Near the Lafayette Community Center on St. Mary's Road, the Lafayette-Moraga Regional Trail is a quiet paved path. In the 1950s, state transportation officials drew a four-lane freeway through the same spot. The road was called the Shepherd Canyon Freeway, or Highway 77. It would have come out of a tunnel from Oakland, cut through Moraga Valley and Burton Valley, and passed just feet from the Community Center on its way to Highway 24. The state planned to use eminent domain to make property owners sell the land it needed.
The freeway lost. In 1972, after decades of community opposition and with BART service starting, the State Assembly took the project out of the State Highway Plan. In 1975, Caltrans dropped Highway 77 from future consideration. On July 4, 1976, the East Bay Regional Park District dedicated the Lafayette-Moraga Regional Trail on that corridor. The trail turns 50 this year. It was dedicated the year after the state gave up on the freeway, on ground that has been Lamorinda's main north-south route for close to two centuries.
A Route Older Than Either Town's Main Street
The corridor was a transportation route long before anyone thought of it as a place to walk. The Lafayette–Moraga History Trail site, built for the anniversary, starts the story with mule trains in the 1800s. They hauled freshly milled redwood lumber from mills in the Oakland hills toward shipping ports in Martinez. In 1847, Lafayette founder Elam Brown bought the 3,329-acre Rancho Acalanes, a former Mexican land grant. Stores went up to serve locals and travelers, Gold Rush "49ers" among them.
The site's first stop, at Reliez Station Road, compares the route to Highways 24 and 680 today. It linked communities west of the Oakland Hills with people and land to the east. People traveled it on foot, then on horseback, then by rail until 1957, and then by automobile. Seen that way, the Highway 77 plan simply continued the corridor's history as a road. The trail is the use that broke the pattern.
When Glenside Drive Had a Train to San Francisco
In 1913, the mule-train route became an electric railway and joined the Sacramento Northern. That interurban line ran 183 miles and was one of the longest in North America. Multiple stops in Lafayette let local merchants sell goods to settlers, farmers and ranchers.
By 1939, commuters at Glenside Drive could board the Sacramento Northern's daily Comet and Meteor trains. Those trains ran straight into San Francisco on the lower-deck rails of the new Bay Bridge. The trains had dining and parlor cars, reached up to 60 mph, and got from San Francisco to Sacramento in under three hours. One archival photo on the history site shows electric car No. 1014 at Glenside station in June 1941, days before passenger service ended.
The infrastructure that made the train's San Francisco run possible also helped end it. The Bay Bridge opened in 1936 and the Caldecott Tunnel in 1937, and with better roads for cars, fewer people rode the train. Passenger service ended in 1941 and freight in 1957. After that the rails were pulled up and the corridor became a utility easement. A long, continuous strip of land with no active use was what made a freeway plan possible, and later a trail.
The Neighbors Who Got There First
The trail began with a goal much smaller than stopping a freeway. In the early 1970s, Lafayette residents Avon Wilson and Lynn Hiden, known as the "Bike Ladies," pushed for a safe off-street route for children going to school. Former Lafayette Mayor Donn Black helped bring Lafayette, Moraga and the park district together in a nine-member Trails Advisory Committee. Lamorinda Weekly's 2021 anniversary coverage reported that Barbara Grigg had proposed a safe school route about ten years before Hiden got involved. Once the work started, Hiden handled the trail layout and Wilson worked out the costs. The Lafayette Historical Society also credits Don Goode, Jerry Kent and other local leaders with turning the abandoned rail corridor into a trail.
Local communities partnered with the park district in 1974 to convert the corridor into a paved path for walkers, cyclists and equestrians. Two years later came the July 4 dedication, making this one of the early Rails-to-Trails projects. Five years ago, for the 45th anniversary, the East Bay Times reported on a historic panel unveiled at the original dedication site behind Glenside Community Pool, between St. Mary's Road and Glenside Drive.
