If you took your usual loop down the river this month and hit an orange sign somewhere past Simon's Ravine, you're not imagining it. The Mississippi River Greenway is genuinely torn up between Grand Avenue and the Wakota Scenic Trailhead, and it's staying that way through October. What's easy to miss, standing at that barricade, is that the closure only affects one stretch of a much longer trail system, and the parts still open are having their most active month of the year.
That's the part worth understanding before you reroute your evening walk. The closure doesn't shrink what's available along the South St. Paul riverfront this August. It just concentrates everything into the half that's still open.
What's Actually Closed, and Until When
Dakota County's own trail conditions page is blunt about it: the greenway is "closed from Grand Avenue to the Wakota Scenic Trailhead through October 2026," with a posted detour along Hardman Avenue. That segment overlaps roughly the same two and a half miles that normally connect Kaposia Landing to the Wakota Scenic Trailhead, based on the county's own greenway distance map.
The detour itself is worth knowing even if you never plan to walk it. It reroutes foot and bike traffic onto Hardman Avenue, the same corridor where Bonfe closed on a new property across from its existing facility this spring and started construction on a 50,000-square-foot light industrial building, and where Danner Inc. is finishing a nearly 80,000-square-foot office and manufacturing facility at the Wakota Business Park, expected to wrap by the end of this year. Your detour, in other words, currently runs past two of the more visible construction projects in the city's industrial corridor.
Why Simon's Ravine Doesn't Care About the Closure
Here's the piece that changes how you should think about your route. The closure starts at Grand Avenue, which sits well south of Simon's Ravine Trailhead at 1308 North Concord Street. That means the connector into Kaposia Park, via the scenic bridge from Simon's Ravine, is completely untouched by any of this. So is the nearly two miles of paved interior trail circling Kaposia Landing itself, along with its 6.3-acre off-leash dog area.
That distinction matters because Kaposia Park isn't just sitting there waiting for the construction to clear. The park's 29-hole disc golf course, spread across 85 acres that trace back to a 1937 WPA project, is hosting the NADGT x Zanfel Minnesota Premier, a PDGA A-tier tournament, on August 29 and 30. That's not a small local outing. A-tier events on the PDGA circuit draw competitive players from well outside the metro, and Kaposia's course has hosted state, regional, and international tournaments for years. None of that required the closed stretch of trail to happen. It's all north of the barricade.
Three Things Actually Happening This Month
The pattern holds if you look at what's on the calendar right now, all of it inside the section of the riverfront that's still fully open:
- Subarus & Cold Brews, 5th Annual Event — Sunday, August 16, starting at 9 a.m., at 740 Concord St S.
- Drive-in Movie Night — Friday, August 21, starting at 8:30 p.m., at Kaposia Landing, 800 Bryant Ave.
- NADGT x Zanfel Minnesota Premier — Saturday and Sunday, August 29-30, at Kaposia Park's disc golf course.
Three separate draws, three separate weekends, all clustered in the part of the riverfront the county detour never touches. If you were worried the closure meant a quiet month along the river, the calendar says otherwise.
The Detour Runs Past South St. Paul's Newest Buildings
There's a second layer to this that has nothing to do with trails and everything to do with what's changing along Concord Street while the greenway project runs its course. The city's own economic development recap pointed to the arrival of Asian Mart on Concord Exchange as one of last year's clearer wins, a small business that worked through the Dakota County CDA's Open to Business program and the city's own EDA to land in a new building on the corridor. That's the same stretch the city has been steadily reshaping through its Concord Exchange streetscape work and the broader South Concord Corridor plan, which is also why you're seeing projects like the Wakota Business Park and Bonfe's expansion cluster along Hardman Avenue right now instead of somewhere else in the metro.
None of this is dramatic on its own. Taken together, it's a corridor that's actively under construction in more than one place at once, which is exactly why a trail detour and a wave of new commercial buildings are showing up on the same stretch of road this summer.
What This Means for Your Next Walk
If your normal route runs south past Grand Avenue toward the Wakota Scenic Trailhead, plan on the Hardman Avenue detour through at least October. If your usual loop stays north of that, around Kaposia Landing or up through Simon's Ravine into Kaposia Park, nothing about your walk has actually changed. You've just got more reasons to be out there this month than usual, whether that's a Saturday morning car meet, a Friday night movie under the open sky at Kaposia Landing, or a weekend watching some of the better disc golfers in the region work the course's tighter lines.
The closure is real, and it's worth knowing exactly where it starts and how long it runs. But it's a story about one segment of trail, not about the riverfront going quiet. This month, most of the evidence points the other way.
If you're already living in South St. Paul and keeping an eye on what's changing around Concord Street, Kaposia Landing, or the Hardman Avenue corridor, our South St. Paul neighborhood page tracks local listings and market activity alongside the kind of neighborhood detail that doesn't show up on a standard property search. And if you've been thinking about what your own home might be worth in this market, Huerkamp Home Group can put together a free market valuation whenever you're ready to look at the numbers.
