If you have lived in Sewickley Heights since the spring of 2024, you already know Backbone Road as the road that isn't there anymore. Landslides in mid-April of that year tore out the stretch between Little Sewickley Creek Road and Grouse Lane in Bell Acres, sending guide rails down the hillside and onto Little Sewickley Creek Road itself. For more than two years, that section has simply not existed as a driving option. The borough finally has a contractor lined up, a funding source locked in, and a construction window that could open as soon as this September.
Here is the part that changes how you should think about this fall: the same week Backbone Road construction is likely to start, a different road on the other side of the borough is closing for the first time. Audubon Road, Route 4039, shuts down September 2 between Barberry Road and Magee Road for its own slide remediation project, running through late September. The borough isn't going from one closure to zero. For a stretch of September, it's going from one closure to two, and only afterward does the math start moving in the right direction.
What actually gets fixed on Backbone Road
The scope of the coming work is specific. Council awarded a contract in July to a firm whose core business is landslide remediation, the kind of company that has handled slope work for PennDOT and for neighboring Aleppo and Edgeworth. Construction, once it starts, is expected to take about 20 days. Borough Manager Nathan Briggs told council on July 22 that work may begin in September, pending contract finalization and an engineering review of the slide area.
Money had been the holdup for most of those two years. The repair carries a price tag of roughly $990,000, and the borough was never going to cover that out of its own road budget. That figure came from geotechnical analysis by Pennsylvania Soil & Rock and engineering review by GSI, and it stuck around as an open question until late last year, when the state's Department of Community & Economic Development approved the borough's application through its Local Share Account program. No borough match is required, which is part of why the timeline finally has a real date attached to it instead of another round of "we're waiting to hear back."
Separately, council also approved smaller road contracts this cycle: about $119,000 for work on Stonedale Road and the southern portion of Backbone Road, and roughly $23,000 for microsurfacing on Backbone's middle section, both to Peter J. Caruso and Sons. A third contract, about $43,600 to El Grande Industries, covers an asphalt overlay elsewhere along Backbone, unrelated to the slide zone itself. None of that touches the actual landslide, but it does mean Backbone Road as a whole is having a busy construction season, not just the one segment everyone already knows about.
A closure PennDOT didn't need two years to plan
Audubon Road is a different animal entirely. Where Backbone Road ground through borough budget cycles and grant applications for over two years, PennDOT District 11 simply announced that slide remediation on Route 4039 begins Wednesday, September 2, weather permitting, with crews starting around 7 a.m. The closure runs continuously between Barberry Road and Magee Road through late September.
That's a state road, a state contractor, and a state timeline, which is why it moved so much faster than the borough-owned Backbone Road ever could. It's also why the overlap matters. If you've spent two years routing around one closure, you're about to spend a few weeks routing around two, in different parts of the borough, with different agencies running the clock.
Why this keeps happening on the same hillsides
Sewickley Heights sits on old, narrow, two-lane roads that thread through the kind of terrain that was never particularly stable to begin with. Briggs put it plainly when describing the ongoing movement near Little Sewickley Creek Road:
"These heavy rains we get, it looks like it's still moving."
That's not a one-time event, it's a description of how this landscape behaves. Public works and PennDOT crews have been out to clean up the Backbone Road area multiple times since the initial slide, hauling away roughly 400 cubic yards of material at one point just to keep Little Sewickley Creek Road passable. The borough's own general government summary for 2026 notes that its six-year road resurfacing program just wrapped, with every borough-owned road resurfaced in that span, and that 2026 work continues with additional asphalt repair and microsurfacing specifically on Barberry and Backbone. Slope and road stabilization aren't an occasional line item here. They're a recurring category of borough business, which is worth knowing if you're trying to predict how often this sort of thing shows up on the calendar going forward.
The detours you already use, and the one about to matter more
Because Backbone Road has no posted official detour, residents have been improvising their own workaround for two years now, mostly using Camp Meeting Road, Fern Hollow Road, and Beaver Road to get between the Bell Acres side of the borough and Sewickley or Route 65. That informal network has held up fine as a one-closure solution.
It gets more crowded once Audubon Road closes on the other side of the borough between Barberry and Magee. If your normal route already leans on Camp Meeting or Beaver Road because Backbone is out, and your other regular trip crosses Audubon between those same cross streets, you're now stacking two workarounds on top of each other for at least part of September. Worth building a few extra minutes into both trips until the construction calendars start clearing.
What doesn't care which road is closed
None of this touches Sewickley Heights Borough Park itself, and that's where the fall actually gets good. Fern Hollow Nature Center, the 33-acre hub for the park's trail system, draws more than 10,000 visitors a year and keeps its grounds open from dawn to dusk regardless of what PennDOT or the borough's road crews are doing elsewhere. The Fern Hollow Loop trail inside the park runs 2.5 miles with about 272 feet of elevation gain, a moderate hour-to-hour-and-a-half hike with a trailhead off Hallaway Road, well clear of both construction zones.
Late September is actually the best time to go. The meadow that wraps the hillside inside the park turns gold as its goldenrod comes into full bloom, typically peaking in the final weeks of the month, right as Audubon Road's closure is scheduled to lift. The same grounds are also home to the Sewickley Heights History Center, an admission-free museum built on one of the area's original farms, with exhibits on equestrian displays, antique carriages, and vintage attire from the estates that once defined this part of the valley. It keeps regular hours Tuesday through Saturday. And if you've ever wondered why the park's trail network feels wide enough for more than foot traffic, it's because the historic Sewickley Hunt still uses those same trails for horseback riding, alongside the hikers and runners who've made Fern Hollow part of their regular rotation.
The closure count doesn't hit zero this fall
The temptation is to read "Backbone Road is finally getting fixed" as good news for your commute this month. It is good news, eventually, but not yet. For a real stretch of September, Sewickley Heights will be running two active slide-related closures at once, one closing for the first time on state land, one entering active construction after two years of borough paperwork. The honest way to plan around it is to assume both are live through most of September, build your Camp Meeting or Beaver Road alternate now rather than discovering it mid-commute, and use the park itself, where none of this reaches, as the one part of the borough that doesn't require a workaround at all.
If you're weighing a move into Sewickley Heights, or trying to understand how a place like this actually functions day to day, road and slope conditions here are as real a part of the picture as the architecture or the acreage. Nicole Kriebel has spent years working this exact corridor and can walk you through what a property's location actually means for how you'll get around it, not just what it looks like on a listing sheet. Let's Connect.
