At the trailhead off 150th Street, past the portable toilet and the gravel lot that fills before nine most weekends, a laminated sign has hung since February 2025: the Red Barn Trail is closed to all users due to safety concerns. The trail sits at the southeast corner of Beaver Marsh Lake, and the county's language hasn't changed in the year and a half since, a long-term fix that will take a few months. One longtime hiker posted online that the pond had dried up entirely and the trail was in the best shape they'd seen it in over a decade of walking it. They called the closure nonsense.
The mud complaint might even be fair. What it misses is the bigger picture. Red Barn isn't stuck because of one soft patch of ground near a marsh. It's stuck because Lord Hill Regional Park is in the middle of the most significant rebuild of its 30-plus mile trail system since it opened to the public three decades ago, and a single trail segment near a wetland boundary is a low priority against 60 other line items competing for the same handful of parks staff.
A plan six years in the making
Snohomish County's last real master plan for the park dated to 1996, an addendum to an even older 1988 document that nobody on staff today would recognize as adequate. Trail use at Lord Hill exploded over those thirty years, hikers, mountain bikers, equestrians, and trail runners all converging on the same unofficial paths that residents had carved into the hillside without much oversight. By the time the county sat down to fix it, the process took six years of surveys, meetings, and public comment before a final Preferred Plan was released in July 2022.
Senior Park Planner Emily Griffith summed up the goal at the time: the county didn't want people to love the park to death. More than 60 distinct projects came out of that plan, from drainage fixes to full trail decommissions, and county staff estimated that clearing the list on staff time alone, not counting volunteer hours, would take roughly a decade. More than three-quarters of the park's 1,480 acres will stay undeveloped and untouched. This isn't a park getting bigger. It's a park getting organized.
Whose trail is it
Not every user group came away happy. When the draft plan proposed swapping the equestrian parking area to a lot with angled, back-in spaces, horse trailer drivers pushed back hard, arguing the layout made maneuvering a trailer nearly impossible. About 70 members of the public showed up to one meeting to say so. The final plan restored a handful of dedicated bike-only segments in the park's west side, trails like Third Eye and Goldeneye that mountain bikers had lobbied to keep, while other novice-friendly trails on the east side, including Red Barn itself, were slated to become hiker-only under the new designation scheme.
That history matters here. Red Barn was never a trail everyone agreed on in the first place. It sat at the edge of a jurisdictional argument before it ever sat at the edge of a closure sign.
What's actually gotten built this year
The frustrating part, if you're a regular at Lord Hill, is that plenty of other work has moved forward while Red Barn sits idle. County staff and volunteer groups logged more than 2,000 hours across over 300 volunteers in 2025 alone, and the trail log for that year reads like a running inventory of exactly where the Preferred Plan is landing its effort:
| Month (2025) | Trail | Work Done | Group |
|---|---|---|---|
| February | Rock Candy Bypass | Cleared drains, armored sections with gravel | Sky Valley Singletrack |
| March | Rogue Knight | Rerouted to reduce steep grade with a new switchback | Snohomish Composite MTB Team, Sky Valley Singletrack, Washington Student Cycling League |
| March | North Pipeline | Trail maintenance work party | Friends of Lord Hill Regional Park, Snohomish High School track team |
| August | Lower Springboard | Trail maintenance | Sky Valley Singletrack |
| October | West View Loop | Rerouted | Sky Valley Singletrack |
| November | Lower Springboard | Second maintenance pass | Sky Valley Singletrack |
None of that touches Red Barn. That's not an oversight. It's a sequencing decision, and it's the kind of thing that only makes sense once you understand the plan isn't a punch list getting worked top to bottom. It's a decade of parallel projects, funded and staffed unevenly, moving wherever volunteer labor and grant money happen to line up in a given season.
The land under the trail markers
Part of what makes this particular patch of ground worth the county's attention is what it used to be. Mitchell Lord purchased 80 acres on the hill in 1879 and homesteaded 130 more by 1884, running a dairy operation with horses, sheep, and hogs across roughly 100 cultivated acres. His home, built on a terraced rise looking out over the Snohomish River Valley, was described by the county as one of the most imposing residences in the area at the time. The land eventually passed through timber harvest cycles, a reconveyance from the state Department of Natural Resources and Washington State Parks, and a further land transfer completed in December 1994 before the park officially opened to the public in 1995.
That layered history is part of why the county treats trail decisions here so deliberately. This isn't raw forest being carved up for the first time. It's homestead ground, then timberland, then wildland preserve, each layer leaving something behind that a modern trail plan has to work around, whether that's an old quarry pit near the southern trailhead or a wetland boundary that keeps a popular loop trail closed longer than anyone expected.
What to actually expect next
If you're planning a weekend loop and Red Barn was part of your usual route, the honest answer is that there's no posted reopening date, and the county's own project page treats it as one line among dozens still in progress. The wider Quarry, River, Meet Cutter, and Panther Ridge combination that many longtime hikers rely on for a full day out still connects without it, just with a shorter southeast leg than before.
There's a second piece of context worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who's watched the mountain bike traffic at Lord Hill grow over the years. The county has already completed a feasibility study for two entirely separate mountain bike destinations, at sites called O'Reilly Acres and Three Lakes Hill, with grant applications planned for 2026 aimed at construction as early as 2027. If those sites come online, some of the pressure that's driven trail-allocation fights at Lord Hill for years could ease on its own, simply by giving riders somewhere else to go. That's a few years out, not a fix for this season, but it's the kind of detail that explains why the county isn't rushing to reopen every closed segment here. They're playing a longer game across the whole county park system, not just this one hillside.
For now, the most useful habit for anyone heading out to Lord Hill is checking the county's park alert page before you go. Closures here don't follow a predictable calendar, and the same plan that's quietly rebuilding Rogue Knight and West View Loop this year could just as easily shift its attention to Red Barn next spring, or not. The map is being redrawn in pieces. Any single closed trail is less a broken promise than a line still waiting its turn in a very long queue.
If you're already part of this community and want to talk about what's changing on the hill, or anywhere else in Snohomish County, Tanya Mock would love to hear from you. Let's connect.
