't already know better, like the entrance to private timberland.
That ambiguity isn't an oversight. It's the current state of a project that is legally finished and practically still being written.
The McKinleyville Community Forest became public land in January 2024, when the McKinleyville Community Services District took ownership of the tract from the Trust for Public Land, which had used a $3.8 million California Natural Resources Agency grant to buy the property from Green Diamond Resource Company. MCSD is the first community services district in California to own a community forest outright. That distinction matters here because it means there was no template to copy. Every rule about where you can walk, ride, or build a trail has had to be invented from scratch, in public meetings, over the past two and a half years.
MCSD set itself a target: have both a Forest Management Plan and a Trail Plan finished by the first half of 2026. That window has now closed. Public meeting records running from January through March 2026 show the Trails, Infrastructure, Clean-Ups, and Security subcommittee still assigning sections of the draft Trail Plan for members to write on their own time, and still circulating an updated draft, with new language on accessibility and access points, as late as March 19. The Forest Management Plan is further along. The Community Forest Committee voted on November 18, 2025 to recommend the 159-page document for board approval, and the MCSD board took it up at Azalea Hall on December 3. The Trail Plan, the document that actually tells you where you're allowed to go, is the one still catching up.
What's already rideable, even without the rulebook
None of this means the forest is closed. It means it's being used ahead of being finished, which is its own kind of interesting.
The main route, listed on AllTrails as the McKinleyville Community Forest Trail, is a 3.2-mile out-and-back that gains about 460 feet and takes most hikers an hour and a half to two hours. It's flat by Humboldt standards at the start and dustier than you'd expect in summer, according to hikers who've logged it. Access runs through the same two undeveloped points off Murray Road, one west, one east, both of which MCSD has flagged for future trailhead development with parking and signage that doesn't exist yet.
Beyond the main trail, the forest has roughly 10.8 miles of old logging roads left over from Green Diamond's operations, some of them reclaimed by brush, most passable only in dry months. There's also a growing network of mountain bike features, including a jump track that volunteers with the Mountain Bike Tribal Trail Alliance have been building by hand. In the summer of 2024, someone drove a car into the middle of it and wrecked months of donated labor, which tells you something about the enforcement gap MCSD is still working through. Weapons, overnight camping, and open fires are all prohibited, but as of 2024 the district's parks and recreation department numbered just three staffers, so actual patrol falls mostly to the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office when someone calls it in.
If you're going this fall, expect a working forest that feels more like the beginning of something than a finished park. That's accurate, because it is.
Why disc golf became the loudest fight in town
The single clearest sign that people care about how this forest turns out isn't a board vote. It's disc golf.
At the February 24 TICS subcommittee meeting, MCSD received forty-five written public comments and heard from eleven disc golfers in person, all advocating for a course inside the community forest. For a town this size, that's a genuinely large turnout for what is, on paper, a single line item about trail plan measures. The subcommittee took the input, discussed possible locations, and made no decision. It's still an open question as the Trail Plan gets finalized.
Forty-five written comments and eleven in-person speakers, all for one recreational feature, at a subcommittee meeting most residents will never attend. That's what local buy-in actually looks like when a plan is still open for argument.
The disc golf debate is really a smaller version of the bigger question MCSD is trying to answer: does this forest become a quiet, low-impact walking space, or does it lean into active recreation, with mountain bike trails, a jump track, and now potentially a tournament-capable disc golf course that could draw players from outside the county? Both directions have real support. Neither has been settled.
Where the harvesting philosophy actually changes
There's a second story running underneath the trail debate that's easy to miss if you only care about where you're allowed to hike.
Green Diamond managed this land under even-aged clearcutting on roughly a 45-year rotation, the standard commercial timber approach. The Forest Management Plan the committee recommended for adoption in November 2025 explicitly rejects that model in favor of uneven-aged silviculture. In practice, that means harvests every 10 to 25 years instead of every 45, removing only 20 to 40 percent of stand volume at a time rather than clearing entire sections. The stated goal, as the Mad River Union reported when the plan came up for a vote, is a forest that develops old-growth characteristics over time: complex canopy layers, standing dead trees left for wildlife, and a mix of species and ages rather than a uniform commercial stand.
That's a genuine change in what this piece of forest on the east side of town will look like in twenty years. What you walk through today, with its second and third growth Sitka spruce, redwood, and Douglas fir along Widow White Creek and Mill Creek, is being managed toward a different endpoint than it would have had under its previous owner.
Money is moving faster than paperwork
While the Trail Plan sits in draft, funding has kept arriving. Congressman Jared Huffman secured a $1 million federal earmark for the forest, announced in November 2025. The Humboldt Area Foundation launched a dedicated McKinleyville Community Forest Fund in June 2025 to support stewardship, fire resilience work, and trail construction. MCSD has also signed memorandums of understanding with the Humboldt Trails Council, the Mountain Bike Tribal Trail Alliance, the Redwood Coast Mountain Bike Association, the Redwood Empire Endurance Riders, and Wright Tree Service, each bringing labor or expertise to a project the district's own staff can't cover alone.
The gap between funding and finished planning isn't unusual for a project this size. It does mean that if you're expecting a fully built-out trailhead with parking and restrooms by the time you read this, you'll be disappointed. The money to build one now exists. The document that says exactly where it goes is still being written.
If you want a say before it's decided
The Trail Plan isn't locked in, which means the window to weigh in hasn't closed. A few ways in:
- The Community Forest Committee meets the third Tuesday of every month at 5:30 p.m.
- The TICS subcommittee, which is handling the trail and disc golf questions specifically, meets separately and has taken public comment at its sessions this year, with a toll-free dial-in number published on each agenda for residents who can't attend the MCSD office in person.
- Volunteer Trail Stewards gather on the third Saturday of each month to help build and maintain the forest's trails.
- Questions about the forest go to Parks and Recreation Director Kirsten Messmer at MCSD, whose contact information is listed on the district's community forest page.
None of this requires you to have an opinion on disc golf, harvest rotations, or trailhead design. It just requires showing up, which is more than most of the town has done so far, given that a public comment period drawing eleven in-person speakers counts as a big night in McKinleyville civic life.
The forest belongs to this town now, fully and legally. What it becomes is still being decided in a conference room at 1656 Sutter Road, one meeting at a time. If you've been putting off a walk out there because you assumed it wasn't finished yet, that assumption is correct. Go anyway. It's yours either way.
Redwood Realty keeps track of stories like this because knowing McKinleyville means knowing what's changing in it, not just what's for sale in it. If you're curious what else has shifted in your corner of the county, or you just want a clear-eyed read on what your home is worth in the middle of all this, Redwood Realty is happy to talk.
