Irving Called the Campion Trail Finished in April. The Bridge to Dallas Opens This Fall.

Walk the loop around Lake Carolyn on any weekday evening and you'll see the same crowd: office workers cutting through Water Street on their way home, a few paddleboarders drifting past the Mandalay Canal, someone jogging past the Mustangs of Las Colinas sculpture at Williams Square for the third time this week. It feels like a neighborhood amenity, contained and finished, the kind of loop you do because it's exactly the right length and it's right outside your door.

That loop actually did just finish, quietly, sometime in the last year. But a much bigger story happened around it this spring, and if you only caught the headline, you'd have the wrong idea about what's actually open right now.

The Loop You Already Walk Is Genuinely Done

The Lake Carolyn Promenade has been under construction in phases since 2010, funded through Tax Increment Finance dollars pulled from the Las Colinas Urban Center's own TIRZ No. 1 zone. The final stretch, Phase V, added 3,800 feet of new walkway along the lake's north shore near the Toyota Music Factory and the Wells Fargo campus, complete with benches, pedestrian lighting, and new entry structures. It closed the gap that had kept the promenade from being a true, unbroken 6-mile loop around the lake.

The city's own materials give two different completion windows for this last piece, an earlier fall 2025 target and a later spring 2026 estimate. Either way, it's done now. If you've walked the full ring around Lake Carolyn recently without hitting a barricade, that's the answer. The project came in at $4.66 million, which the city notes was 22.6 percent under the original estimate.

That part of your daily routine hasn't changed in any way that requires an announcement. It's just finally whole.

What Irving Actually Celebrated in April

In April 2026, the city staged something bigger than a ribbon cutting. State Rep. Cassandra Garcia Hernandez presented Mayor Rick Stopfer with an oversized ceremonial check for $2.1 million, memo line reading "Campion Trail completion." City officials framed it as the finish line for a project that started with a master plan approved back in 1995.

What the ceremony actually marked was the Elm Fork Extension, the piece of the Campion Trail system that ties Irving's trail network into a continuous route reaching Coppell, Carrollton, and Farmers Branch. That's a real accomplishment, and if your rides or runs tend north out of Las Colinas, you now have a genuinely longer, connected route than you did a year ago.

The Piece That Wasn't Actually Finished Yet

Here's where the timeline gets more interesting than a press release. While Irving was celebrating northward connectivity in April, a separate and arguably more locally anticipated piece of the same trail system was still under construction to the south: the Frazier Dam segment, officially Phase 1B of the trail's Unification project.

This is the stretch that runs along Frazier Dam between Irving and Dallas, and it's the one advocacy groups like Friends of Bachman Lake have been pushing to get built for years specifically because it's the missing physical link between Irving's Campion Trail and Dallas's Bachman Lake Trail. Back in January 2024, that group announced it had secured funding just to study the best connection route through the Frazier Dam Recreation Area. That's how unfinished this particular link still was.

Construction on the 1.8-mile segment began in summer 2025. The scope is substantial: two bridges, two low-water crossings, two boardwalks, a new dam overlook and rest area, and canoe launches on both sides of the dam. It's a $4.2 million project funded through Irving's Park Improvement Bond Fund, and the city's own target has consistently been fall 2026.

That target is arriving right about now. As of this writing, the city hasn't published a firm opening date beyond the season, so if you're planning a ride toward Dallas via Frazier Dam, it's worth checking current conditions before you go rather than assuming April's ceremony means that route is clear. And even once Frazier Dam opens, it isn't the final word: Phase 2 of the Unification project, the last piece needed to fully stitch the trail's northern and southern halves together, is anticipated to begin sometime in 2026 and isn't expected to wrap until late 2027.

Here's where things stand across the system as of this month:

What to Actually Do With This Right Now

If you're heading out this weekend, the practical guidance is simple. The full Lake Carolyn Promenade loop is open and finished, so that evening walk or run is exactly as advertised. Heading north from Irving toward Coppell, Carrollton, or Farmers Branch on the Elm Fork Extension is also genuinely rideable now, a direct result of April's completion. Park at Sam Houston Trail Park, at the northern end of the Elm Fork section near Valley Ranch, or at the L.B. Houston Trailhead if you're starting closer to the Trinity's edge.

Holding off on Dallas is the smarter move for now. Until Frazier Dam opens, that route dead-ends at active construction, not a finished connection.

A few named stops worth building a route around, whichever direction you head:

• The Mustangs of Las Colinas at Williams Square, the bronze sculpture of nine horses by Robert Glen, free to view any time and one of the more photographed spots in Irving
• Mandalay Canal, where Gondola Adventures runs Venice-style rides through the heart of Las Colinas
• Pacific Table and Cork & Pig Tavern along Water Street, both an easy detour off the promenade for sushi, wood-fired pizza, or gourmet sandwiches after a lap
• Toyota Music Factory's plaza, where the trail passes close enough for a coffee or lunch stop without breaking your route

The bigger picture here is that Irving's trail work is one piece of a larger regional push. The North Central Texas Council of Governments is coordinating a Fort Worth to Dallas Regional Trail that will eventually stretch 64 miles across Fort Worth, Arlington, Grand Prairie, Irving, and Dallas. Irving's Campion Trail is one of the more finished stretches of that vision, which is part of why the city was eager to hold a ceremony. It just wasn't the whole story yet.

The loop you already know is done. The bigger network around it is closer than it's ever been, arriving in pieces on its own schedule rather than all at once behind a single check presentation.

If you're thinking about what it actually means to live somewhere this connected, or you're weighing a move to Las Colinas or another Irving neighborhood, HXC Real Estate tracks these kinds of changes as part of knowing the area, not just the listings in it. Message Harman on WhatsApp to talk through what's happening in Irving right now.