The Northwest Greenway Was Never One Trail, and Now the Gaps Are Gone
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
"It provides great opportunities for residents to be in nature, and to feel like you're not in this city," said Sonya Rippe, the city project supervisor who oversaw the last stretch of Plymouth's Northwest Greenway, at a ribbon-cutting on October 21, 2025. That was the day the city closed the final gap in a trail system that took a quarter century to finish.
Here's the part that gets lost in a headline like that. Most people who walk this trail already had Rippe's feeling long before last October. If your regular loop passes the Plymouth Dog Park, you've had it since 2016. If you've stood on the boardwalks over the Elm Creek wetlands, you've had it since 2018. If your teenager has climbed the netting on Peony Lane, you've had it since 2021. What changed this fall wasn't the feeling of being somewhere quiet inside a growing suburb. It was whether the separate pockets of Plymouth that already delivered that feeling finally connected to each other without a dead end in between.
The Northwest Greenway is not a single trail that opened all at once. It is six separate construction projects, built over ten years, that only became one continuous system this year. The timeline:
Add those up and you get the 7.7 miles of paved trail the city now points to. Almost nobody experienced it that way while it was being built, though. Most residents picked the entry point closest to their own subdivision and treated it like a cul-de-sac: walk in, walk out, turn around wherever the pavement happened to end that particular year.
The final phase, the one that closed the gap west of Juneau Lane to 57th Avenue, broke ground in April 2025. It was supposed to wrap by summer. Instead, construction stalled for months while the city waited on lumber for two new boardwalks, according to Rippe. The finished segment ended up costing about $800,000, paid for out of the city's park dedication fund rather than a new bond or tax.
It is a small detail, but it says something true about how these projects actually get finished. A twenty-five-year civic effort that started with a 2006 voter-approved $9 million referendum came down, in its last stretch, to whether a supplier could get the right lumber to a wetland crossing before the ground froze.
The greenway's own footprint is smaller than the mileage suggests. Measured in a straight line, the preserve runs about two miles, from Lake Camelot on the east to the Pavilion and Challenge Course near Wayzata High School on the west. The other 5.7 miles of pavement come from loops, spurs, and neighborhood connectors that fan out from that central line.
Back in 2017, when only about three miles were finished, city officials already described the project as passing through ten separate Plymouth neighborhoods. That is the more useful number for anyone deciding whether this trail is relevant to them. It was never designed as a destination you drive to. It was designed to run past the back of as many subdivisions as possible.
Even the acreage has shifted in city literature as the project matured. Early planning materials called it a 350-acre reserve. The finished project is now described as roughly 315 acres, the kind of adjustment that happens once final parcel surveys replace early estimates rather than any change to what got built.
The sixth phase added two boardwalks over wetlands, a rest stop with a bench, and a bike rack, connecting the trail west of Juneau Lane through to 57th Avenue. That sounds modest. Here is what it means in practice: if you used to start at the Dog Park and walk west toward the Elm Creek boardwalks, you would have hit a dead end somewhere around Juneau Lane. That dead end is gone. You can now continue straight through to the Pavilion and Challenge Course, and from there pick up the Medicine Lake Regional Trail, which reaches Three Rivers Park District's Clifton E. French Regional Park and Elm Creek Park Reserve.
That regional connection stays useful past summer, too. Three Rivers plows the Medicine Lake Regional Trail between County Road 81 and County Road 47 through the winter months, so the link from the greenway out to the regional parks doesn't disappear once the snow comes.
At the western end, on Peony Lane just north of Wayzata High School, sits the piece of the greenway most likely to surprise a longtime resident: the Challenge Course. It's free, open to anyone 13 and older, and built around netting, climbing structures, and balance obstacles rather than a standard playground. The adjacent pavilion has been available for private event rentals since 2022, with a plaza, restrooms, and a servery for anyone planning a birthday party or a small gathering.
Families who make that western trailhead their turnaround point often end up a few minutes down Peony Lane or Highway 55 afterward, at spots like Honey & Mackie's for ice cream, Culver's, or ElMar's for a slice of pizza. None of that is part of the trail system itself. It's just what tends to happen once you're already parked out there.
The greenway doesn't have one obvious front door. It has a dozen small ones, most of them tucked behind neighborhood parks you may already drive past:
Any of these gets you onto the system. Which one makes sense depends entirely on which piece of the greenway is already closest to where you live, which is really the point of the whole thing.
The ribbon-cutting made news because twenty-five years is a long time to finish anything. But the more useful fact for anyone who already lives near the greenway is quieter than that. The piece of trail you already know now goes somewhere it never used to. Worth a walk this fall, not to see something new, but to see where the thing you already knew finally leads.
Aaron Lowe has spent more than two decades in Plymouth, raising two kids through the Wayzata school district and watching this trail system grow one phase at a time. If you're weighing what a home near one of these access points is worth in today's west metro market, or just want to talk through the neighborhood with someone who actually walks it, let's connect.
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