For a little over a year, if you drove Route 1 near the Nonesuch River or cut through on Pleasant Hill Road, you got used to the orange cones and the chain-link fencing around a construction zone that never seemed to move. That gap had been part of the landscape so long that a lot of longtime Scarborough residents had stopped expecting it to close at all. Then on August 6, a few hundred people showed up at the Wainwright Sports Complex in South Portland, a ribbon got cut, and the gap was just gone.
What that ribbon cutting actually changed is bigger than a ceremony. For the first time, you can get on a bike or lace up running shoes anywhere along the Eastern Trail's off-road spine and ride roughly 16 miles from Bug Light Park in South Portland to downtown Saco without touching a road shoulder. That connection runs straight through Scarborough Marsh, and it didn't exist three weeks ago.
A Project That Was Supposed to Be Finished by 2017
The number that makes this story interesting isn't the 1.6 miles of new trail. It's the math around it. When the Eastern Trail Alliance launched its first fundraising push for this exact segment, the goal was $4.1 million and the target completion year was 2017. What actually happened was a decade of easement negotiations, a pandemic that stalled momentum for months, and a final price tag of $7.5 million, funded by a mix of the Town of Scarborough, the City of South Portland, the Maine Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration, and individual and corporate donors through the Eastern Trail Alliance.
By the time crews broke ground in June 2025, the project's own revised deadline was November 2027. Instead, it opened 15 months early. For a piece of public infrastructure that had become something of a running joke among people who follow local planning, finishing early is the part that actually surprised people who'd been watching it for years.
Eliza Alexander, executive director of the Eastern Trail Alliance, described what the finished segment is for in plain terms after the ribbon cutting: it's "this nice, beautiful stretch of off-road trail that can be used for commuting, for bicycling, for taking walks with your friends, with your family." South Portland Mayor Elyse Tipton put it more bluntly at the ceremony: "The gap is gone."
What the Missing Piece Actually Connected
Before this summer, the off-road section of the Eastern Trail in Scarborough dead-ended at the Nonesuch River, short of a real connection into South Portland. Anyone who wanted to bike the full stretch toward Portland had to detour onto surface streets to get around that gap, which meant the "off-road trail" experience that draws people to the Eastern Trail in the first place broke down right where Scarborough meets South Portland.
The new segment fixes that with two pieces of infrastructure that took most of the construction budget: a bridge over the Nonesuch River and a second bridge over a rail bed near Pleasant Hill Road. From there, the trail loops around Prouts Pond and ties into the Wainwright Sports Complex at 125 Gary L Maietta Way in South Portland, which already connects to the Greenbelt path running to Bug Light Park.
Scott Kunkler, conservation director for the Scarborough Land Trust, has been making the case for months that this isn't just a recreation upgrade. "The connection goes beyond just recreation," he said. "It could encourage more people to choose active transportation options for daily commutes or errands, helping to reduce reliance on vehicles." That's a real shift for anyone in Scarborough close enough to the Eastern Road or Pine Point Road trailheads to consider biking to a job or an appointment in South Portland instead of driving Route 1.
If you're figuring out where to actually get on the trail from your side of town, the existing access points haven't moved:
- Eastern Road, off Black Point Road, with a small lot that holds 15 to 20 cars
- Pine Point Road (ME-9), about 1.1 miles east of Route 1, near the brick pump station and the Scarborough Marsh Audubon Center
- Black Point Road, which also connects to the Eastern Road lot
All three now feed into a continuous route instead of one that stopped short.
The Marsh Is Having Its Own Moment
The trail opening wasn't the only piece of Scarborough Marsh news this month. On August 15, the Scarborough Land Trust ran the first-ever Scarborough Marsh Day, a celebration built around the 3,100-acre marsh itself rather than the trail that crosses it. People canoed and kayaked, watched clam-digging demonstrations, and listened to live music, all centered on what the Land Trust has spent decades protecting.
The two events aren't officially connected, but they land in the same two-week window for a reason. Scarborough Marsh is the largest contiguous salt marsh in Maine, and this summer gave it both a finished trail crossing and a dedicated public celebration for the first time in the same month. If you've driven past the Audubon Center on Pine Point Road without stopping in, this is a reasonable season to change that. The center rents canoes and runs guided walks, and the nature trail across Route 9 from the visitor center dead-ends right into the marsh most people only ever see from a car window.
Reading This Season Whole
If your Eastern Trail experience up to now has been the short out-and-back near Pine Point or the stretch through the marsh toward Old Orchard Beach, the finished gap gives you an actual reason to go farther in the other direction. You can now ride from a Scarborough trailhead straight through to South Portland's Bug Light Park on Casco Bay, a route that used to require riding on-road through unfamiliar neighborhoods to string together.
Fall is genuinely the better season for this stretch. The marsh crossing gets less bike traffic once summer weekend crowds thin out, and outdoor writers who ride this section regularly single out the fall foliage through the wetland as the best time to be on it. If you've been putting off a longer ride because the gap made it feel like more trouble than it was worth, that excuse is gone along with the construction fencing.
None of this changes what Scarborough is. It changes what's actually reachable from it without a car, which is a different kind of local knowledge than knowing your commute time to Portland. The town spent 20 years and $7.5 million closing a mile and a half of trail, and the payoff wasn't a longer ride. It was a reliable one.
If you're weighing what a season like this says about a town, or you just want someone who tracks Scarborough's daily rhythms as closely as its housing market, The Scoville Foley Team is a good place to start that conversation. You can also browse our Scarborough neighborhood guide for more on what makes this town work day to day. Contact us anytime.
