If you've ever cut through the unmarked dirt path off 89th Place to reach Juanita Heights Park, you've walked infrastructure that doesn't officially exist yet. No trail sign, no county maintenance crew, no line on the city's parks map. Just packed earth where enough neighbors walked the same route enough times that it became real. That path has a name among the people who use it: the social trail. And for the better part of ten years, it was the only version of the Billy Goat Trail that Finn Hill had.
That's changing this year, and the reason it's changing tells you something about this neighborhood that the postcard version, all lake views and Douglas firs, leaves out. Finn Hill has spent a decade doing the unglamorous work of buying land parcel by parcel to connect its parks, often with residents putting up their own money before any government agency committed a dollar. In 2026, the money finally caught up with the ambition.
Everyone on the hill knows the pieces. Big Finn Hill Park, between Kenmore and Kirkland, is both a 220-acre wooded oasis with 9.5 miles of trails and a park with a range of recreation options. What fewer people notice is how split the park actually is. Juanita Drive NE bisects Big Finn Hill Park's 220 acres. The eastern part of the park is developed with playfields, play equipment, big parking lots and access to two schools, and the trails in this section skirt buildings, roads, and developed areas. The western section is much more alluring, with attractive forest, a hillier topography and a larger trail network. If your only exposure to Big Finn Hill is the ballfield side near school pickup, you've seen maybe a third of what's actually there.
Then there's the fact that Big Finn Hill Park is the lesser-known cousin to the adjoining Saint Edwards State Park in Kirkland, and the two connect informally with O.O. Denny Park to the south into a loop that already exists, just not as one continuous, signed trail. The O.O. Denny Park, Big Finn Hill Park and Saint Edward State Park route is an out-and-back trail that covers 7.1 miles, with an elevation gain of 964 feet, and it's open year-round and dogs are welcome, but must be on a leash. That's the closest thing Finn Hill has to a finished Green Loop right now: three separate parks that happen to line up, walked as one route by people who already know the connector trails.
The formal version of that loop, one that runs the full crown of the hill and links to trails beyond it, is still being built. The Finn Hill Green Loop is a long-range project to knit Finn Hill's parks and green spaces into a continuous woodland pathway that will circle the crown of Finn Hill and ultimately connect to nearby parks and trails such as Juanita Beach, the Cross Kirkland Corridor and the Burke Gilman Trail in Bothell, expanding the reach of existing Finn Hill parks and adding to a network of trails linking municipalities on the Eastside.
Here's the part that doesn't show up in a scenic-trails writeup: residents financed a chunk of this themselves before any big institutional money arrived. The clearest example is the Billy Goat Trail, the piece that connects Juanita Heights Park down to Juanita Beach. Juanita Heights Park has been expanded and a trailhead at the bottom of Goat Hill has been acquired, and to the immediate south of Big Finn Hill Park, the Finn Hill Neighborhood Alliance coordinated City and County acquisitions of 7 acres of meadow and forest, protecting a segment of Denny Creek near its headwaters in the park's beaver pond.
One of those land deals breaks down like this:
| Funding source | Amount |
|---|---|
| Grant funding | $350,000 |
| City of Kirkland | $300,000 |
| Finn Hill and Goat Hill residents | $50,000 |
| Total acquisition cost | $700,000 |
These acquisitions cost $700,000; the grants covered half of the price, the City funded another $300,000, and FHNA contributed $50,000, raised from Goat Hill and Finn Hill residents. That's not a homeowners association writing a check from dues. That's individual neighbors passing a hat to buy a right of way for a trail that, at the time, existed only as a line on a map.
The volunteer-funded era of the Green Loop is giving way to something bigger. Roughly $500,000 from the previous King County park levy has been applied to purchase open space near Big Finn Hill Park, and the remaining levy funds, about $1.8 million, were used to complete property acquisitions for the Billy Goat Trail or are committed to developing a Green Loop Master Plan in 2026. Then, in August 2025, the funding jumped by an order of magnitude: the 2026-2031 King County park levy, approved by voters in August 2025, includes $10 million for the Green Loop.
