San Carlos's Hillside Trails Are Finally Catching Up to a 2012 Plan

A weekend walk into the hills behind San Carlos used to depend on knowing somebody. The trails were real. The access wasn't always official. That changed inside the last two years, and most of the people who benefit from it have no idea the paperwork behind their Saturday morning loop only recently caught up with the dirt.

Start with the number that explains the lag: San Carlos's Hillside Trails Plan, the document that first identified a public route through Devonshire Canyon, dates to 2012. The trail itself didn't open until more than a decade later. That gap between the plan on paper and the trail on the ground is the real story here, and it's still playing out across three other corners of the city's park system.

The Los Vientos Way entrance wasn't always legal

Pulgas Ridge Open Space Preserve sits in the hills above San Carlos and Redwood City, a 366-acre property with six miles of trail running through oak woodland and chaparral up to a ridge with bay views. For years, the preserve's only sanctioned entry points sat off Edmonds Road, on the Redwood City side. If you lived closer to the San Carlos edge, the shortest way in ran through a residential street called Los Vientos Way, and using it meant walking through a gap that wasn't a designated preserve entrance at all.

That changed at a Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District board meeting on February 14, 2024, when the board voted to formally open pedestrian access at the end of Los Vientos Way. It's a small administrative fact with an outsized effect on daily life in the neighborhood: a route people were likely already using informally became a legitimate front door to a preserve that includes a 17.5-acre off-leash dog area threaded through the Cordilleras, Polly Geraci, and Blue Oak trails.

The trail that took twelve years

Devonshire Canyon is the more striking case. The Hillside Trails Plan flagged a public trail through the canyon back in 2012, but the land sat under a 30-foot-wide easement across privately held open space, and nothing moved for over a decade. The city picked it back up after a 2023 council strategic planning retreat, and design work finally wrapped in August 2024. Consultants Roach and Campbell drew a route running from Vista Park through an adjacent parcel known as Lot G, with switchbacks connecting to the easement beyond it. Trailscape, Inc. built it. When finished, the trail runs roughly 3,950 feet, an out-and-back of about three-quarters of a mile.

First drawn on paper in 2012. Opened to hikers more than ten years later.

The city's own events calendar later listed a ribbon cutting for the finished trail, marking the moment a route that existed only as a line on a 2012 planning map became something you could actually walk.

Pickleball got a court without a new park

Not every fix required years of land negotiation. When the Parks, Recreation and Culture Commission started hearing from residents about pickleball demand, the city looked at what it already owned rather than what it might need to buy. Staff proposed two options in December 2022: convert the existing sport court at Crestview Park, or dual-line the tennis courts at Highlands Park. The commission approved both. Work at Crestview Park began the week of October 9, 2023, and took about three weeks, with the existing bike-and-scooter use of the space left intact alongside the new court lines.

It's a useful contrast to the Devonshire Canyon timeline. One project needed a decade because it depended on an easement across private land. The other took three weeks because the asphalt was already there.

What's still waiting on funding

Not everything in the pipeline has cleared. North Crestview Park, a separate 4.3-acre passive space with grassy areas, walking paths, and bay views, has a much bigger build-out planned but no dollars behind it yet. The San Mateo Daily Journal reported that the city council approved a master plan concept for the park featuring a loop trail, native plantings, a multiuse meadow, a fitness zone, restrooms, picnic tables, and a playground. Pickleball was floated for the site too, but community feedback pushed the multiuse court toward soccer and basketball lines instead. The estimated cost sits near $7.5 million, and design funding isn't expected until fiscal year 2026-27, with construction still years further out after that.

So the pattern isn't universal progress. It's selective progress, driven by whichever project could clear its specific obstacle first: an easement negotiation, a board vote, an existing slab of asphalt, or a budget line that hasn't been funded yet.

The city just wrote the next twenty years into a plan

The piece that ties all of this together landed this summer. On June 8, 2026, the San Carlos City Council adopted a new Parks Master Plan, the first comprehensive update since 2009. Seventeen years is a long time for a planning document to sit unrevised while a city's population, budget, and recreation habits shift underneath it. The new plan is meant to guide the park system for the next two decades, and coming just months after the Devonshire Canyon ribbon cutting, it reads less like a fresh idea than an official acknowledgment of work already underway.

Here's a quick look at how the pieces fit together, by acreage and what changed:

If your weekend routine already includes Big Canyon Park's loop or Eaton Park's 57.6 acres of meandering trail, none of this changes where you walk the dog tomorrow morning. What it changes is the shape of the network around those familiar routes. A Los Vientos Way entrance means Pulgas Ridge is no longer awkward to reach from the San Carlos side. A finished Devonshire Canyon Trail means Vista Park, at roughly 860 feet the highest point in the city, connects to a canyon route that used to exist only in a planning document. And a pickleball court that didn't require a new parcel of land means the next fight over park space in San Carlos is more likely to be about what goes into North Crestview Park than about whether the city can afford to build anything at all.

None of this required a ballot measure or a headline-grabbing groundbreaking. It required a Midpen board vote, a design contract, three weeks of court striping, and a plan document that finally got updated after seventeen years. That's usually how a trail network actually gets built: not all at once, but piece by piece, until enough of the backlog clears that someone writing about it can point to a single summer and say this is when it came together.

For more on how San Carlos residents spend time outdoors closer to downtown, our earlier look at outdoor living and downtown energy in San Carlos covers the patio and Laurel Street side of that picture.

If you're curious what else has changed in the neighborhood lately, or you're weighing a move within San Carlos and want someone who tracks this kind of detail block by block, the Archini & Sebastian Group is easy to reach and always happy to talk shop about the parts of this city that don't make it into a listing photo.