Any regular at Mission Trails Regional Park knows the spot without needing a map. Where the Father Junipero Serra Trail meets the San Diego River, somewhere between the Visitor Center and the base of the Fortuna peaks, the trail simply stops being a trail. Hikers hop from rock to rock. Some wade through ankle-deep water on a dry week. After a storm, plenty just turn around.
This year, Mission Trails picked up new signage, a repaired footbridge, and a formally approved plan to renovate its Visitor Center. All of it is real, all of it is funded, and none of it touches the one crossing that regulars actually navigate around. If you use this park on a normal weekend, that gap between what got fixed and what didn't is the thing worth knowing before you plan your next loop.
The Crossing Every Regular Already Routes Around
The ford sits on what park staff have long called the default loop, the route that connects the Visitor Center and Jackson Drive parking lot to the Fortuna peaks and back. Hundreds of people cross it on a typical day: trail runners doing an out-and-back, mountain bikers linking singletrack, families out for the Old Mission Dam walk who wander a little further than planned.
The crossing has a name attached to it now beyond its location. In January 2021, 21-year-old Max LeNail, a Brown University student who had recently moved to San Diego, drowned trying to cross the San Diego River there during a flash flood. His parents, Ben LeNail and Laurie Yoler, spent the next four years pushing for a pedestrian and bicycle bridge at the site, and in 2021 the state came through with a $1.5 million grant to help build it. A design was picked in January 2024: 130 feet long, 8 feet wide, glulam arches, shared use for hikers and mountain bikers. A construction firm was selected. City officials told the family construction in 2025 was realistic.
Then the money problem showed up from a different direction than anyone expected.
What Actually Got Built This Spring
While the bridge project sat frozen, the rest of the park kept moving, and the improvements are specific enough to notice on your next visit.
- Five new bilingual interpretive panels went up along the Oak Grove Loop Trail this spring, the first of more than 40 planned across the park, funded through a San Diego River Conservancy grant to the nonprofit MTRP Foundation. Each one carries a QR code linking to additional translations.
- A separate footbridge, unrelated to the river crossing controversy, was repaired using $8,000 in materials funded entirely through donor gifts to the Foundation.
- The Visitor Center has a newly approved concept plan for renovation, adding more exhibits, shade structures, and gathering space, according to Foundation executive director Jennifer Morrissey.
- A water purification pipeline is under construction along the Father Junipero Serra Trail, roughly a third finished, with completion targeted for spring 2028.
- The Foundation is still buying land north of State Route 52, near the uninhabited East Elliott planning area, and donated 108 acres to the city in 2025 alone. Crews are also pulling invasive brush along the trails under the same River Conservancy grant, clearing room for native plants and city biologists' effort to restore rare species like San Diego ambrosia and San Diego thornmint.
- The Foundation's teen Eco Ambassadors program, run by education coordinator Jonathan Serna, reopened its free Fall 2026 cohort this summer, with applications closing August 14.
That's a genuinely active year for a park that's already the sixth-largest municipally owned park in the country. None of it required the layered permitting that a river crossing bridge does. Trail signage doesn't need an Army Corps of Engineers sign-off. Land donations don't need a construction contractor. That distinction matters for what comes next.
The Bridge That Didn't Make Either Report
Here's the part a casual visitor might miss entirely: when Axios San Diego and Times of San Diego each covered this year's park improvements in April and May, neither mentioned the river crossing bridge at all. Not as a delay, not as a setback, not as a footnote. It simply wasn't part of the good-news roundup.
That's because there wasn't good news to report. By April 2025, Ben LeNail said the family had already put close to $700,000 into surveys and permitting. By the summer, the project's own update put total spending near $1 million, nearly the entire private fund the family had raised through the San Diego Foundation. They were two-thirds of the way toward the three permits they needed: site development, grading, and building. Getting the rest would have taken another $500,000 and six to nine months.
Then the federal money that Congresswoman Sara Jacobs had secured got cut when the new administration took office, and the Army Corps of Engineers issued a stop-work order tied to that funding's eligibility. LeNail issued his own stop-work order to the project team on June 1, 2025. The MTRP Foundation, holding the original $1.5 million state grant, decided it couldn't legally release those funds toward permitting costs, arguing the contract earmarked the money for construction only, not the paperwork required to get there. As of the family's most recent public update, the project sits on what Councilmember Raul Campillo, who chairs the park's Task Force, called "a wait-and-see pattern."
According to the family's project update from that period, the city had also posted signage at the ford declaring the crossing officially condemned, a liability move rather than an engineering fix. The rocks are the same rocks. The water still rises the same way after a storm.
What This Means For Your Fall Loop
If you're planning to hit the Fortuna peaks or the Visitor Center Loop this fall, a few things are worth building into your plan.
The river crossing near the Jackson Drive entrance has no bridge, no timeline for one, and no active construction underway as of this writing. San Diego's rainy season typically starts building through late fall, and the crossing that's manageable on a dry August afternoon turns unpredictable fast once storms move through. If your route depends on that ford, check conditions before you go rather than after you're standing at the edge of it.
If you're after the Fortuna peaks specifically and want to skip the crossing altogether, the park's own trail map lists approaches from the East and West Fortuna staging areas that reach the same summits without routing through the Father Junipero Serra Trail ford. It's a longer drive to the trailhead for some routes, but it avoids the one spot that trips people up most.
And if you're curious whether any of this changes before next spring, the Foundation's eNewsletter and social channels are where trail-condition updates and program news actually get posted, since there's no dedicated real-time alert system at the trailhead itself.
The larger point is one most visitors never think about until they're standing at that crossing wondering whether to get their shoes wet. A park foundation can raise money for signage, land, and native plant restoration on its own timeline, because those projects answer to a nonprofit board and a handful of grant conditions. A bridge over a federally regulated waterway answers to city, state, and federal agencies all at once, and when one of those layers pulls funding, the whole thing stalls no matter how much community support exists. Mission Trails proved both halves of that this year. The easy fixes got fixed. The hard one is still waiting.
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