The Real Trail Story in Summerlin This Year Isn't the Mileage Count

If you've lived in Summerlin more than a year or two, you've probably read some version of this sentence before: trails are the community's most beloved amenity, the system now stretches past 200 miles, and it's still growing toward 250. That exact framing, credited most recently to Danielle Bisterfeldt, the community's senior vice president of marketing, has shown up in Howard Hughes press materials in 2020, 2023, 2024, 2025 and again this spring, with barely a word changed year to year.

That repetition isn't a knock on the trails themselves. It's a signal that the mileage total is marketing copy, not news. The actual news, the part that changes how you get around this year and not five years ago, happened on the ground in two specific places: a stretch of Crestdale Lane that went dark for months, and a single new mile of pavement that finally connects Summerlin to Red Rock Canyon after two decades of advocacy.

The Sentence Summerlin Repeats Every Spring

The 200-plus-mile figure is real, and the trail system genuinely does connect neighborhoods to parks, schools and shopping the way the copy claims. But if you're trying to figure out whether your regular loop is open, closed, or rerouted this month, the aggregate number tells you nothing. What matters is which segment is under construction, which street is a detour, and which new piece just opened. That's the part the annual release skips, because it doesn't change from one year to the next. This year, it did.

What Actually Closed This Year

The Summerlin Parkway Trail Project is a $26 million effort that will eventually run 3.5 miles between the CC-215 Beltway Trail and Rampart Boulevard, linking up with the existing Bonanza and Angel Park Trail on the far end. The whole build was budgeted for roughly 18 months when construction started, funded through federal money and Regional Transportation Commission tax dollars, not developer fees.

The part that actually disrupted daily routines was Crestdale Lane. To build a tunnel that lets the new trail pass safely underneath the road, the city closed Crestdale between Covington Cross and Trailwood entirely, with construction announced to begin in January 2026 and originally scheduled to last three months. Detour signage pointed drivers north to Trailwood toward either Town Center Drive or Anasazi Drive, and drivers coming from the south toward Covington Cross east to Town Center, or west around the curve to Banbury Cross and then to Anasazi. A separate, shorter detour rerouted trail users near the Rampart Casino, sending people south on Rampart to Canyon Run instead of the old path along the property's west edge.

By late March, residents were still asking when Crestdale would reopen, and the city's answer at the time was that the original three-month window was nearly up. Working from that same schedule, the closure should be well behind you by now.

Here's how the four segments of the project were sequenced, based on the city's own phasing:

The first three segments were slated to wrap by the end of this summer, so most of the corridor should be finished or very close to it by now. The fourth, the stretch that includes a pedestrian bridge over the wash west of Rampart, runs into spring 2027. If your loop touches that last piece, expect construction signage for a while longer.

The Mile That Finally Reaches Red Rock

The more meaningful change didn't happen on Summerlin Parkway. It happened at the western edge of the community, where Charleston Boulevard meets Sky Vista Drive in the village of Stonebridge.

On April 28, 2026, Clark County opened the first phase of the Red Rock Legacy Trail: a 0.99-mile, 12-foot-wide paved path running from that intersection out to the Red Rock Canyon marker. As part of the same project, the county installed a new traffic signal at Charleston and Sky Vista, built a dedicated trailhead parking lot, and relocated the Red Rock Canyon sign itself to a safer pull-off so visitors can stop for photos without blocking the highway shoulder.

This is a small piece of pavement with a long backstory. Save Red Rock, the local nonprofit that pushed for it, started campaigning for a safe non-motorized route into the canyon back in 2005. Its president, Heather Fisher, has described the trail as a tribute to a friend who was killed while training near the canyon on a bike, riding the same shoulder this project is designed to get people off of. Clark County Commissioner Justin Jones, who worked on the project, has called this opening segment the hardest phase precisely because it required building the bridge crossing that makes the rest of the route possible. Representative Susie Lee helped secure federal funding, and members of the Southern Nevada Bicycle Coalition turned out for the ribbon cutting.

Worth being clear-eyed about scope: this is one mile of a planned 19-mile trail that will eventually run from the edge of Summerlin all the way to Blue Diamond Road. According to Save Red Rock's own project updates, phases two and three, which would carry the trail on toward the Scenic Loop and the Red Rock Visitor Center, aren't expected to open until 2028. So this isn't the finished connection. It's the first mile of it, and it's the mile that took the longest to build because it involved the bridge crossing everything else depends on.

What This Means for Your Regular Loop

If your walk or ride touches Crestdale Lane between Covington Cross and Trailwood, that stretch should be open again, with the new pedestrian tunnel now running underneath it. If your route near the Rampart Casino used to hug the property's west edge, double check current signage, since that detour to Canyon Run was tied to the same project timeline and may still be in effect on the Rampart-to-Town Center segment.

If you haven't had a reason to drive out to the Stonebridge side of the community, the Charleston and Sky Vista corner is worth the trip now. There's an actual parking lot there for the first time, a real trailhead instead of a gravel pull-off, and a paved mile that gets you out toward the canyon without sharing a shoulder with cars on State Route 159. It's not the full connection to the Scenic Loop yet, but it's the difference between an idea two decades in the making and a place you can actually park and walk.

None of this shows up in a press release about total trail mileage, because none of it changes the total mileage claim from one year to the next. It changes whether Crestdale is a through street this month, whether there's a signal and a lot at Sky Vista, and whether the piece of trail you've been hearing about for years is finally something you can stand on.

Staying current on details like these, the ones that never make it into the annual copy, is part of what it means to actually know a neighborhood rather than just market it. If you're weighing a move in or around Summerlin and want a read on the community that goes beyond the brochure, Gianni Sammarco can walk you through what's genuinely changing here, on the trails and in the market alike. Request a private market consultation and valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.