Arcadia Lake Just Tripled Its Trail System. Most Edmond Residents Are Still Riding the Old Map.

For years, the trail at Arcadia Lake meant one thing: the old multi-use path, a dirt out-and-back that ran roughly six and a half miles from the park office to Spring Creek Park, twisting through the trees with a few bridges and water crossings thrown in. You rode it, walked it, or ran it depending on the season, and if it had rained hard the week before, you checked before you loaded the bike rack, because parts of it turned to soup.

That map is no longer accurate. Over the past several years, a mostly volunteer effort has quietly built out the east side of the lake into a much larger network, and on June 6, 2026, the city and the Oklahoma Mountain Bike Association marked the finish line on the newest chapter with the grand opening of a pavilion called The Launch Pad. If your mental picture of Arcadia Lake still stops at that familiar six-mile loop, you are not wrong about what used to be there. You are just behind on what is.

What Actually Opened on June 6

The ceremony ran from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the new Launch Pad, located at Post Road and 15th Street in the parking lot next to the Edmond Water Tower. It capped six years of work by OMBA volunteers, led by trail manager Joe Miller, known locally as Turbo Joe, to add more than 15 miles of new singletrack on the east side of the lake. The project drew on a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Partnership Handshake Grant, plus support from a list of local businesses that stuck with the project long enough to see it through.

The Launch Pad itself is more than a name. It includes a pavilion and drop-in platform, picnic areas, changing stations, real trailhead signage, bridges, and boardwalks, including one 300-foot elevated stretch overlooking a key section of trail. Turbo Joe Miller described the finished product as the result of "patience, persistence, and strong partnerships," and after six years of build days, that reads less like a ribbon-cutting line and more like an accurate summary.

The Map Most Residents Are Still Using

Here is the part that actually matters if you live in Edmond and think you already know Arcadia Lake. The city's own trails page still describes the lake's biking and hiking network as totaling 13 miles, a figure that reflects the original multi-use path and a few older connectors. OMBA's numbers tell a different story. By the association's own count, the system has grown from roughly 9 miles to about 28 miles as the Dam Trails came online. A 2024 feature quoting OMBA board member Catherine Sharp put the growth at 18 miles to 29, a slightly different starting point but landing on the same current total. The sources do not agree on exactly how small the trail once was, but they agree on where it stands now: somewhere around 29 miles, more than double what the city's own page currently advertises.

That gap between the city's published number and the trail system OMBA volunteers actually built is the real story here. Plenty of longtime Edmond residents skip Arcadia Lake for mountain biking because the number they remember, or the number they saw once on a city page, undersells what is out there now.

What the Dam Trails Actually Feel Like

The new mileage is not just more of the same flat, shaded singletrack. The Dam Trails, on the east side near the discharge channel, were built with sandstone obstacles, lumber and rock features, and a rock squeeze section, aimed at intermediate and advanced riders, with bypasses built in around the harder obstacles so newer riders are not simply locked out.

The signature addition inside that zone is the Postmortem Loop, a winding run through the trees that includes a fast, flowing downhill stretch, the kind of extended descent that is genuinely rare on the flat plains around Oklahoma City. According to trail-mapping data on Trailforks, Postmortem carries the single biggest elevation drop of any trail in the entire Arcadia system, around 105 feet. Part of its boardwalk feature was built by Scouts from Edmond Troop 78, working alongside Joe Miller.

The rest of the system spans a wider range than most people expect from a single Edmond lake:

• South Trails, described by OMBA as beginner-friendly and winding through the trees on easy terrain
• West Trails, a step up in difficulty and distance while still staying approachable for newer riders
• The Dam Trails and Postmortem Loop, intermediate to advanced, with rock features and bypass options
• Post Mortem connector trails circling the dam discharge channel back to the southern trailhead
• Named segments scattered through the broader network, including Return to Sender, Flow Daddy, Tainted Skivvies, and a stretch simply called To the Lake, one of the few spots on the whole system where the trail actually opens up to a clear lake view

Catherine Sharp, the OMBA board member, has made a point of pushing back on the assumption that all of this is extreme terrain. "All you really need to start is a bike and a helmet," she said, and she has described watching grandparents ride the trails with their grandchildren on a regular basis.

The Volunteers and the Businesses Behind It

None of this happened through a city contract. OMBA is a volunteer organization, and the Arcadia Lake system alone reportedly absorbs somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 volunteer hours a year just for maintenance, separate from the years of build time that went into the Dam Trails and the Launch Pad. Without that ongoing volunteer commitment, trail systems like this one tend to fall into disrepair fast.

The Launch Pad's grand opening credited a specific list of local partners who backed the project: Cimmaron Construction, Al's Bike Shop Edmond, Thrivent Financial through Ethan Hulme, Edward Jones through Brian Cohlmia, Son of Thunder Roofing, and Visit Edmond. If you ride Arcadia regularly and have never stopped into Al's Bike Shop Edmond, it is worth knowing the shop's name is attached to the trailhead you are parked at.

The Other Trail at the Same Lake

Everything above describes the mountain bike network. Arcadia Lake also has a separate, paved system built for walkers, runners, and road cyclists, and it is worth keeping the two straight since they serve different residents and different routines.

The Arcadia Lake Trail itself is a paved, three-mile path along the east and north side of the lake, currently ending at Edmond Park on East 2nd Street. Ground broke on an extension of that trail in January 2026, aimed at eventually connecting it to the Spring Creek Trail, a separate 3.1-mile paved path that already runs from Spring Creek Park at the lake west under I-35 to Fox Lake Trail, with trailheads at Spring Creek Park and near Integris Hospital. Construction is also underway to extend Spring Creek Trail further west to Coltrane Road.

The long-term goal, as described by the Arcadia Lake Trail Coalition, is a paved loop that eventually wraps the lake's full 26 miles of shoreline. That is a multi-year undertaking, not a 2026 milestone, but the January groundbreaking is a real step toward it, and it means the walking and road-biking side of the lake is expanding on its own timeline, independent of what OMBA has been building on the mountain bike side.

Before You Head Out

A few practical notes worth keeping in your back pocket if Arcadia Lake is back in your rotation. The singletrack sections, especially the older Multi-Use Trail and parts of the Dam Trails, are natural surface and can go from rideable to genuinely impassable after a hard rain. OMBA maintains real-time trail condition updates, so a quick check before you load the bikes can save you a wasted trip. General trail access at the lake is free. Swimming beach access runs $6, and the separate equestrian trail carries its own $4 daily fee or an annual pass through the park office, so those costs are specific to those activities rather than trail use in general.

Arcadia Lake has quietly become a bigger, more varied piece of Edmond's daily life than the city's own trail page gives it credit for. Whether that means finally trying the Dam Trails, walking the paved stretch out to Edmond Park, or just knowing which local bike shop helped build the trailhead you park at, the lake is worth a second look with an updated map in hand.

If you are weighing a move in or around Edmond and want a neighbor's read on what daily life actually looks like here, from the trails to the town itself, Jill Stephens is happy to talk it through. Let's connect.