Ride up from Redwood Park on a foggy morning this month and you'll notice the dirt looks different past the first bend. Fresh tread, a few new wooden lips, and a run of graded platform drops climbing an old logging spur toward Fickle Hill. None of it was there in the spring. If you've lived in Arcata for more than a season, you've probably absorbed a handful of these updates as separate bits of news: a new bike feature here, a paving crew there, a ribbon-cutting somewhere on the Ridge. Looked at one at a time, none of it seems like much.
Looked at together, it's the biggest change to how you can move through this town in years. Three projects that never had anything to do with each other on paper are quietly turning into one continuous system, and this is roughly the summer it finishes closing the gaps.
Three projects that were never really separate
The Arcata Community Forest, 790 acres of managed redwood and Douglas fir climbing from 250 feet at Redwood Park to just over 1,000 feet near its eastern edge, has always been generous with trails and stingy with connections. You could ride for hours inside it and still hit a fence line, a road crossing, or a trailhead that dumped you somewhere you didn't mean to be.
That's the piece that's changing. The Arcata Ridge Trail, a 4.5-mile route the city has treated as a priority project for more than a decade, is now finished end to end, linking the main Community Forest tract with the Sunny Brae tract from West End Road down to Buttermilk Lane. Separately, the Annie & Mary Trail has been under active construction since Granite Construction broke ground in September 2025, extending a paved, car-free route from the Arcata Skate Park at Sunset Avenue north through Valley West to the Mad River. And this July, city staff finished a new bicycle skills park tucked off an old logging road near Redwood Park and the Fickle Hill lot, the kind of feature that has nothing to do with trail connectivity on the surface but everything to do with who ends up on which trail.
None of these three needed the other two to justify its budget. But the city's own project page for the Ridge Trail makes the punch line explicit: once the Annie & Mary Trail is finished, less than a mile will separate it from the Ridge Trail, making it possible to travel by foot or bike from Blue Lake through Arcata without setting a tire on a road shoulder the whole way. That's not a coincidence of timing. That's a decade of separately funded projects arriving at the same finish line.
The rock the forest doesn't have
The skills park is the smallest of the three projects and the one with the most specific origin story. It wasn't a top-down city idea. It came from a group of riders on the Humboldt Composite, the county's middle and high school mountain bike racing team, and the Redwood Coast Mountain Bike Association, who asked the city for a place to practice terrain that Humboldt's own trails don't really have.
Brenda Odell, a Humboldt Composite coach, put her finger on the actual gap: local trails are mostly rock-free, which is pleasant for casual riders but leaves young racers unprepared when they travel to compete on courses choked with rock gardens. Grayden Larson, a high school senior and the team's captain since seventh grade, has felt that mismatch firsthand at away meets. The park the city built in response includes drops sized for a range of skill levels, some just a few inches high with a ramp landing, some considerably taller, mostly built by city staff over the past couple of months and largely designed around what the young riders and RCMBA members asked for.
Arcata's Director of Environmental Services, Emily Sinkhorn, has a second reason for wanting it built: concentrate the fast, technical riding in one spot so it stops mixing with hikers on the multi-use trails elsewhere in the forest. It's a small piece of infrastructure solving two problems that sound unrelated until you say them out loud.
The same stretch of this year saw the county's biking momentum spill past Arcata's borders too. Early work started on a bike park in Eureka's McKay Community Forest, and Redwood Coast Mountain Bike Association says two-time Red Bull Rampage winner Cam Zink and his crew at Sensus R.A.D. Trails are lined up to break ground on the fuller build there later this year. Locally, the two bike shops most involved in that world, Adventures Edge and Revolution Bicycles, each run locations in both Arcata and Eureka and back the region's calendar of races, including Adventures Edge's 8 Hours of Humboldt and Revolution's Bogstomp and Diamond Grinder events.
How close is close
Here's where the three projects actually stand as of this summer.
| Project | What it connects | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Arcata Ridge Trail | Main Community Forest tract to the Sunny Brae tract, West End Road to Buttermilk Lane (4.5 miles) | Complete |
| Annie & Mary Trail | Arcata Skate Park at Sunset Avenue through Valley West to the Mad River (3.5 miles) | Mostly paved; bridges and the final river-parallel segment targeted for completion this summer |
| Community Forest bike skills park | New drops and features off an old logging road near Redwood Park and the Fickle Hill lot | Opened late July 2026 |
The Annie & Mary progress has moved in visible jumps. By late March, paving stretched all the way from Sunset Avenue to West End, a little over two miles, with roughly a mile and a half left ungravelled toward the pump station. By May, the city reported the paved segment reaching past Aldergrove Road, with the remaining work concentrated on the Valley West connection, four bridges, and the final stretch running parallel to the Mad River. City staff have targeted full completion by the end of this summer, which puts the finish line somewhere very close to right now.
If you haven't ridden or walked the Annie & Mary corridor since spring, it's worth another look. The version you remember with gravel and orange fencing past St. Louis Road may already be gone.
Three ways in, one thing to check before you go
The Community Forest has always had a reputation for a confusing web of numbered trails and fire roads, which is part of its charm and part of why most regulars stick to a route they know. Three formal entrances make a reasonable start if you're exploring or showing the forest to someone new:
- Redwood Park, at the end of 14th Street, with parking, a playground, picnic areas, and restrooms
- The red gate on the right as you start up the hill on Granite Avenue
- The Fickle Hill Road parking lot
The city's trail map is worth downloading before you go, and it's also available through the free Avenza app, which tracks your location with a blue dot even without cell service, genuinely useful once you're a few numbered junctions deep. A few rules are easy to forget: camping isn't allowed anywhere in the forest or Arcata's other park lands, dogs need to stay on leash, and the city asks riders and hikers to skip trails that are visibly saturated rather than rutting them out after a hard rain. Equestrians should check in with the city's Environmental Services department for the access points that work best for horses.
None of that is new information if you've lived here a while. What's new is that for the first time, the routes those rules apply to actually connect to each other, and to Blue Lake, and eventually to the Mad River, in a way that would have required a car a year ago.
If you're the kind of Arcata resident who tracks these things because you're curious about where your town is headed, not just where you're riding this weekend, that instinct is exactly what makes a good client of ours down the road. Redwood Realty keeps an eye on Humboldt County's small, unglamorous infrastructure wins because they tend to matter more to daily life here than almost anything else, and when the time comes that you're curious what a home near all this newly connected forest is actually worth, our instant valuation tool is a good place to start.
