Walk the Makahmo Trail on a Sunday morning and you'll pass the same landmarks locals have used as mile markers for years: the old cottonwoods near the McCray Road parking lot, the footbridge over Oat Valley Creek, the gravel bank just before the Crocker Road bridge where kids scramble down to the water. It's the kind of trail that becomes part of a routine without anyone announcing it. The dog knows the turnaround point. So do you.
What most people walking that trail don't know is that the reason Cloverdale has had exactly one developed river park for as long as anyone can remember isn't an accident of geography. It's a funding and permitting story that started six years ago and is only now, this fall, reaching the point where shovels actually go in the ground a few miles north of town.
What Cloverdale already has
Cloverdale River Park sits along the west bank of the Russian River, and its centerpiece is the Makahmo Trail, a paved, mostly flat mile that runs between McCray Road and First Street. It's stroller and wheelchair accessible outside of a few unpaved spur trails that dip down to the water. Along the way you pass through cottonwood, California walnut, maple, buckeye and willow, with older coast and valley oaks clustered near the trailhead, and the route gives you sightlines to the Mayacamas Mountains that you don't get from most of downtown.
The park also does double duty as a put-in for paddlers. There's a hand launch for kayaks, canoes and drift boats, fishing access, picnic areas, and a restroom, though there's no drinking fountain, so bring your own water. Parking runs $7 a day, cash in the self-pay box, and dogs are welcome on leash. There's no lifeguard, so anyone getting in the water is doing so at their own judgment.
The detail that puts the park in context: it's the only public, developed river access between Healdsburg and the Mendocino County line. That's not a small stretch of river to have a single access point covering. It's also the reason a lot of longtime residents have quietly wished for another option, especially during the stretch of the year when the county's other river beaches get crowded and Cloverdale's own park becomes the overflow valve.
Why nothing seemed to happen for years
If you've driven Geysers Road north of town and noticed informal pull-offs where people have been parking and walking down to the river for decades, you've seen the site of what's coming next, and you've also seen why it took so long.
Sonoma County Regional Parks didn't actually control that riverside land until July 2020, when the Board of Supervisors accepted a quitclaim deed for a two-mile stretch of county-held highway easement along Geysers Road. That deed is what unlocked the possibility of a real park there in the first place, because before that, the public had been using those access points for years without the county having the legal footing to build anything permanent or to manage the site.
Money followed a few months later. In April 2020, Regional Parks was awarded a grant of $1,125,000, and the full project budget grew to roughly $1.2 million once county park mitigation fees and Measure M parks sales tax revenue, the tax Sonoma County voters approved in 2018, were added in. By May 2021 the county was asking the public to weigh in on a draft master plan for what it was calling a future 19-acre north county river park, with an ambitious timeline: a final plan to the Board of Supervisors that fall, construction starting spring 2022, and an opening targeted for later that year.
That timeline slipped by roughly three years. The project didn't get formal Board of Supervisors approval, along with its environmental review, until May 13, 2025. From there, the county has been working through design and permitting, with the plan to finish that work and secure building permits in late winter or spring of this year, award a construction contract over the summer, and start actual construction this fall. If you've been wondering for half a decade why the same overgrown pull-offs on Geysers Road never seem to change, that's the answer: the land, the money and the political approval didn't all line up until this year.
What's actually opening, and where
The Russian River Parkway, as the project is formally named, will run along a 1.75-mile stretch of Geysers Road, about a 10-minute drive north of downtown Cloverdale, just south of the Mendocino County line. The finished plan calls for up to three separate public access points and parking areas along that stretch, eventually linked by a multi-use path running parallel to the road's west shoulder.
The first phase of construction, the one starting this fall, covers the north and south access locations. Based on the county's own project materials, expect:
- Permanent pump-out restrooms at each site
- Delineated parking areas, replacing the informal pull-offs that have been there for years
- Picnic tables and trash bins
- New trails connecting the parking areas to the river
None of this is open yet. This is a construction announcement, not a ribbon-cutting, so if you drive Geysers Road this fall and see equipment staged along the shoulder, that's the project underway rather than a park ready for a picnic. But it's worth understanding what it changes once it's finished: Cloverdale goes from having one developed river park to effectively four public access points within a short drive of downtown, addressing the exact scarcity that's made the Makahmo Trail and its single parking lot the default answer to "where do we take the dog and the kayak" for as long as most residents can remember.
It's also worth knowing why the county pushed for this at all. Regional Parks has been candid that the informal river access along Geysers Road came with real downsides, including trash, vandalism and unsanitary conditions that decades of unmanaged public use tend to produce. The parkway isn't creating access from scratch so much as formalizing and improving access that's existed, unofficially, for a long time.
The rest of the fall calendar, for context
None of this happens in isolation from the rest of the town's rhythm. The Sunday Downtown Plaza farmers market runs through November 22 this year, so there's still a full stretch of market Sundays left before the season winds down. Friday Night Live, the Cloverdale Arts Alliance's free concert and street fair series that fills the Plaza every Friday evening, wraps up its 2026 run on September 4, which means the next few weeks are the last chance to catch it before the town's outdoor summer season formally closes out.
What follows isn't a quiet stretch. The Cloverdale Performing Arts Center picks up the slack indoors, with an Open Mic Night on August 29 and its annual One Act Play Festival running September 11 through 13. A couple of weeks after that, RELISH, the three-day food, wine and music festival, takes over downtown September 18 through 20. The pattern is less "summer ends and things get quiet" and more "the action moves from the Plaza to the theater, and eventually, once construction wraps, out to the river."
If you've lived in Cloverdale for a while, none of this rewrites your sense of the town. But it does mean this fall is a genuinely different moment for anyone who's spent years hearing vague talk about "the river park project" without ever seeing it move. The permits are close. The contract is close. For the first time since that 2021 public comment period, there's an actual construction season attached to it.
Sue Winton has spent two decades watching Cloverdale and the rest of the 101 corridor change in ways big and small, and she pays attention to the infrastructure stories, not just the listings. If you're weighing a move to this part of Sonoma County, or you already call it home and want a local perspective on what's changing and why, Sue Winton is a good person to ask.
