Walk across the Roeder Avenue Bridge on any evening this month and you will hit the same wall of noise you hit in June: bass from Kulshan Trackside's stage, kids screaming down the pump track, someone's dog losing its mind over a food truck. The Digester Tanks still loom 85 feet over the whole scene, hollow relics of one of the most productive pulp mills in the world, looking less like industrial ruins and more like something that crash-landed there from an old science fiction film. It reads like the waterfront just picked up where it left off last September.
It didn't. Two different things are happening on this same half mile of shoreline right now, and most people walking that bridge only know about one of them.
The Portal is bigger, not just back
The Portal Container Village opened for its 2026 season on Friday, May 1, and the Port framed it the way it always does: a celebration of local business and the city's connection to the water, in Port interim executive director Tiffany DeSimone's words, "a celebration of everything that makes Bellingham special." That's the familiar story, and it's true as far as it goes. What's actually different this year is the addition of a satellite outpost of Chuckanut Bay Distillery, complete with its own rooftop deck looking out over the water, joining the returning lineup of food and drink container shops that keep Trackside from being the only reason to walk down there.
The season kicked off May 8 with Party on the Pier, a free evening on the Central Pier next to the Granary Building where DJ Selector Joel Ricci spun vintage and contemporary funk and jazz on 45 RPM vinyl while Mercato delle Bonta handled the food. The Downtown Bellingham Partnership stitched that night into its Spring Wine Walk, sending visitors through 23 downtown shops pouring regional wines before they crossed the bridge to the water. That bridge connection matters more than it sounds. The Port has been actively pushing pedestrian access over Roeder Avenue precisely because it's one of the best sightlines in the city, and this year's calendar was built to use it as a hinge between two nights out instead of one.
June brought the Hollywood Beer Prom at Trackside, a benefit for Lydia Place, and by midsummer the Whatcom Mountain Bike Coalition had finished its annual refresh of the waterfront bike park, adding improved lighting and path work along with art installations from Western Washington University students inspired by sustainable design work out of Denmark. Northwest Tune-Up turned five this year and returned July 10 through 12, spreading its bike-and-music lineup across the waterfront and the trail network above town. Its slopestyle centerpiece, the Outdoor Research Freestyle Showdown, ran an entirely rebuilt five-jump course this year, shaped with support from Sensus RAD Trails and built by Instinct Builders alongside local names like Bellingham Millwork Supply, Kulshan Brewing, Hardware Sales, and Janicki Logging. The Galbraith Mountain Enduro moved to a single-day format for the first time, and the Kona Bikes Pump Track Race got a new race director and a tighter bracket system to cut down on dead time between heats.
None of that is a surprise if you've lived here more than one summer. Trackside has been Forbes's pick for "Raddest Beer Garden in the Pacific Northwest" for a while now, and the container village growing a little each year is the pattern, not the exception.
The part of the waterfront that quietly stopped being yours
Here's what most of that coverage leaves out. A few hundred yards down the shoreline from the Portal, at the south end of Cornwall Avenue, sits the spot longtime residents know as Glass Beach: a stretch that's been capped for decades under a layer of dredged sediment covered in tarps, the kind of place you'd bring a beach chair without thinking twice about it. As of early 2026, you can't. Construction crews broke ground in January on the cleanup of the Cornwall Avenue Landfill and the adjacent RG Haley International site, both closed to the public for more than 25 years and both contaminated with heavy metals, petroleum compounds, and PCBs above the limits set by the state's Model Toxics Control Act. The Cornwall Avenue Landfill alone holds an estimated 295,000 cubic yards of municipal waste and 94,000 cubic yards of wood waste under that ground.
The city awarded a $49 million contract to Whatcom County-based IMCO Construction to run the cleanup and build Phase 1 of what will eventually be Salish Landing Park, the name the Bellingham City Council formally adopted for the site back in January 2023 after the Parks and Rec Board recommended it over the old working title, Cornwall Beach Park. Phase 1 includes 27 parking spaces, bike parking, a new beach, trails, habitat improvements, and a boat launch. It is genuinely going to be a good park. It is also genuinely not open, and won't be for up to three years, which means the beach walk a lot of people assumed they could still take this August simply isn't available right now.
That's the piece the container village headlines don't carry. The waterfront isn't uniformly "back." It's expanding in one direction and closed off in another, on the same stretch of shoreline, at the same time.
Here's how that actually breaks down if you're planning an evening down there this month:
| Open right now | Closed until Phase 1 wraps |
|---|---|
| Portal Container Village, Kulshan Trackside, the pump track | Glass Beach and its adjacent gravel lot |
| South Bay Trail, with a construction-related detour in places | The new sandy beach, loop trails, and boat launch planned for Salish Landing |
| Waypoint Park and Central Pier | Full public shoreline access to the former Cornwall Avenue Landfill site |
Why the split matters more than the ribbon-cutting
If you only read the container village press release, you'd assume the waterfront is simply louder and better this year than last. That's true for the acre or so the Port controls directly. But the shoreline immediately south of it is mid-remediation, fenced, and could stay that way into 2028 or even early 2029, since cleanup and construction started this past January and are expected to run as long as three years. For anyone whose summer routine used to include both stops on the same walk, that's a real change to plan around, not a footnote.
It's also a reasonable preview of what the next few years of Bellingham's waterfront actually look like: not one finished district, but a rolling handoff between sections that are open, sections mid-construction, and sections still waiting their turn. The Port's own container village started as an experiment to pull people down to an undeveloped waterfront in the first place. Salish Landing is the next piece of that same long project, just a few years behind.
For now, the practical move is simple. If your evening plan involves Trackside, the pump track, or a Wine Walk crossing over Roeder Avenue, that's all fully open and, if this year's calendar is any indication, still adding new reasons to show up. If it involves Glass Beach, redirect toward Waypoint Park or the open stretches of South Bay Trail until the tarps come down for good.
Understanding which half of a neighborhood's story is actually finished and which half is still under a tarp is the kind of local read that only comes from paying attention to a place over years, not seasons. That's the same read that matters when you're deciding what a home near this stretch of shoreline is actually worth today versus what it will be worth once Salish Landing opens for good. If you're weighing a move in or around Bellingham's waterfront corridor and want a clearer read on how these changes might shape value over the next few years, Chris Boyd is glad to walk through it with you. Schedule a personalized consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
