At 5 p.m. on July 31, city crews pulled the barricades off the Clive Greenbelt Trail under the Interstate 80/35 bridge and closed out a detour that had been running since October 1, 2024. Nearly two years of routing around Walnut Creek, first through Campbell Recreation Area on the west side, then out to NW 100th Street on the east, came to an end in the space of an afternoon. WHO 13 covered the reopening, and the city's own announcement called it a restoration of an important connection for walkers, runners, and cyclists.
That is the easy version of the story, and it is the one you have probably already half-absorbed from a city newsletter or a neighbor's comment on Facebook. Here is the part that matters more if you actually use this trail: the segment that reopened is not the same segment that closed. While the bridge sat behind orange fencing, the ground next to it changed shape entirely, and a taproom two miles down the path went dark and came back under new ownership. If your mental map of the Greenbelt still reflects 2024, three separate things happened while you weren't looking, and all three change how you'll actually move through this corridor now.
The detour math, briefly
For context on what two years of closure actually meant: the interstate project cut the trail between NW 114th Street and Campbell Recreation Area, which sits east of NW 128th Street at 12853 Woodlands Parkway. Anyone heading from the west side of Clive toward City Hall, the Clive Public Library, or the Aquatic Center had to leave the creekside path and find their way back on surface streets. If you gave up on that particular stretch somewhere in 2024 or 2025 and started driving instead, July 31 is your cue to reconsider. The direct route is back.
That said, treating this purely as a repair job undersells what actually happened next to it.
A park that didn't exist before the detour started
While the bridge was closed, the city was building something new immediately adjacent to it. Greenbelt Landing, a 14.89 acre site on the east side of NW 114th Street next to the Clive Aquatic Center, had its ribbon cutting on July 17, the same day the 50th anniversary Clive Festival kicked off. The project carried a $10.6 million price tag, with more than $3.5 million of that raised through grants and community donations rather than city funds alone.
What actually opened there is worth naming, because none of it existed on the Greenbelt before this year:
- The MidAmerican Energy Stage, a permanent performance space where the old special events building used to just be a rental hall
- Polk County Festival Grounds, open lawn built for exactly the kind of gathering the Clive Festival needs
- The Polk County Wetland Walk, an ADA-accessible boardwalk that gives visitors a close look at a native-plant stormwater wetland and creek access that wasn't part of the old park layout
- The Ashley Okland Star Playground, an all-inclusive design donated by Variety, the Children's Charity of Iowa, meant to serve kids of varying abilities
- A redesigned Creekside Pavilion replacing the old events building
The city has also flagged Greenbelt Landing as its first site on the ICON Water Trail network, which points toward eventual paddling access on Walnut Creek from that same spot. Nothing about that is built yet, but it tells you the site was planned as more than a patch of new grass next to a bridge.
The practical result is that the stretch of trail near NW 114th is no longer just a pass-through point on your way to somewhere else. It is now a place people stop on purpose, whether that means catching a concert on the new stage, letting kids loose on the playground, or walking the wetland boardwalk before continuing on.
The taproom that closed for good reason, then didn't
Two miles east on the trail, 515 Brewing Company sits at 7700 University Avenue with its patio backing up almost directly onto the path. It has been a fixture there since 2013, the kind of stop regulars build a route around. At the end of 2025, it closed. The brewery's own account of what happened next reads like a genuine local rescue story: a father and son, Scott and Wil Hedderich, were drowning their frustration over the closure at the taproom itself when a conversation with a regular connected them to Jason Kyte, a brewer with decades of experience including stints at Granite City Food and Brewery and Padre Island Brewing Company. By June 2026, the taproom had reopened under the Hedderichs with Kyte running the brew system, and 515 Brewing's own recap of the transition makes clear the new ownership intends to keep the same seven-barrel setup and the trailside patio that made the place a trail-adjacent institution in the first place.
If you had crossed 515 off your mental list of trail stops sometime last winter, that list is out of date. It reopened three months ago, under people who by their own description spent the first conversation mourning the fact that it had closed at all.
What actually changed, put together
None of these three things happened because of the others. The interstate project forced the bridge closure. The Greenbelt Landing funding and construction timeline was its own multi-year effort that happened to finish the same summer. The brewery ownership change was a private transaction between people who cared about keeping a local business alive. But they all landed inside the same six-week window in the summer of 2026, on the same physical corridor, and that convergence is the actual news here.
The old assumption, reasonable for anyone who tuned out the Greenbelt during the closure, is that the trail is simply back to normal. It is not back to normal. It has a new permanent event space it didn't have in 2024, a new inclusive playground, a new boardwalk over restored wetland, and a reopened taproom under a new team that has something to prove. The corridor that reconnected on July 31 has more reasons to stop along it than the one that closed.
For anyone recalibrating a weekend loop, the practical shape of it now runs roughly like this: pick up the trail from Windsor Heights or wherever you're closest, pass through the newly reopened bridge segment, stop at Greenbelt Landing near NW 114th for the wetland walk or whatever happens to be booked on the MidAmerican Energy Stage that week, and if you're heading east toward University Avenue, 515 Brewing's patio is there again for whoever wants to end the ride with a beer instead of just water from a fountain. The full paved system runs about 11.3 miles including its neighborhood connections, from 73rd Street on the east end to 156th Street on the west, so there's plenty of trail on either side of this particular stretch that never closed at all. It's the middle section, the part that sat behind fencing for two years, that's worth a second look now that it's actually different from the one you remember.
Clive built its logo around this trail for a reason. "Distinct by Nature" only means something if the nature part keeps getting better, not just repaired. This summer, it did both.
If you're a longtime Clive resident weighing a move within the area, or you know someone eyeing this corner of the metro because of exactly this kind of investment in daily life, BVZ Homes knows this neighborhood past the surface level. Reach out any time you want a straight answer about what a specific street, park, or trail connection actually means for a home you're considering.
