Drive past the Highway 1 entrance to Fort Ord Dunes State Park this month and you will see the visible signs of change: construction fencing, staged equipment, a campground taking shape in the dunes. It is the kind of project that photographs well and gets talked about at the dog park. But if you live in Seaside and want to know what is actually going to change how you move through your own neighborhood, you need to look about two miles inland, along Canyon Del Rey Boulevard, at a stretch of trail most residents have never noticed under construction.
That inland segment is part of the Fort Ord Regional Trail and Greenway, known locally as FORTAG, and it is the piece of infrastructure most likely to alter a Seaside resident's daily routine, not because it leads to the ocean, but because it leads to a school, a wetland preserve, and a park most people already drive to.
Two Projects, Two Different Kinds of Change
FORTAG is planned as a roughly 28-mile paved network of walking and biking trails connecting Seaside, Marina, Del Rey Oaks, Monterey, and the unincorporated communities around them to California State University Monterey Bay, the Fort Ord National Monument, and the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail along the coast. It has been in planning for more than a decade, funded in the piecemeal way most large California infrastructure gets built: a federal grant for one segment, a state active transportation grant for the next.
The first segment to break ground, the Canyon Del Rey stretch, runs 1.5 miles through Del Rey Oaks and into Seaside along the State Route 218 corridor. Construction started in June 2024, with a completion target of late summer 2026, meaning that as of this writing the segment should either be finished or in its final weeks of punch-list work. Monterey County Now reporter David Schmalz, who has tracked the project closely, described the decades-long FORTAG effort as the very definition of a piecemeal approach, a fair description of a project built grant by grant rather than all at once.
Meanwhile at Fort Ord Dunes State Park, a separate and much larger project has been underway since summer 2025: a new 98-site campground carved into roughly 837 acres of dune habitat and shoreline, with a two-year construction timeline that puts completion around summer 2027. During construction, a portion of Beach Range Road and part of the park's recreation trail are closed, with traffic detoured to a parallel route. The rest of the park's trails and its four miles of beach remain open.
Both projects matter. But only one of them is walkable from most Seaside front doors.
What 1.5 Miles Actually Connects
The Fort Ord Dunes campground is a destination you drive to. The Canyon Del Rey segment of FORTAG is a route you already cross on foot, whether you realize it or not. According to the project plans filed by the Transportation Agency for Monterey County, the path threads through:
- Work Memorial Park and its tennis courts
- The Butterfly Garden
- Del Rey Park
- A new underpass beneath State Route 218
- Frog Pond Wetland Preserve
- Carlton Drive, back up to SR 218
- Plumas Avenue in Seaside
- Del Rey Woods Elementary School, where the segment currently ends
That list reads less like a scenic trail and more like a map of a normal week: the park where your kids play tennis, the wetland preserve where you walk the dog, the elementary school run you make twice a day. Once complete, this segment does not require a car trip to enjoy. It replaces one. That distinction is the whole point of FORTAG's design, and it is also the reason a modest, unglamorous 1.5-mile stretch behind a shopping corridor deserves more local attention than the ocean-view campground getting the photographs.
The Bigger Trail Network Is Getting Noticed, Too
The attention on Fort Ord's trail system is not limited to daily commuters. The Sea Otter Classic, the long-running cycling festival based at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, added 5K and 17K trail runs for the first time at its April 2026 event, with the longer route looping 10.6 miles through Fort Ord National Monument before finishing on the raceway track. Organizers also expanded the festival's Enduro mountain bike competition into Toro County Park for the first time this year. None of this happens in Seaside proper, but it signals something worth knowing if you live near the trailheads: the same network of former Army land that FORTAG is stitching together for pedestrians also drew bigger athletic events, and bigger investment, this year than it has in years past.
The Reward Loop
A trail is only as good as what waits at the end of it, and Seaside's Broadway corridor has had a genuinely good year for that. Maligne, the Seaside restaurant led by chef Klaus Georis, earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand distinction in the 2026 MICHELIN Guide USA, recognition reserved for what the guide calls good quality, good value cooking. The menu leans on Italian-American and French classics, chicken parm and asparagus with hollandaise among them, prepared with what Michelin's inspectors describe as a light, contemporary, distinctly Californian touch.
For something more casual after a walk, Other Brother Beer Co., a few blocks up the same street, has built a following as a community-centered taproom with a strong beer list and a closing time late enough to make it a real after-dinner stop. Between the two of them, Broadway now covers everything from a Michelin-recognized tasting menu to a Thursday-night pizza and a pint, without requiring a drive off the peninsula.
A Date Worth Marking on the Calendar
Seaside's fall arts season also has a specific, dated reason to show up downtown this month. The Walter Lee Avery Gallery at Seaside City Hall is hosting an exhibition running September 7 through November 5, 2026, with an Artists' Reception on Friday, September 18, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. It is a small, civic-scale event, the kind that rarely makes it onto a regional calendar but is exactly the sort of thing a resident who already knows Seaside would want on their radar. The reception falls during the same season Seaside's Artists Tour typically runs, giving anyone curious about the local art community two reasons to walk into City Hall instead of just paying a parking ticket there.
The Neighborhood Is Building Itself Inward
The easy story about Fort Ord's transformation is the one you can photograph from Highway 1: new campsites, a beach overlook, a dune landscape being reshaped for visitors who will mostly be day-trippers and campers passing through. The quieter, more consequential story is happening two miles inland, where a modest paved path is connecting a tennis court to a wetland preserve to an elementary school, at a pace measured in grant cycles rather than headlines.
If you already live in Seaside, that second story is the one that will change how your Tuesday actually goes. The next FORTAG segment has already been in planning for more than a year. The Transportation Agency for Monterey County held a community meeting at the Marina Equestrian Center in June 2025 to gather input on where it goes next, which means the piecemeal approach Schmalz described has been in motion for a while and is still working its way through funding rounds. Worth watching, even if it never makes the front page.
Carmel Luxury Group follows these kinds of local shifts closely, not because they show up in a listing description, but because they shape how a neighborhood actually lives day to day. If you are curious what else is changing across the Monterey Peninsula's neighborhoods, or simply want a local's read on what a place is really like before you decide anything, Carmel Luxury Group is glad to talk it through.
