Run the Los Gatos Creek Trail north from Willow Street on a Saturday morning and the asphalt just stops. No sign, no detour arrow, no warning. One moment you're on a wide paved path with the creek on your left, the next you're standing at the edge of a parking lot near Meridian Avenue wondering if you took a wrong turn. You didn't. The trail actually ends there. It picks back up again more than half a mile away, on the other side of Lincoln Avenue, and nothing physically links the two pieces.

Most people who live off Lincoln or Willow have already worked out their own way around this without ever calling it a gap. They cut up Willow Street, jog over on Glen Eyrie Avenue, pick up Lincoln for a couple of blocks, then drop back onto the creek near Lonus Street. It works. It's also, according to the City of San José's own trail documentation, the official recommended route, not a local shortcut somebody figured out. The city calls it an on-street connection. Everyone who uses it calls it the way to get from one half of the trail to the other.

Two Trails Wearing One Name

The Los Gatos Creek Trail sounds like a single, continuous ribbon running from the hills to downtown San José, and for most of its length it is. The main segment covers 9.7 miles from Lexington Reservoir, through Los Gatos and Campbell, ending at Meridian Avenue right at the edge of Willow Glen. A separate northern segment then picks up near Lonus Street and runs about half a mile under Interstate 280 to Dupont Street, where a set of stairs drops you onto the West San Carlos Street bridge and into downtown.

Between those two pieces, on the city's own map, there is nothing. The City of San José's trail directory is direct about it: on-street travel along the bike lanes on Willow Street is required to get from one reach to the other. That's not a caveat buried in a footnote. It's the honest description of how the trail functions today, and it runs directly through the neighborhood most people assume it already threads.

If you've ever wondered why your phone's mapping app routes you through a few blocks of Willow Glen streets instead of keeping you on the creek path the whole way, this is why. The official detour, spelled out by the city, goes like this:

Exit the main trail onto Willow Street about 0.8 miles before the Meridian Avenue terminus. Head northeast on Willow Street. Turn left on Glen Eyrie Avenue. Turn left on Lincoln Avenue. Turn right on Lonus Street to rejoin the trail.

It's a perfectly walkable four turns. It is also, if you think about it for more than a few seconds, a strange way to run a trail that gets described as one of the busiest multi-use paths in the South Bay.

The Quieter Fix Nobody Advertises

There's a second option, and it's the one worth knowing about even if you never plan to use the on-street route again. The Three Creeks Trail, a shorter path also inside Willow Glen, runs about 0.9 miles from the creek near Lonus Street down to the Guadalupe River, and its western half has been fully paved since late 2018.

What makes it interesting isn't the pavement. It's what the pavement sits on. Before it was a trail, that stretch of ground carried a working railroad, part of the Western Pacific line that served Willow Glen's industrial spur. A trestle bridge known as the Willow Glen Trestle crossed Los Gatos Creek near Lonus Street starting in 1921, and for decades trains used it to haul goods to and from the Del Monte cannery. Union Pacific bought the Western Pacific line in the early 1980s and eventually abandoned the route in the early 2000s, which is when the corridor became available for the kind of conversion that turned it into the trail residents use today.

For cyclists, the Three Creeks route is genuinely the better path, not just the more interesting one. It lets you avoid a stretch of Lincoln Avenue that's narrow and carries steady traffic, connecting instead at the corner of Willow Street and Bird Avenue before linking up with the northern creek segment at Lonus. Pedestrians can still take the shorter direct route through Glen Eyrie if that's more convenient, but if you're on two wheels, this old rail bed is the one to learn.

Why the Gap Never Closed

None of this is new information to the people who've spent time studying it closely. A community walking tour of the gap conducted in July 2025 mapped out several plausible alignments for a permanent trail connection, from an easement across a private parking lot near the Stokes and St. Elizabeth entrance to a proposal for reconfiguring the traffic signal timing where Coe Avenue meets Lincoln, since crossing there today means threading between stop lines set roughly 330 feet apart. Most of these options run into the same obstacle: land or intersections the city doesn't fully control yet.

One option in particular carries baggage that has nothing to do with trail planning. There's an unbuilt crossing at Cherry Avenue that shows up on old plans as a potential bridge site, and it has a history that makes residents wary of any proposal involving that corridor. The city has, at different points over the years, pursued turning Cherry into a four-lane connector running from the Race Street exit off I-280 down toward the southern part of the city. According to residents who tracked the process, city planners at times framed the project as a simple bicycle bridge while renderings quietly showed a much wider vehicle crossing. That history is part of why trust in any Cherry Avenue proposal, even a modest one aimed purely at closing the walking gap, remains thin.

This is the part that rarely makes it into a trail review or a weekend hiking guide. The gap in the Los Gatos Creek Trail isn't a funding oversight or a simple construction backlog. It sits at the intersection of creek geography, private property lines, and a decades-old road fight that has nothing to do with recreation and everything to do with how much traffic Willow Glen is willing to route through its own streets.

The Meeting Happening This Week

Here's what makes this worth paying attention to right now rather than filing away as neighborhood trivia. The Willow Glen Neighborhood Association has closing this exact gap on its published agenda for its meeting on Monday, September 14, 2026, at the Baha'i Center in San Jose, sitting alongside items on the district's council update, a new police captain, and street tree policy. It's not a standalone trail advocacy meeting. It's the regular civic business of the neighborhood, and the creek trail gap made the list.

There's also a sign the physical picture is shifting. Recent trail documentation describes a new bridge just south of Lonus Avenue that would tie the Three Creeks Trail directly into the northern segment of the Los Gatos Creek Trail, removing the need to route through Lincoln Avenue at all for that connection. If that bridge opens as described, it closes one of the more awkward pieces of the current workaround, even if the larger gap toward Meridian remains.

None of this means the full trail connection is imminent. Cherry Avenue's history alone suggests any permanent fix will take real negotiation. But a neighborhood association putting a specific infrastructure gap on a specific meeting agenda, in the same season a new connector bridge is described as opening, is the kind of local movement that's easy to miss if you're only checking a trail app for mileage and not paying attention to who's talking about the missing piece.

What This Means If You Use the Trail This Week

If you already know the Willow Street to Glen Eyrie to Lincoln to Lonus detour, nothing here changes your Saturday run. But if you've been avoiding the Los Gatos Creek Trail because you assumed it was broken, it isn't. It's just built in two pieces with a short, well-marked street connection between them, one that the city itself designed on purpose rather than left as an accident. And if you're on a bike, the Three Creeks Trail along the old rail bed is worth learning even if you never touch Lincoln Avenue again.

Understanding a neighborhood at this level of detail, down to which four turns connect one half of a trail to the other and why a 1921 rail trestle still shapes how people move through the area today, is the same kind of close reading we bring to every conversation about buying or selling a home here. If you're curious what that attention looks like applied to your own street or your own property's position in this market, the Palermo Properties Team is glad to talk specifics. Request a Strategic Market Plan when you're ready.