Behind the visitor center on Lee Road, a half-mile loop of weathered gray boards usually carries a steady stream of foot traffic through a stand of ancient cypress. It is the walk most people mean when they say they are "going to Loxahatchee," the postcard shot with Spanish moss overhead and an alligator sunning somewhere near the pond. Right now, that boardwalk is roped off. The Cypress Swamp Boardwalk Trail is closed until further notice, and it has been for a while.
That closure lands at an odd moment. The Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge is turning 75 this year, and the anniversary season, called the 75/75 Celebration, is running through this fall with real dates on the calendar. If you assumed the birthday party would happen on the boardwalk everyone already knows, it will not. The programming has moved to the parts of the refuge most visitors walk past on their way to the parking lot: the Marsh Trail, the levee system around the A, B, and C impoundments, and a gathering point called Pond Lily Pavilion that most people couldn't point to on a map. Understanding where the anniversary actually lives, and why the signature trail sat this one out, changes how you plan a visit this season.
What's Closed, and What Opened Instead
The refuge's Headquarters Area, off Lee Road in Boynton Beach, holds two marked interpretive routes: the Cypress Swamp Boardwalk and the Marsh Trail. Only one of them is usable right now. The boardwalk, a 0.36-to-0.4-mile loop depending on which refuge document you read, remains closed with no posted reopening date. The Marsh Trail, which starts across the entrance road from the visitor center, is open and unaffected. It runs along a grid of levees surrounding the impoundments, flat and grassy, with several miles of walking available depending on how far you want to go.
The Perimeter Levee Trail is the only route in the entire refuge where pets and horseback riders are permitted, and it stays open too. If your usual routine has been a quick boardwalk loop with the dog on a leash, that combination has never actually been allowed at the boardwalk itself. Pet walking is restricted to the Perimeter Levee, accessible from the boat ramp parking lots, not from the visitor center.
None of this is dramatic. Refuges close individual trails for maintenance and reopen them without fanfare all the time. What makes it worth knowing this particular fall is that the 75th anniversary programming was never going to happen on the boardwalk anyway. The anniversary events are built around open water, open marsh, and citizen science, not a shaded walk through cypress. The closure and the celebration are unrelated, but together they mean the refuge you'll experience this season looks different from the one on the brochure.
Where the Actual Anniversary Is Happening
The Friends of Loxahatchee, the refuge's nonprofit support organization, are running the 75/75 Celebration with three events that current residents can actually walk into this fall.
October 4, 2026 kicks off the Friends' new speaker series with a talk called "Millions of Eyes on Nature." The speaker is Corey Callaghan, a researcher who studies how citizen-science platforms like iNaturalist and eBird are generating enormous volumes of species observations and reshaping biodiversity research. It's a talk about the kind of work ordinary visitors with a phone camera are already doing every time they log a bird sighting or a plant photo at the refuge.
October 11, 2026 is the Wild 75 BioBlitz, the refuge's first one ever. It runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with guided hikes departing at 10, 11, and noon, each lasting one to two hours. Participants meet at Pond Lily Pavilion rather than the visitor center, and birders, botanists, and naturalists lead the groups. You can join more than one hike if you want to stay the full stretch. Registration runs through the Friends' website, and the event doubles as a fundraiser tied to a "$75 for 75" donation campaign marking the anniversary.
November 1, 2026 continues the speaker series with Everglades ecohydrologist Christopher McVoy, who will give an update on the state of Everglades restoration. McVoy has spent decades on the science and policy side of that work, which makes the talk less of a nature-center lecture and more of a briefing on where the restoration effort actually stands.
| Date | Event | Location | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 4, 2026 | Speaker series kickoff: "Millions of Eyes on Nature" | Refuge Headquarters | Citizen science, iNaturalist and eBird |
| Oct 11, 2026 | Wild 75 BioBlitz | Meet at Pond Lily Pavilion | First-ever BioBlitz, guided hikes at 10/11/noon |
| Nov 1, 2026 | Speaker series: Everglades restoration update | Refuge Headquarters | Featuring ecohydrologist Christopher McVoy |
The BioBlitz in particular is a genuinely different kind of visit than the usual boardwalk stroll. A BioBlitz is a timed push to document as many species as possible in a set window, so instead of quietly walking a loop, you're moving with a small group trying to spot and log frogs, wading birds, insects, and whatever else turns up before the two-hour mark runs out.
The Detour Nobody's Anniversary Programming Mentions
If your entry point to the refuge is the Hillsboro Area rather than the Lee Road headquarters, none of the anniversary events above will change your routine, but a longer-running construction project might. Roughly 6.2 miles of Loxahatchee Road has been under construction since October 2023, with the project expected to run into early 2027. The Hillsboro Area and the 20 Mile Bend Area both stay open 24 hours, unlike the Headquarters Area's 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. window, but reaching the boat ramps in that section currently means following a detour: west on Holmberg Road from US-441, north on University Drive, then left onto State Highway 827, which is Loxahatchee Road.
That detour has nothing to do with the 75th anniversary. It's a separate, years-long infrastructure project that happens to still be running through the same fall the refuge is throwing its birthday party at the other end of the property. If you fish or paddle out of the Hillsboro side, it's worth knowing the workaround before you head out, especially since the project has more than a year left on its timeline.
Planning an Actual Visit This Season
The Headquarters Area entrance fee is ten dollars per vehicle for a day pass or twenty-five dollars for an annual pass, both purchasable at the visitor center, at self-pay stations, or online through Recreation.gov. Entry is free if you arrive on foot, by bicycle, or on horseback, and the refuge posts occasional fee-free days throughout the year. The visitor center itself keeps shorter hours than the trails, open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on select days and closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas, while the outdoor trails, boat ramps, and levees in the Headquarters Area stay open daily from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
For most residents, that means the practical fall plan looks like this: skip the boardwalk since it's closed anyway, walk the Marsh Trail or the Perimeter Levee instead, and build a visit around one of the three anniversary dates if the timing works. The refuge has been sitting at the edge of Boynton Beach and Loxahatchee since 1951, first under a license agreement between the state and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, renamed in 1986 to honor conservationist Arthur R. Marshall. Seventy-five years in, it is still, at its core, 145,188 acres of working wetland doing flood control and habitat restoration at the same time, which is part of why a trail closure and a construction detour can both be running at once without anyone treating it as a crisis. This is a place built to keep functioning through disruption, not to pause for a photo.
That's arguably the more honest way to mark 75 years than a ribbon-cutting would have been. The anniversary isn't asking you to see the refuge the way it's always been photographed. It's asking you to show up at Pond Lily Pavilion on a Sunday morning in October and help count what's actually living there.
If you're weighing a move to this part of Palm Beach County and want a clearer read on how proximity to places like the refuge, acreage zoning, and the surrounding equestrian and rural markets actually shape value here, David Welles has spent his career working this exact terrain. Schedule a confidential consultation with David Welles to talk through what a property here actually offers, beyond what shows up in a listing photo.