That's the shift worth understanding if you live here. For most of its life, this project ran on grants measured in the hundreds of thousands and neighbor fundraising measured in the tens of thousands. It now has an eight-figure public commitment behind it. The bottleneck was never community will. It was money, and that bottleneck just opened.
The design work started catching up with the funding last year. In August 2025, Goat Hill neighbors, Kirkland Park employees, Finn Hill Neighborhood Alliance board members and consultant Alta Planning + Design toured the Green Loop corridor, including the Billy Goat Trail. Alta had been hired to create a plan tying together all the parks in the loop, with the resulting study meant to inform the Parks Department on the best way to finalize a formal path to the beach. That work is still in progress. Finalizing a Green Loop implementation plan is listed as one of the Finn Hill Neighborhood Alliance's own goals for 2026, which tells you the formal trail hasn't been built yet. Part of the reason: there are two wetland areas to negotiate and hundreds of steps to construct, which is why the Parks Department suggested a two-year timeframe once plans are approved. As of last year, the honest answer to "is the Billy Goat Trail open" was the one a longtime Goat Hill resident gave in an online update: "for now, we have a social trail we can use and enjoy."
Skip the master plan for a minute. Here's what exists on the ground right now, with the details that don't make it onto a trail app.
The Finn Hill Neighborhood Alliance, the same group that raised $50,000 for trail land and now sits on Alta's planning tours, runs two events this month that put you inside the park system rather than reading about it.
On August 9, an FHNA staff member leads a forest walk to help residents get to know the native plants in their own backyard. It meets at Big Finn Hill Park's playground parking lot from noon to 1:30 p.m., a low-key way to learn what's actually growing in the western half of the park you may not have explored.
Then there's DennyFest, the neighborhood's signature end-of-summer gathering. DennyFest is Finn Hill's annual neighborhood celebration at O.O. Denny Park, on the lawn along the shore of Lake Washington, featuring live music, a dog parade, and a host of entertainment including a magician, face painting, trail tours, geocaching, a bouncy house, a Kirkland fire truck, food trucks, free soft drinks and snacks, and a community art project. The exact date moves year to year, from August 17 in recent summers to as late as early September, so check the Finn Hill Neighborhood Alliance's calendar for this year's confirmed date before you plan around it.
Two logistics notes if you go: parking along Holmes Point Drive is limited, so attendees are encouraged to walk to DennyFest or take a free shuttle from the former Inglewood Presbyterian Church at 7718 NE 141st Street at the top of Finn Hill. And if you buy a raffle ticket, aim high. The grand prize in recent years has been a two-night stay at The Lodge at St. Edward Park and a $250 dining credit at their Cedar and Elm restaurant.
Part of why the Green Loop matters is scale most residents underestimate. Finn Hill is Kirkland's largest neighborhood geographically at 2,600 acres, its second most populous at roughly 16,000 residents, and its most environmentally diverse, with deep ravines, multiple watersheds and wetlands, and an extensive lakeshore. That's a lot of ground to knit together with volunteer fundraising and one grant at a time. The $10 million levy doesn't finish the job this year. What it does is turn a decade of neighbor-funded, parcel-by-parcel patience into a project with an actual budget to match its ambition.
Until the wetlands are crossed and the steps are built, the trail behind your house is still, in the most literal sense, something the neighborhood made by hand. That's worth knowing the next time you're on it.
Want to know what the Green Loop's next phase means for property values and buyer interest near Big Finn Hill and Juanita Heights Park? The Pavone Kinzler Team tracks how Eastside infrastructure projects like this one shape local demand. Reach out for a free home valuation and local market plan.
3933 Lake Washington Blvd NE, Suite 100 Kirkland WA 98033
3933 Lake Washington Blvd NE, Suite 100 Kirkland WA 98033