The gate at the Murray Road parking area is shut. If you're one of the residents who parks there most weekends to walk the loop MCSD cut a couple years back, or to meet up with the Mountain Bike Tribal Trail Alliance crew for a Saturday build day, you've probably already hit the closure signs and turned around. It would be easy to read this as one more interruption in a public space that has felt half-finished since the town got its hands on it. That read misses what's actually happening on the ground this month.
Beginning in mid-August 2026, the Murray Road Parking Area and sections of the McKinleyville Community Forest are temporarily closed for hazardous fuels reduction work tied to the Murray Road Fuel Break Project, a joint effort between the Humboldt County Resource Conservation District, McKinleyville Community Services District, and Green Diamond Resource Company. It's one of five wildfire prevention projects moving forward under a Community Wildfire Protection Plan Phase VI grant, and the target is specifically the corridor along Murray Road itself, the road that connects McKinleyville to Fieldbrook and doubles as an evacuation route if things ever get bad. Crews are thinning ladder fuels and improving access for fire equipment. MCSD has said it will post updates as work progresses and reopen sections as soon as it's safe, but there's no fixed reopening date yet, so treat any weekend plan that depends on that lot as tentative through the rest of the month.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only see the closed gate: this is the first time in the forest's short public life that it's closing because someone is actively doing planned work on it, rather than closing because nobody had gotten around to opening it properly yet.
Why This Forest Is Dense Enough to Need a Fuel Break
The 599 acres that make up the Community Forest didn't get their fire risk by accident. MCSD acquired the land in January 2024 through a Trust for Public Land purchase from Green Diamond Resource Company, and the trees you're walking under are mostly second and third growth Sitka spruce, redwood, and Douglas fir. Roughly three-quarters of that timber is under 30 years old, with some sections logged as recently as 2017. That's not neglect. It's the direct result of decades of short-rotation, even-aged clear-cutting under the previous owner, a management style built around 45-year harvest cycles that leaves a forest permanently young, permanently dense, and permanently loaded with the low shrubs and lower limbs that turn a ground fire into a canopy fire.
MCSD's draft Forest Management Plan, recommended for approval by the Community Forest Committee in November 2025 and taken up by the district board in December, explicitly rejects that model going forward. The plan shifts to uneven-aged silviculture, meaning lighter harvests every 10 to 25 years that remove only 20 to 40 percent of stand volume instead of clearing whole sections at once. The goal, according to the plan, is a forest that eventually looks more like old growth, with varied canopy heights and standing snags for wildlife, rather than a tree farm on a fixed rotation. The fuel break work happening this month is the first physical step in managing that inherited density before it becomes a liability, not the start of a new one.
Where to Walk Instead This Month
If your usual route runs through the closed sections, Hammond Trail is the reliable substitute, and it's worth treating as more than a detour. The trail runs roughly 5 to 5.5 miles as a segment of the California Coastal Trail, stretching from the Arcata Bottoms north to Clam Beach County Park, and it's managed by Humboldt County Parks rather than MCSD, so the Community Forest closure has no effect on it.
A few practical starting points if you're working around the closure:
- Hiller Park, off Hiller Road near Fischer Avenue, gives you parking plus a shorter loop through coastal meadow and forest before you commit to the longer stretch north.
- Clam Beach County Park, at 1100 Clam Beach Drive, is the northern trailhead and the spot most people use if they want beach access along with the walk.
- The Murray Road and Kelly Avenue intersection is a southern access point that's closer to town if you're not driving out toward the coast.
- The Mad River pedestrian bridge, reached via Janes Road off the Giuntoli Lane exit, is the southernmost start and the section with the best river views.
The trail is dog friendly, mostly flat with a steeper gravel grade north of Widow White Creek down to Clam Beach, and paved enough in most sections to work for strollers and bikes as well as walkers. It's a fair trade for a month when the forest's own trails are inconvenient.
The Forest Is About to Stop Being Confusing
Here's where the closure connects to something bigger. Anyone who's used the Community Forest since it opened knows the access has always been a little makeshift. As recently as 2024, visitors were parking in a gravel pullout next to a locked gate because the actual parking lot hadn't been built yet, and the only posted sign at the eastern entrance was easy to miss. That informality wasn't unique to Murray Road either. The district's own trail planning documents acknowledge unofficial entry points off Babler Lane, Gwin Road, Sutter Road, and Cochrane Road, none of which are officially designated, all of which technically involve trespass, and several of which have become dumping spots as a result.
That's the exact problem the Trails, Infrastructure, Clean-up and Security subcommittee has been working through since its first meeting in October 2024. The subcommittee's Draft Trail Plan, which has been through repeated rounds of review with a target completion in the first half of 2026, is meant to formalize which of those informal cuts become real, maintained trailheads and which get closed off to protect the creek habitat they currently run through. In November 2025, MCSD also received a one million dollar earmark from Congressman Huffman for the forest, with the funding allocation still pending as of this writing but earmarked for whatever the committee prioritizes once it lands.
None of that happens in a vacuum, either. At a TICS meeting in February 2026, the subcommittee took public comment on a proposal to add a disc golf course to the forest, and the response was not quiet. Forty-five written comments came in supporting it, along with eleven people who showed up in person to make the case and argue over where it should go. Whatever you think about disc golf, that's a sign the planning process is actually being watched and argued over by the people who'll use the results, not rubber-stamped in an empty room.
How to Actually Track What's Happening
If you want to stay ahead of closures like this one instead of finding out at the locked gate, MCSD's Community Forest page is the most current source, and it includes a direct contact for the Parks and Recreation Director if you want a real answer instead of a guess.
If you'd rather put in a few hours than just watch, there are two standing volunteer opportunities that predate this month's closure and will outlast it. MCSD's Volunteer Trail Stewards hold build and maintenance workdays on the third Saturday of each month. Separately, the Mountain Bike Tribal Trail Alliance, a veteran-led nonprofit founded by Shaun Fyfe and affiliated with Two Feathers Native American Family Services, holds its own workdays on the second Saturday, meeting at the Murray Road lot to work on the multi-use trail network it signed an agreement with MCSD to help build back in 2024. Both groups are how the forest's more official trails actually got built in the first place, and both will likely be doing more of that work once the fuel break crews clear out and the Trail Plan finally locks in.
The gate being closed this month isn't the story. The story is that after two and a half years of committee meetings, draft documents, and gravel pullouts standing in for real parking lots, McKinleyville's forest is finally getting worked on the way a public forest should be. That's worth a little patience and a reroute to Hammond Trail while it happens.
If you're weighing what living near a piece of public land like this actually means day to day, whether that's proximity to trails, access to the coast, or just understanding how a growing town's infrastructure is catching up to it, Mike and Marci Pigg know McKinleyville from the ground up. Let's Connect.
