You search "hikes near Bonney Lake," get the same three results everyone gets, and they all send you to the same place: Victor Falls, the 68-foot waterfall off Rhodes Lake Road where Fennel Creek drops over a sandstone ledge. Pack the kids, grab the dog, drive out to the gravel lot on a Saturday morning.
The gate's locked. It has been since September 2024, and the closure is indefinite, not seasonal.
That single fact rewrites the whole map for anyone who actually lives here and wants to know where to walk, ride, or let the dog off leash this weekend. The generic guides haven't caught up. Here's what's actually true right now.
What closed, and why it isn't reopening on a schedule
Victor Falls Park sits on land the city bought in 2013 specifically to give the public access to a waterfall that had been fenced off on private property for years. It never had much infrastructure to begin with: a gravel lot, a portable restroom, soft-surface paths to an overlook. That was the appeal. It was also, apparently, the liability. As of this writing the city's own parks page still lists Victor Falls Park among its holdings, but the trail itself has carried an indefinite closure notice for two full years, with no reopening date attached anywhere in the public record.
If you're the kind of resident who checks a map before a Sunday drive: don't bother routing to Rhodes Lake Road for the falls this year. Save the trip.
Where the terrain actually went
Here's the part the old guides miss entirely. The land immediately south of Victor Falls, the same wooded plateau mountain bikers had been riding informally on private timber company property for a decade, didn't sit idle while the falls trail closed. It got formalized into something bigger and became a mile away, not two.
The Trek at Tehaleh opened to the public on June 22, 2024, three months before the Victor Falls closure notice went up. It's a 204-acre Pierce County Parks property at 14988 170th Avenue East, built over six years by the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance in partnership with Brookfield Properties, the developer behind the Tehaleh community, and funded in part by a $309,000 state direct appropriations grant. Riders who'd been quietly using that ground for years now have a real trailhead, a parking lot, a restroom, and signage instead of a tolerated arrangement with a private landowner.
One trail in the system, Rhythm & Berms, was named Singletrack's Best Beginner Trail of 2024. Ride logs on Trailforks show activity as recently as this spring, which tells you it isn't a park that opened with fanfare and then went quiet. People are still out there.
Here's the shift in plain terms:
| Old Victor Falls access | The Trek at Tehaleh | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Informally tolerated on private land | Publicly owned, Pierce County Parks |
| Opened to public | Never formally, until 2013 park purchase | June 22, 2024 |
| Trail mileage | A fraction of a mile to an overlook | Over 6 miles, 204 acres |
| Activity type | Hiking, waterfall viewing | Mountain biking, cross-country and freeride |
| Current status | Closed indefinitely since Sept. 2024 | Open, actively ridden |
If you're a hiker who wanted a waterfall view, that terrain no longer serves you. If you're on two wheels, it serves you better than it ever did.
The trail nobody can find on purpose
For walkers and dog owners, the closest thing to a woodland trail still standing inside city limits is the Fennel Creek Trail Head at 11112 185th Avenue East, and it's easy to miss even when you're looking for it. The entrance sits between two houses at the back of a residential subdivision, with no real signage from the street. Parking is a handful of spots in what amounts to an alley.
Once you're in, it's short: a flat paved stretch to a wooden bridge, then a set of stairs climbing to a straight path that dead-ends near a school playground and back into the neighborhood. Reviewers who've found it describe roughly ten to twenty minutes of actual trail, plus a boardwalk section through the trees. The park gates close at dusk, and more than one visitor has reported driving twenty minutes only to realize the address on the map is, in fact, someone's residential street.
It's real, it's dog-friendly, and it's the only piece of the planned Fennel Creek corridor that functions today as a self-contained walk rather than a fragment waiting on the next one.
The reliable fallback that never closed
If the goal is just getting outside without a scavenger hunt, three parks have kept doing what they've always done:
- Allan Yorke Park, 45 acres on the south end of Lake Tapps, for lakeside walking paths, ball fields, and a skatepark
- Viking Park, next to Bonney Lake Elementary, home to the city's off-leash dog park since a 2010 grand opening
- Ken Simmons Park, on the northwestern edge of Lake Bonney, for fishing and a non-motorized boat launch
None of these are new discoveries. They're just the parks that were never dependent on a private landowner's patience or a grant timeline, which is exactly why they're still the dependable option while everything else around them shifts.
The corridor that's still half-built
The bigger plan, on paper, has always been a continuous Fennel Creek Trail running roughly 5.2 miles from Allan Yorke Park to Victor Falls and on toward the Foothills Trail. Segment 1, giving neighborhoods access to Victor Falls Elementary, finished in October 2013. The segments after that have moved in grant-funded stages for more than a decade, each one requiring its own round of state and regional funding before a shovel goes in the ground.
The point isn't to track every segment number. It's that the finished, walkable trail on the ground today is a small piece of what's been proposed since 1997, and the piece that connects to Victor Falls specifically runs into a closed gate. Anyone picturing a continuous creekside walk from downtown to the falls is picturing a plan, not a trail.
What this means if you're already here
The mental map a lot of longtime residents are still carrying, waterfall hike on one side of town, informal bike trails on the other, has quietly flipped. The hike closed. The bike trails got a parking lot and a name. If you haven't been out to either area in the last two years, the terrain you remember isn't the terrain that's there now.
Elton Home Team spends as much time tracking what's changing on the ground in Pierce County as we do tracking what's changing in the market, because the two are never really separate. If you're weighing a move within Bonney Lake, or just want a team that actually knows which trailhead is real and which one is a locked gate, Rhett Elton and the Elton Home Team are a call away. Start Your Home Search whenever you're ready.
