If your regular loop out of Silver Springs starts on the McLeod Creek Trail, you've already run into the orange fencing. It shows up just north of Silver Springs Drive and Bear Hollow Drive, right where the path used to carry you straight through toward Canyons Resort Drive. The detour sign points you down Bear Hollow Drive instead, over to Cooper Lane, onto the Frostwood Trail, and back to the main corridor near the resort. It works. It's also not the trail you've walked a thousand times.
Here's what's easy to miss if you only ever use one side of State Route 224 to get around: the corridor isn't closed, it's split. One side of the highway is mid-construction and rerouting daily walkers and riders through neighborhood streets. The other side, the Old Ranch Road approach into Round Valley, hasn't been touched. For a neighborhood that treats trail access as part of daily life rather than a weekend errand, that split is the thing worth knowing about this season, not the construction itself.
What's Actually Closed, and Why It's Not a Quick Fix
The closures trace back to High Valley Transit's Bobsled Express project, a bus rapid transit line running along SR-224 from Kimball Junction to Old Town that locals have started calling "The Bob." Since April 10, 2026, the Millennium Trail on the west side of the highway has been restricted between Landmark Drive and Olympic Parkway, with a posted detour sending trail users through the underpass to the east side. On that east side, the McLeod Creek Trail has been restricted from just north of Silver Springs Drive and Bear Hollow Drive down to Canyons Resort Drive, with its own detour through Bear Hollow Drive and the Frostwood Trail.
By August, a shorter stretch of McLeod Creek Trail near Fox Point Circle and Cutter Lane closed for a separate three-week window, with High Valley Transit's Gabriel Shields pointing walkers and cyclists over to the Millennium Trail on the west side while that section was worked on. That's the pattern to expect for the rest of this project: not one closure that reopens in the fall, but a rotating set of restrictions that shift as construction moves down the corridor.
| Trail Segment | Affected Section | Posted Detour |
|---|---|---|
| McLeod Creek Trail (east side) | North of Silver Springs Dr./Bear Hollow Dr. to Canyons Resort Dr. | Bear Hollow Drive to Cooper Lane to Frostwood Trail |
| Millennium Trail (west side) | Landmark Drive to Olympic Parkway | Underpass crossing to McLeod Creek Trail |
| McLeod Creek Trail (localized) | Fox Point Circle to Cutter Lane | Millennium Trail on west side (temporary, ~3 weeks) |
The bigger context matters here. This isn't a single summer of inconvenience. The Bobsled Express is being built in phases through summer 2028, and construction activity for 2026 alone includes utility relocations, drainage work, roadway reconstruction, and new transit stations, with restrictions expected to shift through November before pausing for winter. UDOT is also running a separate resurfacing project on 224 this year, from the Marsac roundabout to State Route 248, mostly overnight work aimed at drivers rather than trail users, so if you've seen construction notices and assumed they're all one project, they're not. The trail detours are a transit story. The overnight paving is a pavement story. Both are happening on the same road at the same time, which is part of why this season feels busier than it is.
The Access Point That Isn't Part of Any of This
Here's the part of the Silver Springs and Old Ranch Road trail network that construction hasn't reached: the Old Ranch Road trailhead into Round Valley. It's long been the quieter of the neighborhood's access points, especially on weekdays, mostly because it doesn't run past the highway corridor the way the McLeod Creek and Millennium trails do. That's exactly what makes it the more reliable option through 2028. No detour, no rerouted crossing, no watching for construction signage while you're trying to get a dog to the pond before work.
That approach also puts you closer to the other pieces of daily life that make this stretch of Old Ranch Road worth living on in the first place. Willow Creek Park sits right along it, with a fenced dog pond that includes a floating dock for the more adventurous swimmers, eight pickleball courts, soccer fields, and a pond that converts to a hockey rink once it freezes. Farther along the same corridor, the Osguthorpe farm parcel, preserved as open space by Summit Land Conservancy, gets groomed into cross-country ski tracks once the snow sets in, which means the same land that's dog-pond season now becomes ski-season terrain in a few months without you having to drive anywhere new. And if you time a ride or a walk right, the Copper Moose Farm Stand along the way is still the spot for picking up something local on the way home.
None of that is new information if you've lived here a while. What's new is the reason to actually use it more this year. The habit of defaulting to the McLeod Creek and Millennium trails because they're the direct line to Canyons Village is going to keep running into construction signage for at least another two seasons. The Old Ranch Road side of the neighborhood was always the quieter option. Through 2028, it's also the more dependable one.
What This Actually Means for the Next Two Years
If you've been treating this construction as a temporary detour to tolerate until things go back to normal, it's worth resetting that expectation. The Bobsled Express timeline runs through summer 2028, and the restrictions are described as shifting, not disappearing, as work progresses down the corridor between April and November each year. That's not a single bad season. That's a new baseline for how the east side of the neighborhood connects to the resort side until the project wraps.
The practical move is the one a lot of Silver Springs residents haven't needed to make yet: build the Old Ranch Road entry into your regular rotation now, rather than waiting out a timeline that runs another two construction seasons. UDOT's SR-224 project page has the current detour maps if you want to check a specific stretch before you head out, and High Valley Transit posts updates as restrictions shift through the fall.
None of this changes what makes this stretch of Snyderville Basin worth being in. The dog pond is still there. The farm stand is still there. The quiet trailhead that most people treated as the backup option is, for the next two summers, the main one.
If you're weighing a move within Silver Springs or Old Ranch Road, or just want a second opinion on how a specific address sits relative to the trail network and the construction timeline, Pack | Fey knows this stretch of Summit County well enough to walk through it street by street. Request a private home valuation when you're ready to talk specifics.
