The Clyde Hill Loop: A Late-Summer Walking Guide From Queen Bee To Cozy Cove

Clyde Hill does not have a downtown. It has a hill, a grid of quiet streets, an elementary school, a gas station at 92nd and 24th, and a coffee shop that used to be a Tully's. That is roughly the extent of the commercial footprint. Anyone who has lived here for a season already knows this. What takes longer to notice is that the absence of a downtown is not a gap. It is a feature that the Points Loop Trail quietly fills.

Late August is when the trail comes into its own. The maples that shade the Fairweather stretch stop dropping seeds. Cozy Cove goes glassy in the early evening. The Bellevue Farmers Market is still running Thursday evenings through October, and Wells Medina Nursery is turning over its shelves toward fall planting. If you live here, this is the season to stop treating the loop as a walking route and start treating it as the connective tissue it actually is.

The spine, not the scenery

The Points Loop Trail runs roughly 5.4 miles and links Clyde Hill with Medina, Yarrow Point, and Hunts Point in a single continuous corridor. Parts of it are off-street. Parts are sidewalk. It brushes past Fairweather Park, Wetherill Nature Preserve, Clyde Hill Park and Medina Park, and it connects, at its edges, to walking and biking routes that carry on into Bellevue, Kirkland, and Seattle.

Most guides describe it as a scenic walk. That undersells it. In a town without a commercial core, the loop is the closest thing Clyde Hill has to a main street. It is where you run into neighbors. It is how you get to the water without driving. It is the reason you can spend a Saturday morning walking to coffee, walking to a park bench with a lake view, and walking home with a bag of tomatoes, without ever getting into a car. The trail is not a substitute for a downtown. It is a better version of one, because it happens to be lined with madrone and Douglas fir instead of parking meters.

Why the trailhead has a coffee shop

Start at Queen Bee Cafe on Points Drive NE. The address matters. The Clyde Hill cafe is the first standalone location of its kind, in the former space of Tully's Coffee on Points Drive NE. That building has been a coffee stop for two generations of residents, and Queen Bee's decision to plant a flag there was not accidental. It sits within a two-minute walk of two Points Loop access points and one block from the Overlake Golf & Country Club entrance.

Queen Bee is open seven days a week from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. (the city's older guide lists a longer 6 to 7 window; hours have tightened over the past year, so check before an evening visit). The practical read for residents: this is the only place inside Clyde Hill proper where you can meet someone for coffee without driving down the hill to Bellevue Way. Pair it with a loop walk and you have solved the two hardest logistics problems of living in a bedroom community — a place to run into people, and a reason to leave the house on foot.

The Cozy Cove detour most residents skip

Halfway around the loop, on the Hunts Point side, there is a downhill spur that most walkers ignore because it looks like someone's driveway. It is the Wetherill Nature Preserve trailhead. Sixteen acres of preserved shoreline, waterfront on Cozy Cove, and a network of paths that the loop map does not really convey.

In 1989 Marjorie Baird and her sister Sidonia Foley bequeathed sixteen acres of prime property, originally purchased by their grandfather, Seattle financier Jacob Furth, to the towns of Yarrow Point and Hunts Point to protect the land from development and preserve its wildlife and native plants. The sisters dedicated the Preserve to their mother, Sidonia Furth Wetherill, and their father, Army Colonel Alexander Wetherill. The provenance is worth knowing because it explains why a piece of shoreline this valuable, in a zip code this expensive, is open to you at all.

The Preserve can be entered from the Points Loop Trail connecting the towns of Yarrow Point and Hunt's Point, is open all year during daylight hours, and pets must be on leashes. The payoff for the detour is a short walk downhill to a bench at Cozy Cove where you can watch the lily pads and, if you are lucky, a kingfisher chatters from the water's edge or an eagle lands in the lily pads, dipping its wings for a bath. The Washington Trails Association's suggested route pairs Wetherill with Fairweather Nature Preserve for a 4.3-mile round trip combining Wetherill and Fairweather via the SR 520 Trail, which is a good half-day if you are already dressed for a walk and want to earn breakfast.

The lid park question hanging over 92nd Ave

The other bench worth knowing about sits on the SR-520 lid at 92nd Ave NE, directly opposite the Yarrow Point Freeway Station. The city guide describes it as a place to jog, walk the dog, or relax on a bench at the scenic SR-520 Lid Park in Clyde Hill, opposite the Yarrow Point Freeway Station on 92nd Ave NE. What that description omits is the ongoing tug of war over who is responsible for keeping it usable.

The lid park, and the two other lids in the Points Communities, are still WSDOT facilities. On June 2, 2026, the city posted a notice on Points Communities lid maintenance, and Medina's 2026 legislative priorities describe the unresolved question plainly: responsibility for the ongoing maintenance and liability of WSDOT's SR520 lid structures in the Points Communities (City of Clyde Hill, Town of Hunts Point, City of Medina, and Town of Yarrow Point), and the SR520/Evergreen Point Road multiuse path underpass. The dispute goes back years. WSDOT has approached the Points Communities at various intervals to request that responsibility for ongoing maintenance of the lids be transferred to city government. The Points Communities have in turn voiced concerns that the scope, scale, and cost of maintaining the existing WSDOT facilities would overwhelm limited city operating budgets.

You do not need to follow the mediation to enjoy the bench. But if you have wondered why the landscaping on the lid sometimes looks a step behind the rest of the neighborhood, that is why. The lid is the biggest piece of usable open space in Clyde Hill and the piece with the least clear ownership.

A Thursday layered onto the loop

The loop is a Saturday habit for most residents. A Thursday version is more interesting.

The Bellevue Farmers Market runs Thursday evenings through October, a short drive or a longer walk from the south end of the loop. From May through October it is the closest thing to a weekly gathering the area has. Pair it with a stop at Wells Medina Nursery, which sits directly on the loop's path, or at Kitchen & Market in Medina and Yarrow Bay for chef-made take-home meals and high-end pantry staples, and you have a Thursday that looks nothing like the standard suburban week. Walk. Groceries. Dinner. Home before dark.

A note for newer residents: Kitchen & Market is the closest thing the Points Communities have to a neighborhood provisions store. It is small, it is not cheap, and it is where you go when you want to bring something to a dinner without stopping at a grocery.

The week, mapped

For the reader who wants a shape to hang the season on, here is a version of a late-August week built entirely from anchors inside or adjacent to Clyde Hill:

None of these require more than fifteen minutes of driving. Most require none.

What this all adds up to

Clyde Hill is often described as a quiet residential shelf between Bellevue and the water. That is accurate and it is also incomplete. The town is quiet because its public life is not concentrated in a commercial strip. It is spread along a 5.4-mile loop, threaded through four small governments, anchored by a coffee shop in an old Tully's, a bench on a WSDOT lid, a bequeathed nature preserve on Cozy Cove, and a farmers market a short walk south. Late summer is when that arrangement is at its most usable.

The reason to notice it now, rather than in the abstract, is that the loop's condition is not a given. The lid dispute is unresolved. Wetherill runs on volunteers and donations. Queen Bee's hours have already shifted once. Residents who use these places regularly are the ones who keep them viable. Which is to say the walking is not only the reward. It is the participation.

Let's Connect

If you have been in Clyde Hill for a while and are thinking about what comes next, whether that is a move down the hill, a move across the lid to Yarrow Point, or a renovation that lets you stay another decade, I would enjoy the conversation. Reach out through Michael Nix and we can walk part of the loop while we talk. The best market conversations I have had this year happened somewhere between Queen Bee and Cozy Cove.