The Lake Monona Loop Has a Gap Until Next Summer
Runners lined up at Winnequah Park before 8:30 on the morning of September 26 for the Wisconsin Lakeside Half Marathon, the race that used to go by Rockin Brews. The course notes handed out beforehand carried a hedge that any regular on the lake loop would have caught immediately: the full circuit around Lake Monona would happen only "if there is no bike path construction." That single conditional sentence tells you more about the state of the trail right now than any map of the route ever could.
There is construction. It has been there since roughly midsummer, and it is not clearing out anytime soon.
The stretch in question sits on the Capital City Trail between E. Lakeside St. and S. Broom St., closed for work tied to the John Nolen Drive project. The closure is expected to run from around July 2026 through June 2027, which means anyone treating the lake loop as a dependable year-round circuit is currently working around an eleven-month gap, not a weekend detour. The marked workaround is a 2.6-mile combination of shared-use paths and low-traffic bicycle boulevards routed around Monona Bay, built specifically so cyclists and runners have a way through without cutting across John Nolen itself.
For a route usually cited at somewhere between 12 and 13 miles depending on where a rider starts counting, adding a 2.6-mile patch changes the math and the feel of the ride. It also means the loop most people picture when they hear "lake loop" doesn't currently exist in its familiar form. What exists is two solid arcs and a rerouted middle, and that middle happens to run right past Monona Bay instead of along it.
The Wisconsin Lakeside Half Marathon's own course description leans on that same uncertainty. Race organizers built the route to follow paved paths and tree-covered streets along the Lake Monona shoreline, timed so that cooler temperatures cover roughly three-quarters of the course and the fall color is just starting to turn. Around mile six, runners pass beneath Monona Terrace, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed convention center that anchors the north end of the lake. All of that is fixed. What isn't fixed is whether mile six through mile ten actually completes the loop or diverts onto the marked detour, because the race falls squarely inside the John Nolen construction window.
That's not a small footnote. It's a Monona institution writing its own event logistics around a lake trail closure in real time, which is about as direct a signal as you'll get that this construction is actively reshaping how people move through the neighborhood this season.
There's a detail worth sitting with here. Clean Lakes Alliance ran its 15th annual Loop the Lake bike ride on June 19, 2026, at-your-own-pace around the full lake, starting and ending at The East Side Club with stops at Winnequah Park, Olin Park, B.B. Clarke Beach Park, Hudson Park, and Olbrich Park along the way. No caveat, no detour language. Riders that day covered the complete circuit.
The Capital City Trail closure began roughly a month later. So the last community event to use the whole, uninterrupted loop happened in June, and the next big organized event to touch the same stretch, September's half marathon, had to write its course description with an if-clause. That's the actual shape of this fall on the lake: a route that was whole in early summer and has been split ever since, with the reopening not expected until next June.
None of this has paused the neighborhood's fall calendar, which is its own kind of evidence that Monona doesn't organize its year strictly around the trail.
The Monona Fall Festival returns to Nichols Road on October 10, running from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. with kids' activities, pie tasting, a chili cook-off, and the Hoot Hoot Hustle. It's the kind of event that draws people who have zero interest in biking the loop that weekend and every interest in a Saturday spent outdoors before the weather turns.
A few miles away, Aldo Leopold Nature Center runs its own after-dark tradition each fall: Fall Fest, billed as "Creatures of the Night," with activity stations spread across the center's trails and grounds. Parking gets tight enough that the center runs a free shuttle from Ahuska Park, with the last shuttle back leaving ALNC at 8:15 p.m. Campfire s'mores are available for a small fee, and the event itself is free and open to the public with no registration required. It's a low-key, kid-forward night that has nothing to do with the trail closure a mile away and everything to do with why families who live near the lake stay put on a Friday or Saturday night in October.
The construction reroute isn't only an inconvenience. Part of what makes it tolerable is that the detour still threads past some of the best reasons to be out on the lake loop in the first place.
Buck & Honey's and Breakwater both sit with waterfront dining patios on the Yahara River, close enough to the rerouted path that a ride or run through the detour still ends at a table with a view of boats passing by. Further along, Monona Bait & Ice Cream Shop is the kind of stop that turns a workout into an outing, serving scoops of Babcock ice cream made on the UW-Madison campus. None of these were added because of the construction. They were already fixtures on the Monona side of the loop. The detour just happens to keep them in the rotation instead of routing around them.
That matters more than it sounds. A construction closure that cut riders off from the lakefront entirely would change the character of a fall on Lake Monona. One that reroutes them past the same patios and the same ice cream counter, just on a slightly different set of streets, keeps the actual experience of the loop mostly intact even while the pavement itself is in flux.
By next June, the Capital City Trail should reconnect and the full loop should be rideable again without anyone's course notes needing a conditional clause. Until then, the gap is real, it's documented in the same event logistics that residents already rely on, and it hasn't stopped the fall calendar from filling up around it. The Fall Festival on Nichols Road and Fall Fest at Aldo Leopold Nature Center are happening on schedule. The half marathon ran its hedged course and finished on time. The ice cream counter is still open. That's a fair description of what a construction season actually looks like here, not a closure that empties out the neighborhood, but one that reroutes it for a while and lets everything else carry on.
If you already know this stretch of shoreline well enough to notice a rerouted bike path before anyone posted about it, you know Lake Monona better than most listings ever will. When the conversation turns from riding the loop to owning a piece of it, Susan Sutton Homes is worth a call.
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