For two summers, the shortest walk to Safeway has ended at a barricade. Carlton Drive has been closed at the Highway 218 intersection since late April, orange cones have lined Canyon Del Rey Boulevard past the Frog Pond, and the pond itself has been fenced off with a "closed until further notice" sign since the FORTAG crews arrived. If you live on the south side of the city, you have almost certainly rerouted through Quendale and Portola more times than you can count. That routine is about to end.
August 2026 is the month everything reopens
The thesis of this post is simple, and it is the one thing a resident here should know going into the last weeks of summer: three separate closures and disruptions that have shaped daily life in Del Rey Oaks are all resolving inside the same thirty-day window. The city is not slowly returning to normal. It is doing it all at once.
Here is what is on the calendar, in the order it lands:
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| Wed, Aug 5, 6–8 pm | 2026 State of the City event, hosted by Mayor Donaldson and City Manager Guertin |
| Through August 2026 | Canyon Del Rey FORTAG segment finishes construction |
| Late summer 2026 | Frog Pond Wetland Preserve reopens after two years of closure |
| Tue, Aug 18, 1–5 pm | Summer 2026 Community Blood Drive |
The dates matter because they change what "living in Del Rey Oaks" actually looks like for the fall. The FORTAG Canyon Del Rey Segment is in construction and is expected to last through August 2026. The Frog Pond Wetland Preserve will not reopen until late summer 2026, which lines up with the trail work wrapping. And the State of the City address, delivered by Mayor Scott Donaldson to a standing-room-only crowd, is where the city talks about progress on various fronts — this year that conversation happens with the biggest construction project in recent memory finally behind it.
What Carlton Drive actually looks like when the cones come down
The Carlton closure has been the most disruptive piece of FORTAG for anyone living inside the city limits. The intersection at Canyon Del Rey and Carlton Drive, just across from Del Rey Oaks City Hall, has been closed since April 28 as part of the FORTAG construction, detouring traffic off Carlton onto Quendale Avenue and Portola Drive, while through traffic on Canyon Del Rey has not been impacted.
When it reopens, you are not getting back the intersection you remember. You are getting a rebuilt one, designed around a 12-foot paved bike and pedestrian corridor that runs the length of Canyon Del Rey. FORTAG is a paved regional active transportation route that will serve as a safe pedestrian and bicycle corridor connecting Seaside, Marina, Del Rey Oaks, Monterey and unincorporated community residents to California State University Monterey Bay, the Fort Ord National Monument and the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail, proposed as an approximately 28-mile continuous 12-ft wide paved bicycle and pedestrian trail with an open-space buffer on both sides.
The practical read: the 1.5-mile stretch through Del Rey Oaks is only the first completed piece of a much longer network, and the city is the front door. Walking from a house near Rosita Road to Laguna Grande, or biking to CSUMB without touching a car lane, becomes a real option for the first time. That is a bigger shift than any single restaurant opening or event, and it is landing in weeks.
Where locals walked while the Frog Pond was closed
The 17-acre preserve has been off the map since 2024, and every regular walker in this city has had to improvise.
A local treasure in Del Rey Oaks, the 17-acre Frog Pond is composed of a unique arrangement of habitat including frogs, deer, hummingbirds, towhees, mallards and western fence lizards.
A few notes for the reopening, based on what the park district and long-time walkers have said:
- The trail is a 3/4-mile loop off Canyon Del Rey Boulevard, so if you have been driving to Jacks Peak or Fort Ord for a short evening walk, you are about to get your 20-minute option back.
- Parking is on Canyon Del Rey Blvd between Gen. Jim Moore Boulevard and Highland Street, dogs are allowed on leash, and bikes are not. Worth remembering, because FORTAG has trained a lot of us to think bike-first about anything with a paved surface nearby.
- The Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District does not presently authorize bicycles within the Preserve, and that policy has not changed with the trail project.
- Poison oak along the trails is a real thing, and two years of unmanaged growth means the first month back will be worse than usual. Long sleeves for the first walk.
