Three miles of the Neal Smith Trail, a popular recreational stretch in central Iowa, will be closed until late October while crews work to repair Des Moines River bank erosion and reroute a portion of the damaged trail.

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The section north of Des Moines between the Sycamore access to the river and Morningstar Drive was closed to the public Tuesday.

“We’ve seen this coming, and we’ve been looking at, ‘Can we fix it? Do we have to move it?’ That’s all taken a little bit of time,” said Chad Kelchen, manager of Big Creek State Park.

The trail runs 24.7 miles from downtown Des Moines north to Saylorville Lake and Big Creek State Park.

Kelchen said it’s among the most popular sections of trail in the Des Moines metro area, although he didn’t have an estimate of how many people use it.

The project budget is $500,000, but some costs have come in cheaper than expected so far, he said.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources, which maintains this section of the Neal Smith Trail, has been looking at how to address the problem for about a year, Kelchen said.

A severely damaged half-mile of trail will be rerouted away from the river and the eroded streambank will be stabilized. The erosion was undercutting the asphalt, which posed a risk to cyclists and others.

The old trail will be removed and recycled to use as a base for the new trail.

“All rivers meander to some extent; in this particular place it’s happening at the riverbend and taking out a piece of infrastructure,” Kelchen said. “We’re going to move the trail off the shoreline. It should be a permanent fix.”