Walk the gravel spine of the Samish Crest Trail on a weekday evening and you'll pass a dog walker, a mountain biker coasting down through the old clearcut, maybe a runner who ducked out from a Western dorm fifteen minutes ago. None of them are thinking about a planning goal the city set in 1990. But that goal is the reason the ridge under their feet is about to change, and this year three separate, decades-apart promises made to this pocket of Bellingham are finally landing at once, on three completely different timelines.
That's the thing about the neighborhood the city calls Samish and most residents call Samish Hill: it isn't one place moving at one speed. It's three overlapping systems, each with its own clock. The Crest is a trail network finally catching up to a 36-year-old plan. The lake is a park that came back from a bridge closure but didn't come all the way back. The Way is a commercial strip where a 37-year-old drive-in still sets the tone while a housing project and a road overlay both grind through their own separate multi-year processes. If you live here, you probably only track one of the three. Here's what's actually happening on all of them.
The Crest Is Catching Up To A Promise From 1990
The Samish Crest Trail runs about 1.7 miles from the edge of the Puget neighborhood into the heart of Samish, cutting through 113 acres of forest with a couple of real payoffs: a lookout over Bellingham Bay near the top, and salmonberries along the path if you time it right. For years the open space around that trail has been a patchwork, part official city parkland, part unofficial social trails worn in by the same dog walkers and mountain bikers who use it now.
That's changing because of a deal that closed in March 2025. Bellingham spent $4 million in voter-approved Greenways Levy money, a fund that pulls in more than $9 million a year, to buy 66 acres on the southern end of the Crest and stitch it to land the city already owned. The purchase wasn't really about adding acreage for its own sake. It was about finishing something the city has wanted since 1990: a continuous north-south trail connecting Whatcom Falls Park all the way to Lake Padden Park.
Here's the part that matters if you actually use these trails: buying the land was the easy step. The harder one, a formal trail-connection and wayfinding plan for the newly contiguous Crest, is only budgeted to begin in 2026. In other words, the ridge you're walking on today still looks and feels like the informal network it's always been. The signage, the official routes, the parts that get built out for people who aren't already comfortable getting a little lost, are still ahead. If you've been waiting for the Crest to feel finished, this is the year the waiting officially becomes planning, not the year it becomes pavement.
The Lake Came Back, But Not All The Way
Samish Park, on the northwest shore of Lake Samish, is the only public beach on the lake. It closed ahead of the 2024 swim season so crews could replace the North Lake Samish Bridge, a project the city expected to take about a year, plenty long enough to swallow more than one boating season. The park has since reopened. What hadn't reopened, at least as of last fall's reporting, was a stretch of lakeside trail between the main park and the fishing dock.
That distinction is easy to miss if you're only skimming a headline that says the park is back. For someone planning a picnic, a swim, or a shoreline walk with the dog, "reopened" and "fully reopened" are two different afternoons. Day-lodging reservations for the 2026 season opened back in December, so the shelters and group spaces are bookable, but the full loop around the water isn't there yet.
The lake is also getting a moment of unusual visibility this year for a different reason. On August 29, the Bellingham Traverse relay, the low-stakes multi-sport cousin of Ski to Sea, runs under new management for the first time, with a route that sends road bikers around Lake Samish on their way from Marine Park to Lake Padden before handoff to the trail runners. It's a one-day event, not an infrastructure story, but it's a useful marker: even with a piece of shoreline trail still fenced off, the lake is functional enough to anchor a citywide race.
Quick snapshot of where things actually stand at the park right now:
- Open: the main park, the beach, day-use areas, and day-lodging reservations for 2026
- Still closed as of last fall's reporting: the lakeside trail segment between the main park and the fishing dock
- New this year: the Bellingham Traverse road-bike leg loops the lake on August 29
The Way Still Runs On Boomer's Time
If the Crest is waiting on a planning process and the lake is waiting on a trail segment, Samish Way is waiting on two things moving at once, neither of which has much to do with the other.
The first is Samish Commons, the Bellingham Housing Authority's redevelopment of the old Aloha Motel site. The plan calls for roughly 172 affordable rental homes across three buildings plus 20,000 square feet of commercial space fronting Samish Way, part of a mixed-income, mixed-generation project that's been unfolding in phases for years under the Samish Way Urban Village plan the city adopted back in 2009 and updated again in 2019. The corridor's designation as a federal Opportunity Zone has kept investor interest alive even as construction has moved in stages rather than all at once.
The second is pavement, literally. The city is currently in the design phase of a Samish Way and Maple Street overlay project meant to resurface the roadway and improve pavement conditions, with an engineering contract running from this past July through September 2027. That's a design and permitting window, not a construction start date, which means the corridor's next visible change is more likely to be traffic control signs than finished asphalt.
Through all of that, the one fixed point on Samish Way has been open since 1989. Boomer's Drive-In sits right where Maple Street bends into Samish Way, carhop service and all, and every January and February it runs "Boomuary," selling burgers for the same low price it's charged since it opened, a number that had only crept from $2.99 in 2013 to $3.44 by 2023. It's the kind of institution that outlasts subarea plans and paving contracts alike, which is probably why generations of Western students have treated a stop there as a rite of passage rather than a dining choice.
Three Clocks, One Neighborhood
None of this is really about roads, trails, or a drive-in menu on its own. It's about what it means to live somewhere that's improving on three unsynchronized schedules at the same time. The Crest is in its planning year. The lake is in its partial-recovery year. The Way is in its overlapping design-phase-and-construction-phase year, propped up in the meantime by a business that hasn't needed a single planning document to stay exactly what it's always been.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks one of these threads closely, it's worth knowing the other two exist, if only because they'll eventually intersect. A finished Crest trail network someday means more foot traffic funneling down toward the Way. A fully reopened lakeside loop means more weekend visitors passing the same commercial frontage the city is trying to fill with year-round tenants. None of that changes what to do this weekend. It just means the version of "finished" you're picturing for any one of these projects is probably still a couple of years out, and the neighborhood you'll be living in by then is being decided in city planning documents and design contracts right now, not next spring.
For anyone tracking how these kinds of neighborhood shifts play out over time, especially in a market where infrastructure investment tends to show up in property values a few years after the ground actually breaks, Flannery Group keeps close watch on projects like these across Whatcom County. If you want a read on what a particular block or listing in Samish actually looks like once you factor in what's still under construction around it, schedule a local market consult and we'll walk through it with you.
