If you hiked out to Boronda Lake anytime in the last year, you probably noticed the trails felt roomier than the stories from 2020 and 2021 suggested they would. That's not your imagination. The city's own numbers back it up, and it just quietly rewrote a multi-year improvement plan because of it.
For years, the working assumption around Foothills Nature Preserve was straightforward: the park opened to the general public in December 2020, crowds surged, and the city would need to keep building infrastructure to handle a permanently bigger audience. That assumption drove a 2023 improvement plan with new parking lots, extra fencing, and a full slate of traffic calming. Then, in October 2025, the Parks and Recreation Commission looked at the same problem and came back with something smaller. Not a bigger fix. A lighter one.
The visitation number nobody expected to shrink
The park's historic average, before it opened to non-residents, ran around 175,000 visitors a year. After the 2020 opening, that number jumped. By 2022, the preserve logged roughly 202,000 visitors, about 40 percent above the historic baseline. Between 2020 and 2024, the average climbed to about 221,000 visitors a year.
That's the number most residents still have in their heads: a park getting steadily more crowded, year over year, with no end in sight.
But the October 2025 staff report to the Parks and Recreation Commission told a different story. Mike Warner, the supervising ranger in the city's Community Services Department, told commissioners that attendance is now close to pre-pandemic levels, and that visitor behavior has improved along with it.
Warner told commissioners the park isn't seeing the cross-country shortcutting or trail-cutting the city worried about right after it opened.
"It seems folks have figured out the flow, generally, of the preserve and are being respectful of that."
| Period | Approximate annual visitors |
|---|---|
| Historic average (pre-2020) | 175,000 |
| 2022 | 202,000 |
| 2020 to 2024 average | 221,000 |
| Current (per city staff, late 2025) | Close to pre-pandemic levels |
That cooling is the actual reason the plan changed shape.
What the city cut from the plan
The 2023 version of the project was built for a park under pressure. It included a new 19-stall parking lot near the north end of Boronda Lake, split-rail fencing to keep people on marked trails, new crosswalks and stop signs, and pedestrian paths up to 6 feet wide connecting the lake to Vista Hill and the Oak Grove picnic area. That version pushed total parking at the preserve from 355 to 360 stalls, still short of the roughly 400 spaces that existed before 2020.
The version the Parks and Recreation Commission discussed on October 28, 2025, scales most of that back:
- Pedestrian paths shrink from 6 feet wide to 3 to 4 feet, and switch from a proposed hard surface to quarry fines, the same sand, silt and clay-lime mix already used at Arastradero Preserve
- The planned new asphalt parking area near Boronda Lake is dropped in favor of gravel hardscape
- Crosswalks, stop signs, and speed bumps stay in the plan
- Vista Hill gets "tiger teeth," a device meant to stop drivers from going the wrong way on the preserve's one-way road
- The estimated cost drops from about $450,000 to roughly $300,000
Part of that reduction traces back to the city's broader budget picture. Palo Alto approved roughly $6 million in citywide budget cuts over the past year, and staff were directed to reconsider the Foothills project's scope as part of that process.
The pushback that didn't disappear
Even with a lighter plan, not every detail landed smoothly with commissioners. Removing roughly two dozen existing parking spaces along the road near Boronda Lake drew objection from Commission Vice Chair Jeff Greenfield, who argued that parking close to the lake matters to the community and pushed staff to find another nearby spot for cars rather than pushing everyone to an overflow lot up the hill.
Commissioner Shani Kleinhaus raised a different concern, questioning why the city would build any new trail through sensitive habitat between the lake and the overflow lot at all. She also floated a smaller, stranger addition to the plan: some kind of crossing to help wildlife, especially newts, avoid getting run over on the busier park roads.
"I don't know if we need to direct the newts to it."
The commission generally supported the scaled-down plan, particularly the choice to skip new asphalt in ecologically sensitive spots. But the debate is a useful reminder that even a smaller project still involves real tradeoffs between access and habitat protection.
What happens on the ground this year
Here's the sequence city staff laid out in that October 2025 report:
- Final approval was expected to go before the Palo Alto City Council this past spring
- If approved, construction is set to begin this fall
- The city aims to finish the pedestrian path and traffic calming work by the end of the year
We haven't seen a published update confirming the council vote, so treat the fall construction start as the plan's intended timeline rather than a locked date.
Separately, the preserve shows up on the city's FY2026 capital improvement list with several line items that don't depend on the pedestrian path vote: a Boronda Lake dock replacement, a dam seepage investigation, and general trail maintenance shared with the neighboring Pearson Arastradero Preserve. Those are maintenance and safety items, not crowd control, and they're worth knowing about if you fish, row, or canoe on the lake regularly, since dock access could shift while replacement work is underway.
The parts of the preserve that were never up for debate
None of this changes what actually makes Foothills worth the drive up Page Mill Road in the first place. Boronda Lake is a 10-acre, man-made lake, formed by damming a tributary of Buckeye Creek, and it's stocked with bass, perch, and sunfish, open for fishing, rowing, and canoeing from three docks on its north and east sides. No swimming, no motorized boats.
The self-guided birding route that starts near the entrance takes you past the lake along the Woodrat and Toyon Trails, where regulars watch for dark-eyed juncos, western bluebirds, and the occasional flock of wild turkeys crossing the lawn. Drive deeper into the preserve and you reach Orchard Glen, a picnic area shaded by native oaks, bay trees, and coast redwoods, planted in part with old fruit trees left behind by an early owner of the land, looking out over Las Trampas Valley, where black-tailed deer graze most mornings and evenings. Oak Grove, the preserve's reservable group picnic area, has eighteen tables and requires booking ahead.
Runners tend to gravitate toward the Los Trancos Trail, while the Chamise Trail loop around Boronda Lake stays flat enough for a relaxed weekday walk. None of that changes under the new plan. What changes is how you get from one of those spots to another without walking down the middle of the access road.
A few practical notes if you haven't been out in a while: dogs are welcome on weekdays but not on weekends or city holidays, and current city code caps the preserve's capacity somewhere between 400 and 600 people at a time, applied the same to residents and non-residents. An annual pass covers up to two vehicles and includes a resident discount, though entry still isn't guaranteed once the preserve hits capacity.
If you want to do more than hike it
Two local groups have quietly shaped what the preserve looks like today, and both welcome newcomers. The Friends of Foothills Preserve installed 18 numbered redwood rest seats along the trail system and built a small scavenger hunt around them: find all 18 benches, log their carved numbers on a downloadable flier, and turn it in to a ranger for a prize. It's a low-key way to see corners of the preserve most visitors skip.
Grassroots Ecology has run a native plant nursery near the Interpretive Center since 2003, restoring habitat along Buckeye and Los Trancos Creeks and maintaining a demonstration garden where a section of turf lawn was converted to native plants starting in 2010. Volunteer sessions are open to the public and don't require any background in ecology, just a willingness to pull weeds and plant natives on a Saturday morning.
The city's own reporting suggests the crowds that justified a bigger plan back in 2023 have thinned out. The 2025 plan reflects that reality rather than fighting it, and it means your next visit to Boronda Lake, Vista Hill, or Oak Grove should feel closer to the preserve residents remember from before 2020, just with a slightly better path underfoot once construction wraps.
Foothills is one of the reasons people put down roots in this part of Palo Alto in the first place. If you're weighing a move to a neighborhood near it, or thinking about what your own property is worth in a market shaped by things like this, Christy Lin is happy to talk through it. Let's Connect.
