You start at Meridian Avenue on a Saturday morning, coffee already working, assuming the pavement under your tires will carry you straight through to downtown Willow Glen and on toward San Jose. A mile or so in, the trail just stops. No sign. No detour arrow. Just asphalt ending mid-block, the way it does when someone forgot to finish a sentence.
If that has happened to you, you are not bad at reading maps. The Los Gatos Creek Trail through Willow Glen is not one trail pretending to be two segments. It is two separately maintained reaches that share a name and a creek, with a gap of city streets stitched between them. The City of San José's own trail directory spells this out in plain terms: travel between downtown and west San José along this corridor requires riding on-street bike lanes on Willow Street, because no paved trail connects the two pieces.
Two Reaches, One Name
The city's facility records break the corridor into a downtown reach and a western reach, and the distances matter more than they sound like they should.
| Reach | Endpoints | Length |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown reach | San Carlos Street to Lonus Street | 1.9 miles |
| Western reach | Meridian Avenue to Lexington Dam | 9.3 miles |
Read that table again and you'll notice what's missing: nothing connects Meridian Avenue to Lonus Street. That's the gap. It runs directly through the part of Willow Glen most residents think of as the trail's home turf, and it's not an oversight waiting on funding. It's how the trail has functioned for years, and how it still functions today.
The Turn-By-Turn Nobody Signs
The workaround exists, and it's specific enough that you could write it on an index card and tuck it in a jersey pocket. Riders are meant to exit the western reach onto Willow Street about eight-tenths of a mile before the trail's official endpoint at Meridian, then follow a short sequence of turns to pick the downtown reach back up near Lonus Street:
- Exit the paved trail onto Willow Street, roughly 0.8 miles short of the Meridian Avenue terminus.
- Turn left onto Glen Eyrie Avenue.
- Turn left onto Lincoln Avenue.
- Turn right onto Lonus Street, where the downtown reach of the trail resumes.
Lonus itself is a short stub street off Lincoln, sitting about nine-tenths of a mile from where the western reach ends. That's the real size of the gap: not a technicality, but close to a full mile of surface streets standing in for trail.
If the map on your phone shows one unbroken green line running through Willow Glen, treat that line as an intention rather than a fact. The turns are real. The line is not.
The Bridge That Took Seven Years
The reason the north end of this system looks the way it does traces back to a fight that had nothing to do with trail maintenance and everything to do with a wooden railroad bridge.
The Willow Glen Trestle carried Western Pacific Railroad freight, including runs to the Del Monte cannery, and the city took ownership of it in 2011 with plans to eventually swap it for a pedestrian bridge linking the trail network. A group called the Friends of the Willow Glen Trestle fought for seven years to keep the crossing standing, arguing it deserved restoration instead of removal. California's Historical Resources Commission agreed, adding the trestle to the state register even as the city continued pushing for demolition. The last court challenge was denied in late 2020, and crews began tearing the trestle down that December. Councilmember Dev Davis, who represented the district, said around that time that the trail would be connected by fall even if the connection wasn't paved yet.
The replacement was a prefabricated steel bridge that had been sitting in storage for years while the litigation dragged on. It went in and opened to the public in January 2021, well ahead of the fall Davis had floated. That bridge is what links the northern end of the Three Creeks Trail, a separate 0.9-mile spur running from Lonus Street to the Guadalupe River, to the paved Los Gatos Creek Trail.
For cyclists specifically, that connection opens up a second option that has nothing to do with the Willow Street detour. Instead of threading through the Glen Eyrie and Lincoln turns, riders can exit near Leigh Avenue onto the Willow Street bike lane and pick up the Three Creeks Trail at the corner of Willow and Bird Avenue, bypassing Lincoln Avenue's narrower, busier stretch entirely on the way toward downtown.
What's Still Unfunded
None of this makes the system finished. The Santa Clara Valley Water District put roughly $450,000 toward the western alignment of the Three Creeks Trail, money that covered access gates, signage, and the pedestrian bridge, but that funding was explicitly for the interim western piece. The city's own trail page is direct about the rest: an eastern alignment is planned to extend the network further into San José, and it remains unfunded.
That distinction matters if you're the kind of resident who checks a city planning page every couple of years expecting news. The version of this trail system you use today, gap and all, is likely to be the version you use for a while longer.
What This Actually Means If You Use The Trail Weekly
For everyday use, the practical geography looks like this. Heading north from Willow Glen, the downtown reach passes the dog park portion of Del Monte Park before ending at Dupont Street, where a set of stairs leads up to the West San Carlos Street bridge and into downtown San José proper, close to the Diridon rail corridor. Heading south from the same neighborhood, the western reach keeps going for miles, through Campbell and into Los Gatos, eventually reaching the Forbes Mill Museum near downtown Los Gatos before the pavement gives way to dirt closer to Lexington Reservoir.
Willow Glen sits at the literal seam of that system. It's the neighborhood where a regional trail that stretches nearly ten miles into the hills meets a shorter urban stretch heading into downtown San José, and the seam happens to be sewn with residential streets instead of more pavement. Locals who've ridden it long enough stop noticing the gap because the four turns become automatic. Newer residents, and plenty of visitors following a map, hit that unmarked stop and assume something's wrong with the trail. Nothing is wrong. It's just built in two pieces, and always has been.
Knowing exactly where a neighborhood's daily routines run, down to the specific turn that makes a Saturday ride work, is the kind of detail that only comes from spending real time in a place. If you're weighing a move to Willow Glen, or trying to understand how a neighborhood actually functions day to day before you commit to it, Elsa Garza can walk you through the parts of South Bay living that don't show up on a listing page.
