How far can you actually get if you start walking from Christmas Hill Park and just keep going? Most people who use the trail there never find out. They loop the park, maybe wander down toward the creek, and turn back before the pavement does anything interesting. The paved path locals call "the Levee" actually runs a full four miles one way, from Gilroy Sports Park out to Hecker Pass Highway, and it happens to pass directly alongside the biggest, slowest-moving construction project in the city's recent history. If you have only ever walked the Christmas Hill Park loop, you have seen a fraction of what is actually out there, and you have missed the view of a two-decade plan finally showing up in concrete and rebar.
Four Miles, Not Four Blocks
The official name is the Uvas Creek Levee Trail, but nobody who actually uses it calls it that. It is a paved, flat, class-one bike path that traces Uvas Creek from Gilroy Sports Park on the south end to Hecker Pass Highway on the north, skirting the western edge of Christmas Hill Park and the Dennis DeBell Uvas Creek Park Preserve along the way. The preserve itself is a 125-acre greenbelt the city manages separately, with its own shorter loop trail hugging the creek, but the Levee is the through-route that ties everything together.
There is no fee and no permit required to walk any of it. The trail includes water stations with bottle fillers along the route, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because Uvas Creek itself runs dry most summers and into the fall. If you are used to seeing water in the creek bed, that is a winter and spring thing. By late summer, the same stretch that looked green in April turns dusty and exposed, and the shade gets thinner the farther you get from the parks.
You have three realistic places to start:
| Access Point | What's There | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Gilroy Sports Park (south end, off Monterey Road) | Main trailhead parking, and a front-row view of active construction next door | A full out-and-back, or watching the sports park take shape |
| Christmas Hill Park (Miller Avenue) | Its own lot, picnic areas, playground, baseball fields | Shorter walks, a midpoint break, dog walks with kids in tow |
| Hecker Pass Park (north end, near Highway 152) | A quieter trailhead with its own parking | Starting from the far side when the south end is busy |
Dogs are welcome on leash. The path gets steady foot and bike traffic on weekends, so if you are walking with a dog or a stroller, staying right and giving cyclists room keeps everyone moving.
Turn It Into Nine Miles
The Levee is not the only paved route out there. The Gavilan Trail runs 4.4 miles one way and connects out of Gilroy Sports Park into the same creek and levee system, giving you a second flat, mostly shaded option that most casual users never try because they do not know it links up. Follow the Gavilan Trail to its northern end, pick up Hecker Pass Road east toward Santa Teresa Boulevard, then rejoin the Uvas Creek Levee Trail near Third Street, and you have turned a short evening walk into a nine-mile loop that starts and ends at the same parking lot.
That kind of range is unusual for a city Gilroy's size, and it exists because the paths were built to connect, not just to circle a park. It also means the amount of walking or riding available to you scales with how much time you actually have, from a fifteen-minute out-and-back at Christmas Hill Park to a half-day loop that touches four different named parks.
What You'll See At The South End Right Now
If you start from Gilroy Sports Park, you are walking past the site of the Gilroy Ice Center, a project that has been technically underway since 2019, when the city signed an exclusivity agreement with Sharks Sports and Entertainment, the company that also runs recreational rinks in San Jose, Fremont and Oakland. The plan calls for two full ice rinks, a restaurant, a snack bar and a pro shop inside a building that has grown from an original 80,000 square feet to roughly 100,000 as the design evolved. The land it sits on was, until recently, farmland growing tomatoes, and the sports park as a whole covers 86 acres, only about a quarter of which has been developed so far.
The project has moved in fits and starts for years. A 2024 council presentation set a target of fall 2026 for opening. As of the most recent public update, this past April, the project remained active but was working through a funding gap tied to rising construction costs, so that fall 2026 target should be read as aspirational rather than confirmed. What is not in question is the money behind it. When the City of Gilroy approved its two-year capital budget in June 2025, covering fiscal years 2025-26 and 2026-27, the Ice Center was the single largest item inside the city's Engineering Program, which itself received the biggest share of a $113.5 million capital plan. Efforts to build out this sports park trace back to a master plan the city adopted in 1999, so what you are looking at from the trail is closer to the final act of a 25-year project than a sudden change.
The Trail Network Itself Is Also Growing
The Levee and the Gavilan Trail are not the only paths the city is investing in. A separate project called the Lions Creek Trail is currently in the design phase, and it is meant to do something the existing network does not: give students and residents a safer, direct route to Christopher High School on Day Road by building a new paved multi-use trail along Lions Creek and adding a signalized pedestrian crossing at Santa Teresa Boulevard. The project is partly funded by a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, secured through the office of Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, and this past April, the city council approved an amendment adding roughly $188,000 to the engineering contract for its design.
None of this is visible yet if you walk the Levee today. But it tells you something about how the city is thinking about its trail system: not as a finished amenity that occasionally gets repaved, but as an expanding grid that keeps adding connections between neighborhoods, schools and parks. The same current two-year budget that funds the Ice Center also sets aside more than a million and a half dollars specifically for new trail construction citywide, on top of investments at San Ysidro Park on the east side of town.
Before You Head Out
A few practical things worth knowing if you have not walked the full route:
- No permits or fees anywhere along the Levee or the Gavilan Trail.
- Water stations with bottle fillers exist along the route, but bring your own in summer regardless, since shade thins out past Christmas Hill Park.
- The creek runs dry by late summer into fall. If you want to see actual water, plan your walk for winter or early spring.
- Leashes are required for dogs on both trails.
- If you are walking the south end near Gilroy Sports Park, expect construction noise and equipment near the Ice Center site through at least the rest of this year.
Most people who live near this trail system default to the same half-mile loop around Christmas Hill Park because that is the part everyone already knows. The rest of it, four miles one way, nine miles as a full loop, and a slow-motion construction project unfolding at one end, is sitting there for anyone willing to keep walking past the point where they usually turn around.
If you're curious how projects like this tend to shape the neighborhoods around them over time, that's the kind of on-the-ground detail we track every day at Sold By Team Robinson. Get a Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready to see what it means for your own corner of South County.
