For most of the past decade, if you lived off Schaffer Mill Road or anywhere inside Lahontan, Martis Camp, or the Martis Valley side of Northstar, getting to Northstar Village on foot or by bike meant driving partway there first. The paved trail ran out at the Castle Peak parking lots, a mile short of the village, and that last stretch belonged to cars. This June, it stopped being true.
Segment 3F of the Martis Valley Trail opened with a ribbon-cutting on June 3 at the new trailhead off the Northstar Preferred Parking Lot, closing the final gap between Castle Peak and Northstar Village. It's 1.23 miles. It doesn't sound like much until you realize it was the one piece standing between a full car-free route from downtown Truckee to Northstar's restaurants, lift lines, and summer concert lawn, something Martis Valley residents have been able to picture but not actually walk since the trail's first phase opened in 2022.
Thirty Years for the Last Mile
The idea for this trail is older than most of the houses it now connects. Former Northstar Community Services District board president Nancy Ives has said she first discussed the concept in the 1990s with her husband, Jerry, and then-NCSD general manager Paul Rouser, envisioning a path that would eventually stretch from Truckee through Martis Valley toward Brockway Summit and the lake. Construction on the broader trail system didn't begin until September 2014, at the Truckee town boundary. The first 4.6 miles opened in August 2022. Segment 3F is what finally reaches Northstar Village itself.
Ives has described the decades in between plainly:
"The progress seemed to move at a snail's pace. There were lots of roadblocks, but everybody kept at it."
NCSD director of public works Eric Martin framed the June opening as closing a loop that outlasted the people who first proposed it, calling it a project representing decades of vision and community investment rather than just a new recreation amenity.
Here's what changed on paper, and what it means if you're the one riding it:
| Trail State | Distance | What It Connects |
|---|---|---|
| Before Segment 3F (2022–2026) | 4.6 miles | Town of Truckee to Castle Peak parking lots |
| After Segment 3F (June 2026) | 5.75 miles | Town of Truckee to Northstar Village |
| Full build-out (in progress) | Approx. 10 miles | Truckee to the Lake Tahoe Basin ridgeline |
The 10-mile version is still under construction, but the 5.75-mile version, the one that matters for anyone living in Martis Valley right now, is already open and already paved.
What One Construction Season Actually Bought
Trail segments this size usually take multiple years to build. Placer County Parks Administrator Erica Seward has pointed out that Segment 3F was different: NCSD and contractor C&D Contractors finished it within a single construction season, installing four bridges, more than half a mile of rock walls, and a 50-foot boardwalk, then completed paving for the full 1.23 miles as a Class 1, Americans with Disabilities Act accessible route.
The money behind it tells you this wasn't a minor add-on. To date, $10 million in transient occupancy tax funding, channeled partly through the TOT-TBID Dollars at Work program, has gone into planning, design, and construction of the trail system, with additional funding from Placer County and state and federal grants bringing the total project cost to close to $19 million. That's real infrastructure spending on a path most of its users will never think about as infrastructure. They'll just notice it's there when they want to ride to dinner instead of drive.
Project partners beyond NCSD and Placer County included the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, the Truckee Donner Land Trust, and Northstar California Resort, a wider coalition than a single trail segment usually pulls together.
The Timing Lines Up With Leaf Season
None of this would matter much in February. It matters right now, in late September, because the newly connected stretch runs straight past Martis Creek Wildlife Area, one of the more reliable aspen pockets in the North Tahoe corridor, and Lake Tahoe's fall color window is opening as this piece publishes. Regional color guides have consistently placed the Martis Valley area's peak in the mid-to-late October range, with higher elevations turning first and the meadow and creek-bed aspens following through the following weeks.
That means this is the first autumn the full Truckee-to-Northstar-Village stretch has existed as a continuous, paved, car-free route through peak color season. Access points are straightforward if you haven't ridden it yet:
- From the north: Schaffer Mill Road (no dedicated parking at this access point)
- From the south: the Castle Peak Parking Lot at Northstar, the same lot used for Elizabethtown Meadows Trail
- Free parking in Truckee is available at 8505 Northshore Boulevard for anyone starting from the town side
The trail is flat enough and wide enough that it works equally well as a morning dog walk, an e-bike commute to the village, or a slow October ride timed to catch the aspens along Martis Creek before the leaves drop.
A Reason to Ride the Whole Way
The route now has a natural endpoint worth riding toward. Martis Valley Lodge, part of Tapestry Collection by Hilton, opened in the corridor between downtown Truckee, Northstar California Resort, and Truckee Tahoe Airport, built out of what was previously the Hampton Inn & Suites Truckee. Its restaurant and bar, Trailhead Social, sits close enough to the trail corridor to function as a legitimate stop rather than a detour, giving trail users an actual destination on the Truckee side of the route in addition to whatever's open in Northstar Village itself.
None of this changes what the trail is for. It's still a commuting and recreation route built by a community services district and a county parks department, not a resort amenity dressed up as one. But it does mean the calculation locals make about whether to drive to Northstar or ride there has shifted, at least for the stretch of the year when the aspens are the reason to go.
The Larger Loop Is Still Coming
The 5.75-mile version open today is a piece of something bigger. Once complete, the Martis Valley Trail will run roughly 10 miles into the Lake Tahoe Basin, connecting toward Brockway Summit, and it forms one leg of the planned Resort Triangle Trail, an eventual 62-mile paved loop linking Kings Beach, Tahoe City, Olympic Valley, Truckee, Martis Valley, and Northstar without a single stretch on a highway shoulder. That full loop is still years out. What matters this fall is that the piece connecting the Martis Valley communities to Northstar Village is no longer a plan on a county parks map. It's paved, it's ADA accessible, and it opened in time for this year's color season.
If you've been driving the mile between Castle Peak and Northstar Village out of habit, it might be worth checking what that trip looks like on two wheels or on foot before the aspens along Martis Creek finish their turn. The gap that made that trip a driving trip for a decade closed in June. Nobody's mentioned that part loudly enough.
Have questions about what's happening in the neighborhoods around this trail, or curious what a Martis Valley property near this new access point might be worth? The Brassie Group knows this corridor block by block. Let's talk about your highest possible return.
