The Fullerton Loop Isn't Finished, and Most People Riding It Don't Know That

Ask a longtime Fullerton resident where the Fullerton Loop starts and you'll get a shrug before an answer. There's no arch, no trailhead sign, no obvious beginning. Most people just park behind the North Justice Center on Berkeley Avenue, a block off Harbor, and start walking or riding north. That's it. That's the whole ceremony.

What's easy to miss, standing in that parking lot, is that the trail you're about to do laps on isn't actually complete. About a third of it runs along the edge of a piece of land that Orange County has been fighting over for fifty years, and the outcome of that fight is still being decided in 2026. The loop you've run a hundred times has an ending nobody's written yet.

No Sign, Just a Parking Lot

The Fullerton Loop is roughly 11 miles, sometimes closer to 12 depending on which side trails and shortcuts you take, and it's built almost entirely out of things that used to be something else. About 85 percent of it is dirt singletrack or doubletrack, the rest sidewalk and asphalt where the trail has to cross a road. Most of that dirt sits on old equestrian paths and an abandoned railroad bed, which is why the trail behaves the way it does. It doesn't route around neighborhoods. It runs straight through the property lines of a city that used to be laid out very differently.

There's no single map painted on a kiosk anywhere along the route. Regulars navigate by landmark and memory, or by pulling up the trail on their phone before a junction gets confusing. If you're doing it for the first time, that's the one piece of advice every local will actually bother to give you: screenshot the map before you start, because the trail won't tell you where to turn.

The Two Miles That Explain the Loop's Reputation

Head north from the courthouse lot and you're on the Juanita Cooke Trail, which runs almost perfectly straight because it used to be the Pacific Electric Railway's Red Car line into Fullerton. It's flat, shaded, and about as far from a wilderness hike as a trail can be while still being made of dirt.

About a mile in, the loop cuts left through Hiltscher Park, and this stretch is the reason people who've done the whole loop keep coming back to just this piece of it. There's a seasonal creek, oak and pepper trees old enough to have real canopy, and a community-tended native garden that residents water and maintain themselves. It's roughly a mile and a half of the kind of shade you don't expect to find this close to Harbor Boulevard.

A few things worth knowing before you go:

• The trail crosses roughly 20 streets over its full length, so this is not a car-free experience the way a canyon trail would be.
• Restrooms exist near Laguna Lake and behind the courthouse, and that's about it for the whole loop.
• Hikers yield to horses, and bikers yield to both. The trail still sees regular equestrian traffic, particularly near Laguna Lake Park's stables.
• If you're finishing near the courthouse, Gonzo's Tacos is close enough to walk to directly off the trail, and it's become the informal finish line for a lot of regulars.

The Climb Nobody Warns You About

Past Hiltscher Park, the loop crosses Bastanchury Road and starts working its way up through Coyote Hills Tree Park, a small, simply signed stretch with two trails, one of which is closed to bikes because of a steep pitch. From there it climbs toward the Castlewood Trail, which runs along the edge of West Coyote Hills before connecting toward Ralph B. Clark Regional Park.

This is where the loop stops being a flat neighborhood connector and starts feeling like an actual hike. The Nora Kuttner Trail, inside the Robert E. Ward Nature Preserve, hits the second-highest point on the entire loop at just over 450 feet, and on a clear day the payoff is real: downtown Los Angeles, Fashion Island out toward Newport Beach, the San Gabriel range behind you. The full loop gains something close to 900 feet of climbing by the time you're back at the courthouse, which is more than most people expect from a trail that starts in a parking lot next to a strip mall.

The stretch between Rosecrans Avenue and Laguna Lake carries the best views on the loop and the steepest push to get them. Cross Euclid Avenue after that climb and Laguna Lake appears about a quarter mile later, a genuine reset point with shade, water, and a bench if you need one before the final stretch back south.

The Third of the Loop That Isn't Actually Settled

Here's the part that changes how you should think about that climb through Coyote Hills Tree Park and the Nora Kuttner Trail. The land those trails sit on, and a much larger piece of open space next to it, has been the subject of one of Orange County's longest-running conservation fights.

West Coyote Hills is 510 acres total, a former Chevron oil field known as Pacific Coast Homes, and the fight to keep it from becoming another housing tract started in the 1970s. The city finally acquired roughly 218 acres on the eastern side by the end of 2021, and that purchase is what created the current footprint of the Robert E. Ward Nature Preserve. Those trails, the ones you've probably already walked if you've done the loop, only opened to the public in 2023.

The other side of the property, roughly 292 acres to the west, is still in play. As of a December 2025 update, $75 million had already been secured toward the state's purchase of that remaining land from Chevron, through a mix of state funding and the 2024 State Climate Bond, with local advocates framing it as the closest the preservation effort has come to finishing what started fifty years ago. But by June 2026, when the city finally adopted its state-mandated open space element (five and a half months after the January 1 deadline the state had set), the document still described that western acreage as unresolved, caught between ongoing conservation-grant efforts and the possibility of future development depending on how federal funding lands.

In other words, the trail system you already use every weekend borders a piece of land whose future is still being negotiated in real time, in 2026, not in some settled history from a decade ago.

What Finishing the Loop Would Actually Mean

If that western acreage does get folded into the preserve, the Robert E. Ward Nature Preserve doesn't just get bigger. It becomes contiguous with the rest of West Coyote Hills, creating one of the largest remaining stretches of coastal sage scrub habitat left in Southern California, the kind of open space that's genuinely rare in a county this developed. For anyone who's already climbed the Castlewood Trail or caught the view from Nora Kuttner, that's not an abstract planning outcome. That's the same ridge you were standing on, quietly getting a lot bigger.

It also means the loop itself stops being a trail that happens to skirt the edge of contested land and becomes something closer to a permanent fixture of how the west side of the city connects to everything east of it. Right now, a good chunk of the loop's most scenic section exists because a fifty-year campaign fought to keep bulldozers off a hillside. That's worth knowing the next time you're up there watching the sun catch the San Gabriels.

None of this changes what to bring on your next lap. Water, a screenshot of the map, and maybe a stop at Gonzo's on the way back. But it's worth knowing that the trail under your feet is still being decided, one funding round at a time, by people who've been paying attention a lot longer than a single weekend hike requires.

If you're the kind of person who tracks what's happening in Fullerton this closely, whether it's a trail expansion or a shift in home values near it, BAIKHOME follows the same ground just as carefully. Get Your Free Home Valuation whenever you're curious what that attention is worth.