Drive to the top of Dyckman Hill Road on a weekday afternoon and you will find a barricade, a stretch of cracked asphalt, and a trailhead sign for a path almost nobody in town has walked since 2021. It is the Englewood Cliffs park entrance to Palisades Interstate Park, the one that carries this borough's name, and for five years it has been the entrance residents here could not use.
That is finally starting to change. Not for every closure along this stretch of the Palisades, though. Right now, the park's two biggest access problems, the Dyckman Hill entrance and the Giant Stairs boulder scramble up near the New York state line, are moving in opposite directions. One has a repair plan. The other does not.
The Entrance With This Town's Name On It
Dyckman Hill Road and its yellow-marked trail have been closed since Hurricane Ida damaged the roadway in 2021. For anyone living in Englewood Cliffs, that has meant driving to Alpine or down to the Edgewater side to reach a park that runs the length of your own cliffs.
The Palisades Interstate Park Commission has now announced a phased construction plan to change that. The first phase focuses on stabilizing and repairing Dyckman Hill Road itself, with the explicit goal of reopening the Englewood Cliffs park entrance at PIP Exit 1. A second phase will follow with broader work on Henry Hudson Drive between Edgewater and Alpine, including drainage improvements, roadway rehabilitation, and repairs to the eastern parapet walls. The commission has not published construction dates yet, only the sequence, but the sequence itself is the news. This is the first time in years the entrance closure has had a plan attached to it rather than an open-ended notice.
Compare that to what is happening at the other closure everyone in town has been asking about.
| Dyckman Hill Road / Englewood Cliffs entrance | Giant Stairs (Shore Trail, Peanut Leap Cascade to Forest View) | |
|---|---|---|
| Cause | Hurricane Ida damage, 2021 | Major rockslide |
| Status as of this alert | Phased repair plan announced, no construction date yet | Closed to all use, no reopening date |
| Park's stated next step | Phase one repairs the road and reopens the entrance; phase two addresses Henry Hudson Drive | Assessing damage and terrain stability following the slide |
| What it means for a resident this fall | The entrance stays closed for now, but for the first time there is a public plan behind it | Treat this section as closed indefinitely, not temporarily |
The Giant Stairs closure went up in January 2026 as a caution while staff assessed the rockslide's stability. Seven months later, the alert is still active, with no phase, no sequence, and no target. The Dyckman Hill closure has moved from the same kind of open-ended notice to an actual construction roadmap in the same stretch of time. If you have been waiting for either to reopen, the honest read right now is that one of them is closer than it was in the spring, and the other is not.
The Hikes That Work Right Now
None of this means the park is off-limits. It means the routes that make sense for a fall walk from Englewood Cliffs run through Englewood Picnic Area instead of Dyckman Hill.
Two are worth knowing by name:
- Carpenter's Loop, out of Englewood Picnic Area, rated moderate, about 5.5 miles and roughly two and a half hours.
- Clinton Point, an out-and-back also based at Englewood Picnic Area, rated challenging, about eight miles and five hours round trip, with rocky river sections and a series of climbs along the summit.
Both stay clear of the closed sections entirely. If a long hike is not the point of the day, State Line Lookout and Rockefeller Lookout are reachable by car without touching either closure, and both look out over the same river the Giant Stairs runs alongside.
Worth building into any fall plan: park areas are open to the public from 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM daily, and the Visitor Center keeps shorter hours, Wednesday through Sunday, 10:00 AM to 4:45 PM. With sunset moving earlier through September and October, the 9:00 PM cutoff matters less than it did in July, but it is still the hard stop if you are timing a longer loop.
One Saturday to Route Around
If you are planning a picnic rather than a hike, mark the calendar. Ross Dock Picnic Area will be closed for an exclusive use permit on Saturday, September 12, 2026, from 6:00 AM to noon. It is a half-day closure, not a season-long one, but it is the kind of detail that only shows up if you check the park's own advisory page before you load the car, not a general hiking app.
After the Hike, Sylvan Avenue
The other half of a fall weekend here has nothing to do with trail conditions. Sylvan Avenue is where most of that happens.
Lefkes Estiatorio, at 495 Sylvan Avenue, is the option for something closer to an occasion: casual elegant Greek cooking, a wraparound bar, valet available, the kind of room that works for a table of six after a longer hike. For something simpler, Cliffs Cafe at 41 Sylvan Avenue is open weekday mornings through early afternoon, Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM, serving breakfast all day under new ownership with an updated menu. It is closed weekends, so it is a weekday-hike pairing more than a Saturday one.
What This Actually Tells You About Living Here
The two closures on this stretch of the Palisades have shaped how residents use the park for years now, often without a clear sense of which one might resolve first. That has changed this year. Dyckman Hill Road has moved from an indefinite closure to a phased construction commitment specifically aimed at giving Englewood Cliffs back its own park entrance. The Giant Stairs has not made that same move. Knowing the difference is the difference between planning around a temporary inconvenience and planning around something that is not on anyone's calendar yet.
That kind of granular, current-season knowledge is the same instinct that shapes how The Luberto Group approaches this market more broadly. Presentation and timing matter as much in a hiking plan as they do in a home sale, and knowing exactly what is happening on the ground in a town like Englewood Cliffs, not the generic version of it, is what separates useful guidance from a search result. If you are thinking about buying, selling, or simply want a conversation about what is actually happening in this corner of Bergen County, reach out and start the conversation.