Reading the Corridor From North to South
The park district puts the trail at 7.65 miles. It runs from Olympic Boulevard at Pleasant Hill Road in the north to EBMUD's Valle Vista staging area near San Leandro Reservoir in the south. EBRPD's trail page splits it into three uneven pieces. The first 4.77 miles run from Olympic Boulevard to Rheem Boulevard and St. Mary's Road. The next 1.16 miles reach Moraga Commons. The last 1.72 miles pass through downtown Moraga to Valle Vista. Staging areas are at Olympic Boulevard, St. Mary's Road, Lucille Lane and Moraga Road.
The anniversary history site has nine stops along that route. Each one covers a different chapter of the corridor's past:
| Stop | Location | What the story covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reliez Station Road | The corridor as a centuries-old link south toward the redwoods |
| 2 | Topper Lane | Lumber trade, Elam Brown's 1847 purchase, merchants after 1913 |
| 3 | Glenside Drive | Sacramento Northern commuters and the Comet and Meteor trains |
| 4 | Lafayette Community Center | Highway 77 and why it was never built |
| 5 | Rheem Boulevard & St. Mary's Road | Fossils of prehistoric horses, rhinoceros, camels, bears, bison and mastodons |
| 6 | Saint Mary's College | The college's 1927 move to Moraga, Navy pre-flight training, co-education in 1970 |
| 7 | Moraga Commons | The Rancho Laguna de los Palos Colorados land grant and ranching |
| 8 | Moraga Country Club | Orchard-era agribusiness and produce shipped by rail |
| 9 | Valle Vista | A failed subdivision whose homes were razed for the Upper San Leandro Reservoir |
Many of the stops are about infrastructure. The railroad, the freeway, the orchards that shipped by rail and the reservoir that wiped out Valle Vista each changed what this ground was used for. At the Community Center stop, the site also points to a separate interpretive panel about the Indigenous Bay Miwok. It sits in the Community Center's native plant garden and parking lot, next to the children's play area.
Panels for the Fiftieth Year
On Oct. 10, the park district held an open house at the Lafayette Community Center's Jennifer Russell Building, 500 St. Mary's Road, to preview a new set of interpretive panels for the 50th anniversary. According to the Contra Costa News announcement, the panels were developed with the Town of Moraga, the City of Lafayette, the Lafayette and Moraga Historical Societies, the Moraga Community Foundation and the Community Foundation of Lafayette. The same announcement says installation along the trail is planned for later this year. The Lafayette Chamber's listing for the event says the panels draw on research by Lafayette resident Shane Reisman. They use stories, photographs and maps to show how the land changed and what the railroad and the trail have meant to the community. The full set of stop stories is online now at lmhistorytrail.org.
The rainy season brings back another feature of the corridor. Lamorinda Weekly has described a seasonal "mini waterfall" just past the trail crossing at Rheem Boulevard and St. Mary's Road, near Saint Mary's College. Patch put it about a quarter mile north of that crossing and called it the "Disappearing Waterfall," since it flows only after enough rain. It sits near stop 5, where the history site describes the fossil record.
The trail's two ends have their own nearby stops. In Lafayette, Headlands Brewing describes its taproom at 3420 Mt. Diablo Blvd. as close to the trail and a short walk from downtown. In Moraga, the Moraga Historical Society's Old Moraga Town Site walking tour meets the regional trail at Moraga Creek. Its route names Si Si Cafe, Ranch House Cafe Moraga, Canyon Club Brewery and Loard's Ice Cream.
What's Closed on the Connecting Trails
The park district's alerts and closures page, updated Nov. 1, shows two closures on trails that connect to this one. Both could change a familiar loop:
- Briones to Las Trampas Regional Trail: closed from Golden Gate Way to Moraga Boulevard in downtown Lafayette until further notice.
- Old Moraga Ranch Trail: closed from Sanders Drive to Sanders Ranch Road because of a landslide.
The page is updated as conditions change, so check it before heading out.
Randy Waller comes from a construction and land background, so a strip of ground that went from rail line to utility easement to a near-freeway to a trail is the kind of land-use history he works with every day. If you have questions about how land use has shaped a particular part of Lamorinda or the wider North Bay, Let's Connect.
