Walk the Batiquitos Lagoon Trail on any weekday morning and you'll hear the same assumption from at least one other person on the path: that you could, if you wanted, keep walking or biking all the way up the coast to Oceanside on a single connected trail. People say it like it's already true. It isn't, not yet, and the gap sits in a stretch you'd never guess just by looking at a map.
Carlsbad's trail system is really two different projects running at two different speeds. One is finished, has been for years, and gets used hard. The other is a regional infrastructure build that's still working through city planning meetings in 2026, more than three decades after it was first proposed. If you live here and walk regularly, knowing which is which changes how you plan a route, and it explains why the "connected coastal trail" everyone talks about still has a hole in the middle.
The lagoon trails are the finished part
Start with what actually works today, because it's better than people give it credit for.
The Batiquitos Lagoon Trail, reached from the nature center at 7380 Gabbiano Lane, is the one most people mean when they say "the lagoon trail." It's flat, unpaved, and runs about 3.4 miles round trip along a 561 acre tidal wetland that the city, the Port of Los Angeles, and other agencies reopened to the ocean in the mid 1990s after decades of sediment closure. No bikes are allowed on this stretch, which is a small detail that changes the character of the whole walk. It stays a foot traffic corridor, which is why it's popular with birders working through the reserve's roughly 185 recorded species and why it doesn't feel crowded even on a Saturday.
If you want a shorter version, the Batiquitos Lagoon North Bluff Trail is a different animal entirely: a 0.7 mile route reached from a small public lot on Windrose Circle, running the bluff above the lagoon before descending through a set of concrete stairs to Avenida Encinas. There's a shaded gazebo partway along and lagoon views the whole way, and because it's a bluff trail rather than a shoreline trail, it stays dry when the flat lagoon path gets muddy after rain.
North of Batiquitos, the Agua Hedionda North Shore Hubbs Trail is the quiet one nobody mentions. It's a half mile, reached from the north end of Garfield Street, running along the outer portion of Agua Hedionda Lagoon between Coast Highway and the railroad tracks. Short as it is, the trailhead has some of the better sunset views in the city and it's the trail locals use when they want the payoff without the mileage.
For something harder, the Aviara trail system includes the Eucalyptus Trail, a 2 mile route through eucalyptus groves with steep sections that climb to high points overlooking both the lagoon and the ocean. It's the one trail on this list that reads as a workout rather than a stroll, and the city's own trail guide lists it as the difficult option among Carlsbad's three signature routes, alongside the Batiquitos North Bluff Trail and the Hubbs Trail as the easy and moderate picks.
All four of these are documented in more detail through the city's GoHike Carlsbad portal, which is worth bookmarking if you're the kind of walker who wants exact mileage before committing to a route.
One small thing worth knowing if you walk the lagoon trail regularly: the palm trees near the nature center have been dying off, and multiple recent trail reports attribute it to an infestation of the invasive South American Palm Weevil combined with a lethal fungal disease. It's not dramatic, but if you've walked that stretch for a few years you've probably already noticed the canopy thinning near the trailhead, and now you know why.
The connecting piece is still in design
Here's the part that surprises people. The lagoon trails above are self-contained. None of them connect north to Oceanside or south to Encinitas on a continuous, purpose-built path. That job belongs to the Coastal Rail Trail, a regional project coordinated by SANDAG that's meant to eventually link Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Solana Beach, Del Mar, and San Diego along the rail corridor.
In Carlsbad, the trail runs along Avenida Encinas and is being built in three segments. Segment 1, from Cannon Road to Palomar Airport Road, is complete. Segment 2, from the Poinsettia Coaster Station to Carlsbad Boulevard, is also complete, and it now includes a new signalized crosswalk at San Carlos Street with an audible walk signal, timed to keep traffic flowing while giving pedestrians a protected crossing into the shopping center on the other side.
Segment 3 is the gap. It runs from Palomar Airport Road to the Poinsettia Coaster Station, the middle stretch that would actually make Segments 1 and 2 into one continuous route, and as of a Planning Commission hearing on January 21, 2026, it's still in the design phase. The city has been clear that this segment requires roadway widening to fit new sidewalks and wider bike lanes, along with property acquisition, utility undergrounding, and habitat review before construction can start. None of that happened at the January hearing. What happened was a resolution getting adopted, which moves the project forward on paper without putting a single new foot of pavement on the ground.
So the honest version of the map looks like this: you can walk or bike a finished stretch from Cannon Road down to Palomar Airport Road, and a separate finished stretch from the Poinsettia Coaster Station down to Carlsbad Boulevard. What sounds like one connected trail because both pieces share a name is, for now, two finished bookends with a gap between Palomar Airport Road and the Poinsettia Coaster Station still waiting on the design work to clear.
If your regular route depends on gliding past the Poinsettia Coaster Station without a break, you're not walking the Coastal Rail Trail as a single trail yet. You're walking a finished stretch that ends at the station and a separate finished stretch further north that the station doesn't reach.
This matters for anyone who's ever tried to plan a longer walk or ride assuming the whole coast is stitched together. It also explains something residents have noticed anecdotally for years: why the Avenida Encinas corridor near the Poinsettia Coaster Station still feels like it's missing sidewalks and consistent bike lanes in a way the rest of the route doesn't. It is missing them. The city's own pedestrian master plan flags that exact stretch as one of the highest concentrations of walking commuters and pedestrian dependent populations in Carlsbad, which is precisely why it's the piece under active design rather than the piece that got built first.
What this means for how you actually walk Carlsbad
None of this makes the existing trails less worth using. The lagoon system alone gives you four distinct experiences within a few miles of each other: a flat three plus mile wetland walk, a short bluff route with a gazebo, a half mile sunset spot most people drive past without knowing it's there, and a genuine hill workout through eucalyptus groves. That's a strong network on its own terms.
What's worth adjusting is the assumption that Carlsbad already has one continuous coastal path from end to end. It doesn't, not yet, and the missing piece isn't a rumor or a technicality. It's a specific segment, in a specific design phase, with a specific hearing date on the public record. If you're mapping a longer route along Avenida Encinas, plan around the Poinsettia Coaster Station as a real break point rather than a connector, at least for now.
If you're weighing whether Carlsbad's trail access lives up to its reputation, or you're curious how neighborhood-level details like this factor into what makes one block feel different from another a few streets over, that's the kind of on the ground knowledge Anastasia Colwell-Olsen brings to conversations about North County San Diego. Let's Connect whenever you're ready to talk through what you're seeing on the ground here.
