Regular visitors to the Baylands have spent the past year watching a strange grassy slope take shape along Harbor Marsh, directly across the water from Palo Alto's Regional Water Quality Control Plant. City engineers said it would be finished by summer. Summer has come and gone, and as of this writing the slope still isn't doing the one thing it was built to do.
That's worth knowing before your next walk, and so is something else. On the afternoon of July 29, a small vegetation fire broke out in the preserve and forced the city to close the Embarcadero Road spur leading to the Sailing Station parking lot, the dock itself, and the walking trail connecting the dock to the nature center. Palo Alto Online covered the closure as a developing story, and no follow-up reopening date has surfaced since. If your usual loop runs through that corner, plan on a detour.
Neither disruption changes what makes the Baylands worth the drive out Embarcadero Road. But the mental map a lot of longtime visitors carry around is a little out of date, and the levee delay in particular tells you something true about how this preserve actually works.
The Slope That Doesn't Look Like a Levee
Most people picture a levee as a wall: steep, gray, armored with rock. What's rising at Harbor Marsh is the opposite. Construction began on September 8, 2025, on a 500-foot stretch of shoreline seeded with more than 35 species of native plants, sloping gradually from the tideline up toward Embarcadero Road instead of standing up against it. Mark Lindley, the lead engineer on the project, has explained the logic by comparing it to a beach: waves break gently across a long, planted slope the same way they break on sand, instead of slamming into a rock face designed to stop them cold.
The plumbing underneath is the real trick. A buried pipe connects the levee to the Regional Water Quality Control Plant next door, which treats roughly 20 million gallons of wastewater a day for 236,000 residents and businesses across six agencies: Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and Stanford University. Once running, treated water is meant to irrigate the levee's marsh plants, which filter out additional nitrogen before the water reaches the Bay. It's a five-year research partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey, UC Davis, and Cal State Channel Islands, with community science support from Nuestra Casa, the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, and Environmental Volunteers. Part of the goal is habitat for the salt-marsh harvest mouse, a cinnamon-colored rodent small enough to fit in a palm and known locally as a "saltie," along with the endangered Ridgway's rail that nests in the same marsh grass.
There's a nearby precedent. The Oro Loma Horizontal Levee near Hayward finished construction in 2017 and became the model other Bay Area agencies have studied since. About a dozen similar projects are in various stages of planning around the Bay today. What makes Palo Alto's version different, and slower to bring online, is that it's the first one actually hydrologically connected to the Bay itself rather than operating as a closed loop. More moving parts, more caution before anyone flips the switch.
Where the Timeline Actually Stands
In December 2025, project managers told reporters that construction was about a third complete, with full completion expected by summer 2026. That estimate made its way into most of the coverage that followed, including the assumption that anyone reading it today would find a finished project.
By August 2026, a report from Maven's Notebook, republishing Grist's reporting on the project, found something different. The levee is visible to anyone walking past, planted and shaped the way it's supposed to look, but it is not yet fully operational. Engineers traced the holdup to complications in the plumbing that links the wastewater plant to the levee itself, the connection that makes the whole design work. There's no new completion date attached to that reporting.
If this feels familiar, it should. The Baylands has a track record of running behind its own announcements. Back in 2018, a flood-prevention project on the East Palo Alto side shut down the Faber-Laumeister trail and a connecting stretch of the Bay Trail, with a reopening date that slipped past its original estimate by nearly a year once contractors ran into a seasonal restriction protecting Ridgway's rail nesting habitat. The pattern is consistent: work here moves at the pace of habitat review, not press releases. That's frustrating if you're trying to plan a specific loop for a specific Saturday. It's also the reason the preserve still looks and functions the way it does after a century of pressure to fill it in.
Where to Walk This Week
None of the current disruptions touch most of the preserve. A few options that stay clear of both the fire closure and the construction zone:
- The Adobe Creek Loop Trail, which starts near San Antonio Road and threads past the airport and golf course before connecting back toward the interpretive center. Flat, exposed, and one of the better stretches for spotting shorebirds working the mudflats at low tide.
- The North Bayfront Loop, a 5.3-mile route popular with runners and cyclists, with benches along the way and long sightlines across the water toward the hills on the far side of the Bay.
- The Renzel Trail and Marsh Front Trail combination near the Lucy Evans Baylands Nature Interpretive Center, a shorter option if you're short on time or bringing kids, with a boardwalk that gets you out over the marsh itself.
If you want a longer detour, Byxbee Park Hills, the site of Palo Alto's old landfill before it closed in 2011, still offers one of the better elevated views in the preserve, looking north toward San Francisco and south past the airport.
Why the Slow Pace Fits This Place
The Emily Renzel Wetlands, named for the councilmember who spent two decades pushing to protect the Baylands, took a $1 million state grant and years of planning before opening in 1992. The landfill that became Byxbee Park closed in 2011, and it took until the following year to shut down the recycling and composting operations that had shared the site. Even the horizontal levee itself has been close to a decade in the making, according to Grist's reporting, long before the first shovel went into the ground last September.
None of that is a story about a project falling behind schedule. It's a story about a marsh that has spent a hundred years absorbing waste disposal, a municipal airport, a golf course, and a swimming pool that eventually became the Duck Pond, and slowly, deliberately clawing habitat back from all of it. A levee that takes an extra season to switch on is a minor footnote in that history, not a break from it.
The Baylands rewards the kind of patience that doesn't show up well in a press release. That's true of the marsh, and it's often true of the neighborhoods around it. If you're weighing a move to Palo Alto and want to talk through what a property here actually offers beyond the headline number, Hummingbird Homes is a good place to start that conversation.
