For years, the idea of biking from Eureka to Arcata without touching Highway 101 was a rumor with a construction schedule attached. Something county planners had been promising since the early 2000s, always a few miles and a funding cycle away from actually happening. That changed on June 28, 2025, when the last four-mile gap in the Humboldt Bay Trail opened to the public with a celebration at the Adorni Center, and it finished changing over the past several months, as the county closed out the punch list of benches, signs, and kiosks that make a paved path feel like a finished place instead of a work site.
Here's what the county's own trail counters found once people actually started using it: this isn't primarily a place for an evening walk along the water. It's a bike commute between two cities, and the data behind that claim is more specific than "people like to ride bikes here."
What actually got finished this year
The headline construction, the 4.3-mile Humboldt Bay Trail South segment connecting Bracut to the Eureka Waterfront Trail, wrapped in 2025. The contractor was Arcata-based McCullough Construction, with Ghirardelli Associates handling construction management and GHD Inc. and Morrison Structures on engineering. Money came from the California Transportation Commission's Active Transportation Program, the State Coastal Conservancy, and Caltrans District 1.
What lingered into 2026 was the part that actually makes a trail usable day to day: two map kiosks, three interpretive signs, ten wayfinding signs, four benches, and two automatic trail counters. Not glamorous work, but it's the difference between a raw asphalt strip through the marsh and a trail where you can find a bench, read a sign about the Wiyot village sites the route passes, or figure out which parking lot you're actually standing in.
The grand opening itself pulled in people you'd recognize if you follow local government: Senate President pro Tempore Mike McGuire, Great Redwood Trail Agency Executive Director Elaine Hogan, and Humboldt County's Deputy Public Works Director of Environmental Services Hank Seemann all spoke. The day included two morning trail cleanups, a one-way skate run from Arcata to Eureka for roller skaters and skateboarders, a group bike ride, and a shuttle service from Humboldt Transit Authority for anyone who wanted to ride one direction and bus back.
Public Works Director Thomas K. Mattson described the goal plainly at the time:
"Our vision is to restore access to and protect the shoreline, provide a place for people to connect with each other and the natural world, and ensure a multi-use trail option for those traveling between Eureka and Arcata."
That word "traveling" turns out to matter more than the ribbon-cutting language usually suggests.
The count that changes the story
Two automatic counters now sit along the trail, one near the south side of the Brainard levee and one in front of the Bracut Industrial Park. Over the twelve months from July 2025 through June 2026, the Brainard counter logged 101,035 total counts. Eighty-six percent were cyclists. Only 14 percent were pedestrians.
The Bracut counter told the same story, more sharply: 84,719 counts, 91 percent cyclists, just 9 percent on foot.
If this were a leisure trail, a place people go to stroll after dinner or push a stroller along the bay, you'd expect something closer to an even split, or even a pedestrian majority, the way you see on most short waterfront boardwalks. Instead, nine or ten out of every ten trips are someone on a bike, which is the signature of a route people are using to actually get somewhere, not just to get outside.
The seasonal swing backs this up. At Brainard, average daily counts ranged from 484 per day in July 2025 down to 173 per day in February 2026, a drop of nearly two-thirds. Bracut showed the same pattern, from roughly 377 per day at its summer peak down to about 142 per day in February. That's not the ridership curve of a scenic path people visit regardless of weather. It's the curve of a route that functions as an alternative to Highway 101 in good weather and gets abandoned for a car the moment it's cold and wet, which is exactly what you'd expect from a commuter corridor in a county that gets its rain in the winter months.
What's actually rideable, point to point
Start at the Arcata Skate Park, at Foster and Sunset, and the Humboldt Bay Trail North runs 4.5 miles through Shay Park and along Alliance Road before dropping into the Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary, which doubles as the city's wastewater treatment system and is worth a stop at the Marsh Interpretive Center if you've never seen how that actually works.
From the marsh, the trail continues to Bracut, then picks up the newer Humboldt Bay Trail South segment, four-plus miles along the shoreline between the railroad tracks and Highway 101, including a full mile riding the top of the Brainard levee with open views across the bay. The route crosses the Eureka Slough Bridge, a former railroad bridge now dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists, and becomes the Eureka Waterfront Trail on the other side.
That last stretch runs roughly 6.5 to 7 miles from the old Elk River Park and Ride up to Tydd Street, passing the boardwalk behind Blue Ox Millworks that crosses the salt marsh, and threading past Old Town on its way north. Seven of the benches along this section were designed by local artists, so if a bench looks a little different from the standard county model, that's why.
County planners still describe the eventual full network as roughly 13 miles. Map the ride yourself today, start to finish from the Arcata Skate Park to the northern end of the Eureka Waterfront Trail, and you'll clock closer to 14.8 miles, since that figure counts the full built length of every connected segment rather than the county's rounded shorthand for the core corridor.
Where to get on, and what's worth building a Sunday around
Access points are scattered enough that almost any Eureka or Arcata neighborhood has a reasonable entry point: the Herrick Avenue Park and Ride, Hilfiker Lane west of Broadway, the Bayshore Mall parking lot, the foot of Del Norte Street or C Street, the Samoa Bridge boat launch off Waterfront Drive, and Larson Park at the end of Eye Street on the Arcata side.
If you're a birder rather than a cyclist, the Redwood Region Audubon Society leads guided birdwalks on the third Sunday of every month at 9 a.m., meeting at the parking lot at the foot of West Del Norte Street, where the group scopes birds from the public dock. Given how much of the trail runs through willow patches, saltmarsh, and dune systems, it's one of the better ways to actually learn what you're looking at instead of just riding past it.
What's next
The county isn't treating this as finished business. In February 2026, planners completed a study, funded jointly by Caltrans' Sustainable Transportation Planning Grant Program and the Humboldt County Association of Governments, for extending the trail south from Eureka to College of the Redwoods along the old railroad corridor. That extension would reach Humboldt Hill, King Salmon, and Fields Landing, communities that currently have no direct non-motorized route north into Eureka at all.
There's also a standing funding mechanism for the trail's day-to-day upkeep. The Humboldt Bay Trail Fund, administered by the Humboldt Area Foundation and overseen by a seven-member committee that includes representatives from the cities of Arcata and Eureka, County Public Works, and the Humboldt Trails Council, accepts proposals from public agencies and community groups for maintenance, emergency repairs, and small amenity upgrades, with awards typically running $500 to $10,000. The February 2026 grant cycle closed with the same deadline as the College of the Redwoods planning study, which tells you the trail's next chapter is already being written by people who live along it, not just by the agencies that built it.
For now, what exists is a nearly continuous shoreline route between two of Humboldt County's largest towns, finished enough to have real benches and real signage, and used enough to have real numbers behind it. The next time someone asks whether it's actually done, the honest answer is: yes, as of this year, and the people riding it every summer morning already knew that before the county made it official.
If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in Eureka or Arcata, from the trails people use to the neighborhoods they connect, Redwood Realty has been paying attention to details like these for a long time. Get Your Home Value and let's talk about what's next for you here.
