Walk the paved loop at the Crooked River Wetlands Complex on any weekday morning and you'll eventually reach the spot where the trail dead-ends at the river. Across the water sits 185 acres of restored floodplain that most Prineville residents have never set foot on, even though it's been under active restoration since 2022. That's not an oversight. Ochoco Preserve is owned by the Deschutes Land Trust, and until a bridge and trail system get built, the only way in is a guided tour.
For years, the story locals heard about that land across the river was simple: the Land Trust is fixing the creeks, and eventually there will be a bridge so you can walk over and see it yourself. This spring, that story split into two, and the more interesting half of it has nothing to do with construction schedules.
What's actually been happening on that land since 2022
The Ochoco Preserve Project has moved in phases, each one tackling a different waterway. Phase one, completed in 2022, restored McKay Creek where it crosses the preserve. Phase two, finished in 2024, went after Ochoco Creek and a stretch of the Crooked River itself. Crews didn't just clean up the banks. They rebuilt the meander of Ochoco Creek, roughly doubling its length on the property from half a mile to a full mile, and shifted a short stretch of the Crooked River, about six-hundredths of a mile, onto new, more complex channels. Along the way, they installed 63 new log jams built from salvaged timber, the kind of structure a healthy stream builds for itself over decades if nobody straightens it out first.
Land Trust restoration specialist Jason Grant, who has walked the site through all of this, put the goal plainly during a tour last fall: the work is about "maximizing floodplain connectivity, fish and wildlife habitats, trying to address water quality." Phase three was supposed to be the payoff for residents. It's the part that adds footbridges over the Crooked River and Ochoco Creek and finally links the preserve's trails to the public path system at the Wetlands Complex across the water.
The bridge got pushed back
That's the part of the story that changed this year. In an April 2026 update, the Land Trust told supporters that "the funding landscape for stream restoration projects has shifted dramatically" over the past year, and that phase three is now being split into two separate efforts. One will finish the remaining restoration work along the Crooked River. The other covers the footbridges and trail access that would actually let the public onto the property. Implementation on that second piece isn't expected to start until 2027 at the earliest, and that's contingent on funding coming through.
If you've been waiting to walk that land, the honest answer is: not this year, and probably not next year either.
But the creeks didn't wait for the bridge
Here's the part that hasn't made it into the general parks roundups. While the recreation piece of the project stalled on funding, the restoration piece it was built on top of quietly proved itself. In early April 2026, Land Trust biologists conducting redd surveys, the term for the gravel nests fish dig to lay eggs in, found something that had never been recorded at Ochoco Preserve before: nine steelhead redds plus additional redband trout redds in the restored section of McKay Creek, and six more steelhead redds in the newly reworked stretch of the Crooked River.
That matters because steelhead don't spawn in bad habitat. They need slow-moving water and the right gravel size to keep eggs at a stable temperature with enough oxygen. Before the restoration, the Land Trust has said the site's straightened, ditch-like channels didn't offer that. The fact that steelhead chose this water on their own, roughly two years after the Ochoco Creek and Crooked River work wrapped in 2024, is the clearest sign yet that the engineering behind the project works the way it was designed to.
So the usual order of things got flipped. Normally the amenity arrives first and you wait to see if the ecology follows. At Ochoco Preserve, the ecology showed up ahead of schedule and the amenity is the part still waiting on a check.
What you can already walk, right now
None of this means Prineville residents are locked out of river access while they wait. The pieces already open to the public sit close by and some of them exist precisely because of decisions the city made over a decade ago.
- Crooked River Wetlands Complex, directly across the river from the preserve, has been open dawn to dusk since its 2017 grand opening. It offers 5.4 miles of trail, 3.25 of them paved for year-round use, plus a covered pavilion and educational kiosks. The complex exists because the city chose a 120-acre wetland treatment system over a conventional mechanical wastewater plant back in 2011, a decision that dropped projected treatment costs from $62 million to $7.77 million and cut the wastewater System Development Charge per home from $9,147 to $3,875, according to the City of Prineville's own project history.
- Ochoco Creek Park, downtown, is the 14.85-acre hub for Western Days and the Fourth of July celebration, with courts, a skate track, and a bike path connection.
- The 10-mile paved path running from Knowledge Street on the east end to Industrial Park Road on the west threads straight through Ochoco Creek Park and has become the kind of everyday infrastructure residents plan errands around.
- The Lower 66 Trail System, 66 acres of singletrack inside city limits, gives mountain bikers and hikers a compact loop without leaving town.
- The Prineville Bike Park, built by COTA with donations that included the Facebook Prineville Data Center, REI, and a handful of local businesses, gives younger riders a pump track built for skill progression rather than raw distance.
Put together, that's a genuinely unusual amount of in-town river and trail access for a city this size, and it's all walkable or bikeable today, with no funding gap standing between you and the trailhead.
What this actually tells you about the preserve
The fair way to describe Ochoco Preserve in 2026 isn't "still years from opening." It's that the hardest, least visible part of the work, the part that determines whether any of this was worth doing, already succeeded. Steelhead don't file for grants or wait on permitting. They just showed up. The footbridge will come when it comes, and when it does, you won't be walking into a restoration project that's still proving itself. You'll be walking into one that already has.
If you're weighing what it's actually like to live near this stretch of Prineville, or you're curious how projects like this factor into the character of a neighborhood over time, Team Licea knows this part of Central Oregon well. Take a look at our Prineville neighborhood guide for more on the area, or reach out directly if you'd like to talk through what's happening in the local market.
