Ride the Iron Horse Heritage Trail west from Imagination Glen Park East on a Saturday morning and you will cover a good stretch of Portage without touching a car door handle. The trail runs east to west through town, picks up the Prairie Duneland Trail at the park, and keeps going toward Hamstrom Road before continuing on to Portage Avenue. It is flat, it is paved, and it is exactly the kind of infrastructure that makes a town feel walkable and bikeable at the same time.
Then you reach the edge of it. The lakefront is a few miles north. Getting there means finding your own way on streets that were not built with cyclists in mind. This has been true for years, and it is the detail most casual write-ups about Portage's outdoor life skip past: the pieces already exist. They just were not designed to meet each other.
That gap is the actual story this year, not because it has closed, but because for the first time there is real money and a stated intention aimed directly at it.
The Lakefront You're Riding Toward Used to Be a Sewage Pond
Before you get to the money, it helps to know what you would actually be riding toward. The Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk, the paved loop and boardwalk that sits where the Iron Horse Trail eventually should connect, opened in October 2008 on land that used to belong to a steel corporation. It was used as settling ponds for industrial byproduct and as a sewage treatment facility before the National Park Service and the City of Portage turned it into a public trail and beach. The National Park Service now calls it a model of brownfield reclamation, and it is easy to see why once you know the site's former life. The trail itself runs close to two miles as a loop, with a stretch of boardwalk along Burns Waterway, and it stays mostly flat and wheelchair accessible the whole way.
That matters for how you think about the rest of the network. Portage is not waiting for a lakefront amenity to justify a trail extension. The amenity is finished and has been open for close to two decades. What is missing is the ride there.
Where the $20 Million Actually Goes
In December 2024, four Northwest Indiana community foundations, led by the Legacy Foundation and joined by the Crown Point Community Foundation, the Porter County Community Foundation, and the Unity Foundation of La Porte County, announced they had received a $20 million grant from the Lilly Endowment. The money came through the eighth round of the endowment's Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow initiative, which distributed $171 million total to more than two dozen recipients across the state that year. The Northwest Indiana project is called NWI Thrive, and its stated purpose is to connect neighborhoods, downtowns, and South Shore Line stations to the Marquette Greenway and the national park.
The foundations chose to hold their announcement press conference at the Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk, standing at the trailhead itself. Indiana Dunes National Park Superintendent Jason Taylor talked that day about connecting people's own driveways and front yards to the lake by bike, without needing a car to get there.
The specific trail and signage improvements named so far are concentrated in East Chicago, Gary, Miller, Beverly Shores, and Michigan City, with Discover Hub placemaking installations planned at seven South Shore stations along that stretch. Portage was not named as a site for a new trail segment in that initial rollout. What Portage got was the symbolism of hosting the announcement, plus its existing position on the Marquette Greenway corridor that the whole plan is built around. When those five towns' new segments and the Marquette Greenway's Burns Harbor section eventually link up as intended, Portage's own trailhead becomes one of the anchor points the rest of the network ties back into.
The foundations did not attach a construction calendar to any of it. As of this writing, there is still no published completion date for a specific segment, in Portage or anywhere else along the corridor. That is worth knowing before you plan a summer around a trail extension that has not broken ground yet.
The Visitor Numbers Behind the Push
The reason this investment is happening at all traces back to how much traffic the dunes already pull in. Indiana Dunes National Park's visitation jumped to a record 3.17 million people in 2021, the year after it was elevated from a National Lakeshore to a full National Park designation. Reporting published August 23, 2026 in The Times of Northwest Indiana puts combined annual visitation to the national and state parks above 4 million people, with more than $240 million in visitor spending tied to that traffic each year.
That is the backdrop NWI Thrive is responding to. The region already draws the crowd. The infrastructure is catching up to it.
What's Already Open This Season
While the bigger trail connections work through funding and planning, the pieces that already exist are fully available right now.
- Sammie L. Maletta Public Marina, Portage's own public marina, runs its full season from April 1 through October 31, open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. during that stretch and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. off season. It offers seasonal and transient slips, boat launch ramps, a supply store, and a free Season Launch Pass for disabled veterans who show proof with a VA card.
- The Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk Trail stays open daily from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., with year-round restrooms and a seasonal snack bar at the pavilion.
- West Beach and the Paul H. Douglas Trail through Miller Woods, both listed by the National Park Service as nearby hikes to the Portage Lakefront trailhead, offer a longer outing for anyone willing to drive rather than wait for the bike connection to arrive.
None of this requires the NWI Thrive project to finish anything. It is what Portage residents already have access to this month, independent of the timeline questions above.
What This Means If You Already Bike or Boat Here
The easy version of this story would be to say Portage is getting new trails. That is not quite accurate, and the more useful version is better anyway. Portage already built the expensive part. The Lakefront and Riverwalk exists, reclaimed from an industrial site and open for close to eighteen years. The Iron Horse Heritage Trail exists, running the width of town. What has been missing is the connective tissue between them, and that gap is now the subject of a $20 million regional commitment with no fixed delivery date attached.
If you already ride the Iron Horse or Prairie Duneland trails, that means this year looks a lot like last year on the ground, with one difference worth watching: the region's foundations, the National Park Service, and local governments are now on record naming the exact problem you have been riding into for years. Whether that turns into a paved connection by next summer or the summer after is not yet public information. What is public is that the marina is open on its usual schedule, the lakefront trail is open daily, and the missing link between your neighborhood and the water is finally named as a project rather than treated as just how things are.
For anyone weighing what it actually means to live somewhere with this kind of lakefront access, on top of everything else Portage and the surrounding Region communities offer, Liz Pilot has spent years helping buyers and sellers move through Northwest Indiana and across the state line with Chicago. You can browse more on the Portage neighborhood page or reach out directly. Let's Connect.