If you have not made it out to Work Memorial Park lately, that is the other piece of green space affected. Construction work behind Safeway required access to Work Memorial Park, the Butterfly Garden and tennis courts to be restricted during the construction period. Those come back with the trail.
The one-square-mile food map, updated for August
Del Rey Oaks does not have a downtown in the sense that Pacific Grove has one. What it has is a handful of anchors along Canyon Del Rey and a cluster in Ryan Ranch, and the composition has shifted enough since 2023 that the mental map most of us carry is out of date.
Tarpy's Roadhouse, 2999 Monterey-Salinas Highway. Established in 1992, and still the destination-restaurant answer for out-of-town visitors. Yelp's July 2026 hours have it open Mon–Thu and Sun 11:30 am to 8:00 pm, Fri and Sat 11:30 am to 9:00 pm. Reservations are the move on weekends.
Wild Plum Kitchen, Ryan Ranch. The lunch answer for anyone working out of the office park side of the city, and one of the few sit-down cafe options walking distance from the business cluster.
Stone Creek Kitchen, 120 Calle Del Oaks. A neighborhood kitchen shop and cafe on the industrial side of the city. If you have not been in a while, worth a stop, especially given the store's role as a lifeline during the pandemic era.
The Creperie Cafe, Acme Coffee Roasting, Counterpoint Coffee. The morning rotation. Yelp's June 2026 top-cafes list for the 93940 area includes The Creperie Cafe, Acme Coffee Roasting, Counterpoint Coffee, Sweet Elena's Bakery and Cafe, Wild Plum Kitchen at Ryan Ranch, Red's Donuts, Naturally Chai, Starbucks, and Speedway.
The rest of the map. The city's own business directory lists Starbucks at 441 Canyon Del Rey, Subway at 461 Canyon Del Rey, and Tarpy's on Monterey-Salinas Highway as the main food-service licensees. Small list. That is not a knock on the city, it is the point of the city.
What's likely to come up at the State of the City
If you are going on August 5, or watching the recap afterward, the interesting agenda is not the trail. That is the visible story. The quieter one is what the city is doing with its remaining land and revenue.
Two threads worth watching:
The Fort Ord parcel. The city entered into an exclusive right to negotiate agreement with developer City Ventures to assess the viability of developing the city's vacant land on the former Fort Ord. This has been in the background for two years and the timeline for any decision is drifting closer.
Short-term rentals as a revenue base. The city has no hotels, but it has 25 licensed short-term rentals, and City Manager John Guertin has said that such rentals are the fourth-leading source of revenue for the city, with $190,000 projected for the current fiscal year. For a city of roughly 1,600 residents, 25 licensed STRs is a meaningful ratio, and it changes the political conversation around Measure R and any future TOT adjustments.
Neither of those is a headline you will see on a poster at the Moose Lodge. Both will shape what Del Rey Oaks looks like in five years more than the ribbon-cutting on the trail.
The quieter version of this city is ending
If you moved here in 2023 or 2024, your entire experience of Del Rey Oaks has been an inconvenienced one. Detours, closed pond, "construction ahead" signs on the way to almost anywhere. That has probably felt like the default state.
It was not. What is arriving at the end of August is closer to the version of this city long-time residents remember, plus a paved trail that connects it to everything on the peninsula that a car used to be required for. The 3/4-mile loop opens again. The intersection opens again. And for the first time, you can walk out of your driveway and be on a continuous paved path to Laguna Grande, and eventually to the coastal trail, without ever getting in the car.
That is worth being ready for. It is also, for anyone who has been quietly wondering what their house is worth in a Del Rey Oaks that finally looks finished, worth a conversation.
If you have owned in the city through the construction years and are curious what the finished-trail version of Del Rey Oaks means for your specific property, Homes by Henson is happy to sit down over coffee at Acme or Counterpoint and talk through it. Book a free home valuation when you are ready.
