Redmond's Dry Canyon Is Whole Again, and Most Locals Have Only Walked Half of It

Start at Bowlby Park on a September morning and Dry Canyon looks like exactly what you'd expect from a paved path behind a baseball field: joggers, a woman walking two leashed dogs, kids cutting across the grass toward the tennis courts at Sam Johnson Park. Keep walking north for close to four miles and the canyon stops looking like a park at all. The pavement narrows, juniper and sagebrush crowd the sandy shoulder trails, and the basalt walls that felt like landscaping a mile back start to feel like actual geology. Most people who live in Redmond have walked one end of this trail for years and never seen the other. This summer, for reasons that had nothing to do with recreation, seeing both halves got harder before it got easier again.

Two Canyons, One Bridge

The trail runs just under four miles one way, from NW 19th Street in the north down to Quartz Avenue in the south, which makes the out-and-back close to eight miles for anyone doing the whole thing in one go. But the mileage undersells how much the canyon changes along the way. The southern stretch is civic infrastructure with a trail running through it: Bowlby Park's ball fields, Sam Johnson Park's tennis and pickleball courts and ADA-accessible Hope Playground, and Kiwanis Field, still known locally as the Spud Bowl for the potato fields that occupied the canyon floor before any of this was a park.

Keep going and you pass under the Maple Avenue Bridge, which has become a minor landmark in its own right. Someone bolted permanent climbing holds and quickdraws to the underside of the arches, so on any given afternoon you might find someone actually climbing the bridge from below while cyclists roll past on the path underneath.

North of the bridge, the canyon changes register. The slope near the crossing still carries rusted debris from the decades when this stretch served as Redmond's unofficial dump. Cliff swallows nest in the higher canyon walls. Ground squirrels have colonized the old dumping ground. By the time the trail reaches its northern terminus, you're circling the city's wastewater treatment plant, and the smell tells you before the trail markers do. It is, depending on which regular you ask, either the trail's one flaw or the honest price of a four-mile hike that starts at a skate park and ends in something close to actual wilderness, inside city limits the whole time.

What Changed at the Seam

The stretch around Sam Johnson Park, right where the polished south end starts to loosen up, spent much of the past year and a half under construction. The Central Dry Canyon Improvement Project, a $7.2 million effort that broke ground in May 2025, added parking, resurfaced sections of the path, and reshaped Spudbowl Park. The most useful piece for anyone walking a dog: a new lighted crosswalk now connects the Weigand Family Dog Park to Sam Johnson Park along a protected path, so the trip between the two no longer means crossing traffic at an unmarked point. City engineers had targeted the end of June 2026 for substantial completion, and by all accounts the bulk of that work wrapped on schedule.

The disc golf course tucked next to the dog park kept running through most of this. The nine-hole layout off Antler Avenue has been there since 2011, carries a Professional Disc Golf Association listing, and stayed open even while construction crews worked near its final hole. Ask anyone who plays it regularly and they'll tell you the course is short, flat, and exactly as forgiving as a course needs to be when half the people using it also have a stroller.

The North End's Longer Story

The bigger disruption sat at the opposite end of the canyon, and it had nothing to do with recreation at all. Redmond's wastewater treatment plant, which has occupied the north end of Dry Canyon for decades, is being phased out in favor of a new facility called the Redmond Wetlands Complex, being built northwest of town on land the city has used for irrigation and biosolids disposal since the 1970s. The full project, interceptor pipeline included, now carries a price tag of $88.8 million, funded mostly through a $74 million Department of Environmental Quality loan with the balance coming from wastewater operations, system development charges, grants, and a contribution from Deschutes County.

This summer's piece of that project ran directly under the trail. Starting July 13, the city closed the north parking lot and trailheads completely to install a new 48-inch interceptor pipeline, more than double the diameter of the old 24-inch line, that will eventually carry effluent from the current plant to the new complex. The closure ran through August 29, with a detour route along 19th Street and alternate parking north of the closed lot in the meantime. That window has now passed. As of this writing the north end trailhead and parking lot are back in service, which means the full loop, dump-ground squirrels and all, is walkable again for the first time since early summer.

Worth knowing before you plan around it: the pipeline closure was one narrow piece of a much longer project. The Wetlands Complex itself isn't expected to be operational until summer 2027, with final completion that fall, so periodic work near the current treatment plant at the canyon's north end is likely to continue on and off for another year. None of it should touch the trail itself again the way this summer's closure did, but it's the kind of thing worth a glance at the city's project page before a long run in that direction.

What happens to the current plant site once it's decommissioned is still an open question, and one city staff seem genuinely undecided about. Public Works operations manager Ryan Kirchner, discussing the eventual fate of the north-end facility, told the Redmond Spokesman:

"I assume in the next several years we'll look at options of what would best serve our community at that site, and it could very well be just the natural landscape."

If that happens, the least scenic mile of the canyon, the one everyone currently holds their breath through, could eventually turn into more of the high desert wildland that already defines the stretch just south of it.

A Quick Reference for the Whole Loop

Walking It This Fall

With the north lot back open, the whole loop is doable again without a detour sign interrupting it. The dirt shoulder trails that parallel the paved path stay shaded longer than the asphalt itself, which matters more in September than it did in July. Dogs are welcome the entire length on leash, and the fenced dog park at Antler Avenue gives off-leash time to anyone who wants a break partway through. The disc golf course is free to play and busy most weekend mornings. If you're planning a Thanksgiving morning around the Redmond Turkey Trot, it starts at the Dry Canyon Trailhead, which by then should be well clear of any lingering construction signage.

Most people who've lived in Redmond for years have their own quarter mile of this canyon that they treat as the whole trail. Given how differently the two ends behave, that's understandable. But the full four miles, now walkable end to end for the first time since spring, is worth the trip at least once before winter closes the window on the shoulder-season light that makes the north end's canyon walls actually worth seeing.

If you're weighing what a piece of property near a trail system like this is actually worth, or just want a second opinion on how Redmond's neighborhoods stack up against each other, Erica Callfas is happy to talk through it. Let's connect.