Before the REI unlocks its doors at nine, a handful of cars are already parked along Peters Canyon Road. Their owners are on the fire road behind the shopping center, dogs off in front on a leash, headed toward the reservoir before the heat sets in. By the time the parking structures at The Market Place fill up with Saturday shoppers, those same people are usually back at their cars, trading hiking boots for flip-flops and walking over for coffee. Nobody advertises this loop. It just happens, week after week, because the geography makes it almost too easy not to.
That's the thing about 92782 that doesn't show up in a drive-by impression of the place. Most people who don't live here think of it as one thing: the mall zip code, the stretch of Jamboree Road where the freeway meets Nordstrom Rack and a very large Target. What they miss is that the same company that built all that retail also happens to be the reason a genuine 340-acre canyon sits directly behind it, and that the two are connected by more than proximity. They share a landlord, decades apart.
One Company, Two Very Different Decades
The land behind The Market Place was part of Rancho Lomas de Santiago, a Spanish land grant that James Irvine purchased in 1897. He leased the upper canyon to a farmer named James Peters, which is where the name stuck. In 1931, Irvine's operation built a reservoir there to irrigate the orange groves that once covered this part of the county. During World War II the site briefly housed an Army base, and afterward the Boy Scouts ran a camp on the property named for Myford Irvine, James Irvine's youngest son. In 1899, one of the first golf clubs in Orange County, the Santiago Golf Club, was also built on this ground. None of it was public land until 1992, when the Irvine Company donated the acreage to Orange County, and it became Peters Canyon Regional Park.
Across Jamboree Road, the same company was doing something entirely different with a different parcel. Construction on The Market Place began in 1988 on the Tustin side, with the first section built around 400,000 square feet anchored by Home Depot and a furnishings store. The Irvine side of the road followed in phases through 1996 and 1999, eventually growing the center to what Wikipedia's history of the property lists as more than 120 stores and restaurants across somewhere between 145 and 165 acres, depending on whose figure you use.
So the retail behind you when you're on the trail and the trail behind the retail aren't a coincidence of good planning. They're the same landowner making two very different bets on the same stretch of land, fifty-some years apart. One bet was orange groves and irrigation. The other was Nordstrom Rack and a food court. The reservoir came first.
What's Actually Open This Week
If you're reading this in the third week of August, the Market Place's Summer Fun Fest at Paradise Park and Date Palm Plaza already wrapped its run, which went from June 13 through August 1. The Summer Music Series, though, has one date left. This Saturday, August 22, the Zach Churchill Duo plays Paradise Park near Regal Edwards from 5 to 7 p.m., closing out a run that also featured the Adam Lasher Trio and Kai Kalama Duo earlier in the summer. After that, the center's outdoor programming goes quiet until next year's calendar gets announced.
On the trail side, nothing about Peters Canyon changes with the season except the heat and the crowds. The park opens at 7 a.m. and closes at sunset, with parking running $3 at the machine, cash or card. Trails can close for up to three days after significant rain, which matters more in winter than in August, but is worth checking before you drive over if the forecast has been unusual.
The Loop Options, By Distance
Peters Canyon isn't one trail, it's a network, and most locals settle into one of four versions depending on how much time they have:
| Route | Distance | Elevation Gain | Rough Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scout and East Ridge View short loop | 1.6 miles | 232 ft | about 40 minutes |
| Lake View Loop | 2.5 miles | about 100 ft | about an hour |
| Lake View Loop with East Ridge extension | 3.65 miles | 200 ft | 1-1.5 hours |
| East Ridge Loop (full) | 5.7-5.8 miles | 662 ft | 2.5-3 hours |
The full East Ridge Loop is the one printed on the park's own trail map, and it's the version most people mean when they say they "did Peters Canyon" instead of just walking the lake.
The Hill Called Big Red
About two miles into the East Ridge Loop, after the Lake View Trail feeds into the Peters Canyon Trail, hikers reach a rust-colored rise nicknamed Big Red. It marks the start of the East Ridge View Trail, a climb of less than 200 feet that looks tougher from the bottom than it turns out to be. At the top of that push sits the highest point on the hike, around 683 feet, with views on a clear day stretching to the high peaks of Angeles National Forest. One visitor summed up the payoff simply: you feel "a million miles away," despite standing minutes from a Target parking lot.
Parts of the park's north end still show the effects of the Canyon 2 Fire in 2017. The regrowth has filled in a lot of what burned, but the burn scar is still visible in places along the ridge if you know where to look, a reminder that this canyon has absorbed a lot more than foot traffic over the decades.
One more detail worth knowing if you're mapping this out: the park's official trailhead address, 8548 E. Canyon View Avenue, actually sits in the 92869 zip code across the Orange border, not in 92782 itself. The canyon that functions as 92782's backyard technically belongs to the neighboring zip on paper. It's the kind of detail that only matters if you've ever tried to explain to someone visiting exactly where you're taking them.
The Retail Side Kept Reinventing Itself
The Market Place's tenant list reads like a small history of American retail. A furnishings store called STØR opened in the first phase in 1988, became an IKEA in 1992, and stayed until the Swedish retailer relocated to Costa Mesa in 2003. That same footprint is now split between Best Buy and REI. A few doors down, the original Home Express store later became a Toys R Us and is now Nordstrom Rack. Kids R Us cycled through a stint as CompUSA before Sprouts Farmers Market moved in. The Good Guys electronics store became a PetSmart. On the Irvine side, Sports Authority closed in 2016 and was never replaced with a single anchor tenant. Circuit City is now a 24 Hour Fitness. Babies R Us sat empty for a while before Amazon renovated the space into one of its first Amazon Fresh grocery stores, which opened in October 2020. Lowe's closed in 2019, and Mathis Brothers Furniture took the space. Even the original six-screen Edwards theater from 1990 didn't survive as a theater. In 2014, the City of Tustin converted it into the Community Center at The Market Place, which now hosts things like the annual Youth Talent Show and Breakfast with Santa.
Through all of that turnover, a few names have stayed put. Miguel's Jr has been serving homestyle Mexican food from the same family recipes since 1973, well before the shopping center existed around it. Shake Shack and Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar anchor the newer dining side, and the center's directory still lists specialty grocers, health and beauty boutiques, and a working food court alongside the big-box survivors.
The Loop Worth Actually Doing
If you're putting a Saturday together this week, the version that most 92782 locals have already landed on goes something like this. Park near REI or Best Buy before nine, while the lot is still half-empty. Walk the Lake View Loop or push further onto the East Ridge extension if you have the legs and the morning is still cool. Come back down, change shoes at the car, and walk over for a late breakfast, Miguel's Jr if you want something that's been a fixture since before most of the center existed, or one of the newer bagel and coffee spots if you're in a hurry. If it's this Saturday specifically, loop back in the early evening for the Zach Churchill Duo at Paradise Park, the last acoustic set of the season before the Music Series calendar resets next summer.
None of this is marketed as a package. Nobody at The Irvine Company or the City of Tustin has put "trail then trail mix" on a brochure. It's just what happens when a reservoir built for orange groves in 1931 ends up sharing a property line with a shopping center built sixty years later, and the people living in between figured out the loop on their own.
If you're weighing a move within the Tustin or Irvine market, or just curious what a home in this corridor is worth given how much the area around it keeps evolving, The O'Dell Group knows this stretch of Jamboree Road from both sides of it. Get Your Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
