Walk the Snail Lake Trail far enough and you will eventually just stop. Not because the path ends at a scenic overlook or a trailhead sign. It ends because the north side of the lake is underwater, and the loop that's supposed to bring you back to your car simply doesn't. Regulars have learned to treat the 1.8-mile route as an out-and-back instead, tacking on an extra mile or two of backtracking once they hit the closed sign they usually spot too late to avoid.
Most people who've dealt with this assume it's bad luck, a wet spring, a trail crew that never got around to the fix. It's neither. The flooding at Snail Lake is a documented, decade-long groundwater problem that Ramsey County has been actively engineering a solution for since at least 2021, and this fall is the season the county finally moves from planning documents to construction equipment on the ground.
A Decade of High Water
Vadnais-Snail Lakes Regional Park has seen above-normal precipitation and rising groundwater for roughly ten years, and the water hasn't stayed where the trail designers of decades past assumed it would. Roads, trails and picnic areas near Snail Lake have taken the hit repeatedly. The public beach and picnic area near Snail Lake closed for five straight years before Ramsey County redeveloped it and reopened it in 2020, rebuilding the beach specifically to function at varying water elevations instead of just one.
That beach project should have been a signal that the flooding wasn't a one-season fluke. It wasn't. The same hydrology that swallowed the beach for half a decade kept eating away at trail segments north and west of it, and those are the sections walkers and cyclists are still routing around today.
The Boardwalk Nobody Wanted to Pay For
Ramsey County didn't rush a patch job. A formal trail feasibility study ran from February through August 2022, examining what kind of trail could legally sit inside a floodplain and wetland, and at what elevation it would need to be built to actually survive the next decade of high water. The county held an open house on September 28, 2022, to share what it found: a raised boardwalk trail would handle the flooding best, but it cost significantly more than residents were willing to support.
So the county kept working. That single detail explains why a closure that started years ago is only now getting a construction date. Engineering a flood-resilient trail is one problem. Engineering one that voters and county commissioners will actually fund is another, and reconciling the two took years, not months.
There was a second delay layered on top of the first. The trail corridor doubles as access for sanitary sewer infrastructure, and a separate regional sewer rehabilitation project led by the Metropolitan Council's Environmental Services Department needed to use that same trail access before Ramsey County could break ground on its own repairs. The trail project sat on hold until the sewer work cleared.
What Changes This Fall
Here's the part that matters if you live near the park right now. Ramsey County's Snail Lake Trail Improvements Project, covering the corridor section running north of Gramsie Road to Snail Lake Road, had its final design completed by fall of 2025, with construction commencing this fall of 2026.
That means the equipment starting to show up along the north shore this season isn't random maintenance. It's the culmination of a review process that ran through the Shoreview Parks and Recreation Commission, the Shoreview Bikeways and Trails Committee and the Ramsey County Parks Commission before heading to the Shoreview City Council, the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners and the Metropolitan Council for sign-off. Along the way, county planners held a pop-up meeting at the Shoreview Community Center for general public input and presented concepts directly to the Snail Lake Improvement District, the resident group most affected by water levels on the lake itself.
Recent visitor reports from people out on the trail this season describe exactly what you'd expect from a project entering its construction phase: the north side still washed out, tree removal already underway near the closed sections. If you've noticed more activity on that stretch lately, that's the fall 2026 start date arriving on schedule.
Where Shoreview Walks in the Meantime
None of this means the trail network is off limits. It means the smart move is knowing which loops are unaffected while Snail Lake's north shore is under construction.
- Rice Creek North Regional Trail runs roughly 13 miles along Rice Creek, threading through Lino Lakes, Circle Pines, Blaine, Shoreview and Arden Hills. The southern stretch near the old Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant site off County Road I has very little elevation change, which makes it a good pick for new riders or anyone pulling a kid on a trailer bike. Along the way you'll pass restored prairie, wetland and mixed woods that draw ospreys, kestrels and bluebirds.
- The off-leash dog area at 5959 Lexington Avenue sits on higher ground than the lake trails, which keeps it usable when everything closer to the water is soggy. It's 13 fenced acres, and the regional trails looping around it work fine on a leash if your dog needs a longer outing than the off-leash lot alone provides.
- Turtle Lake County Park, at 915 County Road I, gives you a swimming beach, boat ramp, volleyball court and picnic shelter on 75 acres, and it connects by bike path back toward the Snail Lake area if you want to string together a longer route once the main loop reopens.
- McCullough Park stays busy with ballfields and grilling families on weekends, but slip past the playground onto the connecting path through Turtle Creek Open Space and you'll find a quieter stretch of trail that most visitors walk right past.
The Takeaway
The flooding at Snail Lake was never a maintenance failure. It was a hydrology problem the county studied, priced out, waited on a sewer project to clear, and finally funded on a real timeline. Fall 2026 is the season that timeline stops being a line item on a county planning page and starts being visible from the trail itself.
If you're already circling the Rice Creek corridor or the Lexington Avenue dog park while you wait it out, you're doing exactly what the county's own alternate-route planning assumed residents would do. The loop will come back. It's just going to take one more construction season to get there.
If you're thinking about what it actually feels like to live near this park system, not just what the trail map shows, Karin Rice-Duncanson knows Shoreview block by block and is always glad to talk through it. Let's Connect.
