If you've driven Wyatt Way toward the Head of the Bay, you've probably noticed the gap in the trees past the last driveway. No trail sign. No name on any city map. Just a path worn narrow by whoever walked it before you, disappearing into second-growth fir and disappearing again somewhere near Fletcher Bay Road. Ask a neighbor what's back there and you'll get a shrug and a rough answer: it follows a creek, it comes out on the other side, people have used it for years. That's been the entire trailhead sign for over two decades.
On October 1, the City of Bainbridge Island, the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation and the Bainbridge Island Metro Park & Recreation District are cutting a ribbon on that same gap in the trees at 2 p.m. What's opening isn't a new idea. It's an old one that finally cleared every remaining obstacle: easements, a wetland crossing, a construction season. The Lost Valley Trail has existed as a rough, unofficial track for as long as most Head of the Bay residents can remember. What changes on October 1 is that it becomes a real trail, with a boardwalk, a name on the map, and a job to do that goes well beyond one wooded mile.
A Bond From 2001, a Purchase From 2004, a Name Nobody Planned to Keep
The Lost Valley Trail traces back to the 2001 Open Space Bond, when Bainbridge voters approved funding to buy land and easements across the island for conservation and future trails. In April 2004, acting on a unanimous recommendation from the City's Open Space Commission, the City spent $280,000 to acquire six acres and roughly 400 feet of trail easements near the Head of the Bay, adding it to land the City already owned nearby. The purchase assembled a contiguous block of forest bisected by Cooper Creek, a salmon-bearing stream that feeds into Eagle Harbor. It got a little coverage in the local paper at the time. Then, for years, not much happened.
The name itself was almost an afterthought. The area had no formal designation and no real basis in island history, so the City's Open Space Commission needed something to call it. The first choice was "Hidden Valley," until someone on the commission pointed out that name was already taken by a bottle of salad dressing. They landed on "Lost Valley" instead, a label meant to describe a patch of woods most islanders had never heard of. Twenty-some years later, that's still the name, even though the valley is about to stop being lost to anyone.
Andy Maron, a board member with the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation who has worked on the project since it began, has called it two decades of stories behind one trail. Getting from a 2004 land purchase to an actual, walkable route meant assembling easements piece by piece from private landowners along the corridor, work the Foundation describes as securing "the links between the links" that make a longer trail possible at all.
What One Mile Actually Connects
The Lost Valley Trail itself is modest: a mostly wooded, roughly mile-long route across about 40 acres of public open space, running between the Head of the Bay area and Fletcher Bay Road, with connections into surrounding neighborhoods along Carmella Lane. On its own, that's a pleasant neighborhood walk. Its real significance is what it closes off.
Bainbridge Island's public trail network runs to nearly 50 miles, but a lot of that mileage lives inside individual parks: a loop around Gazzam Lake, the Grand Forest's network of paths, segments of the Waterfront Trail near Winslow. Getting from one to the next has usually meant a car, or a walk along a road shoulder. Lost Valley was the missing piece in a longer idea: a walkable route from the Winslow ferry terminal, through downtown, and all the way out to the 445-acre Gazzam Lake Nature Preserve, without needing to leave a trail for a road. City project planning engineer Mark Epstein has described the Lost Valley segment as an integral link in that route, one that opens a contiguous path across the central island to a string of destinations that were previously only connected on paper.
That's the piece worth sitting with if you already live here. The map isn't gaining one more trail. It's converting a handful of separate, well-loved walks into one continuous route, roughly three and a half to four miles one way from Winslow to Gazzam Lake, that didn't fully exist as a single walk until this month.
The Boardwalk Was the Hard Part
The reason this took until 2026 to finish, even after the land was long since assembled, comes down to about 200 linear feet of raised boardwalk over the Cooper Creek watershed. The valley bottom floods seasonally, and the creek supports salmon, which meant the crossing had to be built to standards that protect the stream rather than just get people across it. That boardwalk was the single most expensive piece of a roughly $180,000 trail project, built by the Bainbridge Island Metro Park & Recreation District under a 2021 agreement that formalized how the City and the Park District plan and build trails together.
Dan Hamlin, the Metro Park & Recreation District's executive director, credited the district's trails crew with finishing that final piece over the course of the season. The City itself has described Lost Valley as fulfilling a 30-year vision, a reminder that the idea long predates the paperwork. Land assembly can happen in a single vote. Building something that survives a wet Bainbridge winter over a live salmon stream takes longer.
What Changes on October 1
Mary Meier, executive director of the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation, called the opening a landmark moment for the island's trail network, noting that Lost Valley pushes the total past the 50-mile mark for public trails islandwide. That round number gets the headline, but the more useful fact for anyone who already lives near the Head of the Bay, Fletcher Bay Road, or the neighborhoods in between is that this is now a route you can actually walk end to end, not a set of destinations you drive to separately.
The timing lines up with a few other pieces of the same cross-island push. The Vincent Road to Gazzam Lake Trail opened earlier this year, and the Arbor Trail at Bloedel Reserve was built through a partnership with the same group of City, Park District and private landowner collaborators. None of these are new organizations doing new work. They're the same partnership finishing a route they started planning before some current island residents moved here.
The Park District has also put out an updated version of its large-format trail map, "Trails on Bainbridge Island," which now includes several newly added segments like Blakely Hill and the Sakai Park trails, along with a new color-coded system for trail difficulty and a "rollable" designation marking which routes are wheelchair-friendly. The map also links out, via QR code, to Kitsap Transit's BI Ride on-demand shuttle service, aimed at helping ferry walk-ons reach trailheads that aren't within easy walking distance of the dock. If you've ever tried to explain to a visiting friend how to get from the ferry to a trailhead without a car, that's a real answer now, not a workaround.
For a mile of trail that spent decades as an unmarked gap in the trees, that's a fair amount to have finally settled: a name, a boardwalk, a ribbon cutting, and a spot on a route that finally goes somewhere continuous. The updated trail map is worth picking up before you go, if only to see exactly where the Lost Valley Trail fits into the bigger picture.
If the Lost Valley Trail runs behind your street, or near it, the team at Mark Middleton Real Estate would like to hear what changes for you now that it's finished. We've been paying attention to this island's trail projects for the same reason we pay attention to everything else here: because the small, slow-moving changes are usually the ones that matter most to the people already living with them.
