Beacon's Stretch of the Fjord Trail Isn't Scheduled Until 2027
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Drive south on Route 9D past the Beacon city line this year and you will hit orange construction fencing before you hit Cold Spring. The cleared ground behind it, across from what used to be Dutchess Manor, is the new 90-space parking lot at Wade's Hill, and it is the first physical piece of the Hudson Highlands Fjord Trail to come out of the ground. Ask most people in Beacon what that means for their side of the river and you will get some version of "it's happening," which is true, and also not quite the right question.
The trail is real. Construction is underway. None of it is in Beacon yet, and the piece that will be is scheduled for 2027 at the earliest.
The Fjord Trail is a 7.5-mile linear park meant to connect Dockside Park in Cold Spring to Long Dock Park in Beacon along the Hudson's eastern shore, replacing the shoulder-walk along Route 9D that hikers have used for years to reach Breakneck Ridge. The two pieces of it currently being built, the Wade's Hill parking lot and the Breakneck Connector and Bridge that will carry the trail over the Metro-North tracks north of the Breakneck Tunnel, both sit inside Hudson Highlands State Park Preserve, miles south of the Beacon city line. The Wade's Hill lot broke ground in March 2026 and will link by a new connector trail to the existing Wilkinson Memorial Trail, giving hikers another way into the Breakneck and Bull Hill trail system without adding new closures beyond what already exists.
That existing closure is worth naming directly. The Breakneck Ridge Metro-North station, along with the Breakneck Ridge, Wilkinson Memorial, and Lower Brook trailheads, closed in April 2025 and will stay closed through the end of 2026. Anyone who used to hop the train to Breakneck for an afternoon hike has been routing around that closure for over a year now, and it has nothing to do with anything reaching Beacon.
The trail's own phasing plan, laid out in the state's environmental review, breaks the project into four stages:
Long Dock Park, the trail's planned northern endpoint, is itself a former junkyard that Scenic Hudson spent fifteen years transforming into open riverfront space, and the Fjord Trail's Beacon-side route is designed to fold in existing paths already there, including the Klara Sauer Trail along Denning's Point. None of that construction has started. Under the current schedule, it won't start for at least another year.
There is one exception worth flagging precisely: HHFT has proposed a maintenance facility at the site of the Beacon Transfer Station on Dennings Avenue, alongside the city's existing wastewater treatment plant. That facility is part of the approved project, but no construction date has been announced for it. It is the one Beacon-side element that could move before the main trail segment does, and it is a maintenance building, not a public amenity.
If the pace of construction near Beacon feels slower than the headlines suggest, part of that is because most of this year's headlines have been about litigation, and the litigation is not about Beacon's stretch at all. In May 2026, the Village of Cold Spring and the Town of Philipstown filed an Article 78 lawsuit in Putnam County challenging the state's environmental review, and a separate nonprofit group, Protect the Highlands, filed its own suit in Albany County the same month. Both target the southern section of the project, from Dockside Park to Breakneck Ridge, and both center on a specific legal question: whether an existing easement that allows public access to Dockside Park also permits the state to build a riverside boardwalk through it. As of late August 2026, state parks and HHFT had asked the presiding judge to dismiss those claims, arguing that neither municipality holds an ownership interest in the easement.
None of that argument touches Long Dock Park, Denning's Point, or the Fishkill Creek bridge. Construction on the Breakneck Connector and Bridge has continued through the litigation without interruption. Whatever the courts decide about the Dockside easement, it does not change the 2027 start date for the segment that reaches Beacon, because that segment isn't part of the dispute.
While the Fjord Trail's Beacon-facing phase sits a year or more out, the city has its own trail project moving on a faster, more local track. Beacon Mayor Lee Kyriacou has said the city plans to build a segment of a larger rail trail along an abandoned Metro-North line, running from the train station to the city line near Route 52, with bids expected in 2026 and construction the following year. Unlike the Fjord Trail's multi-agency, multi-jurisdiction review, this stretch is entirely within city control, paved and mostly flat, and intended primarily to give residents who commute by train a safer walking and biking route to the station.
Kyriacou has described the two projects as connected rather than competing. The Beacon Rail Trail would eventually link to the Dutchess Rail Trail and, from there, to the Walkway Over the Hudson and the 750-mile Empire State Trail, assuming Dutchess County commits to extending the line the full thirteen miles to Hopewell Junction. That larger connection is still speculative. The city segment, championed directly by the mayor's office rather than a multi-year state review, is the piece with an actual construction timeline attached.
For someone who already lives in Beacon and just wants to know what changes on their daily walk, that distinction matters more than the Fjord Trail news cycle suggests. The rail trail bid process this year is the nearer-term thing to watch. The riverside path through Long Dock Park and Denning's Point is real, funded, and designed, but it sits behind at least one more construction season before ground breaks anywhere near the city.
If you are tracking either project because you are weighing a move to this side of the river, or because you already live here and want a clearer sense of what's coming to your own street, The Live Upstate Team can walk you through what's actually scheduled versus what's still speculative. Schedule a free consultation and we will tell you what we know.
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