Cary spent this spring and summer sending out one number: 100. As in, 100 miles of paved greenway, a milestone the town has been marking with a photography contest, a Bike Month push, and a run of tie-in events that started with Spring Daze and continues through Great Trails State Day in October. It is a real number, and a fair one to be proud of. Since 1980, the town has been stitching together trail segments that now link parks, schools, shopping centers, and neighborhoods across Cary.
But if you actually use Black Creek Greenway, one of the town's own most popular corridors for its length and its connections to other parks, you already know the milestone tells only half the story. A section of it has been closed since early May, and it will not reopen until sometime this winter.
The Milestone, and Why the Town Is Suddenly Counting Every Step
The 100-mile figure comes from Cary's own greenway page, which frames the network as more than four decades in the making and connected to the East Coast Greenway, the state-designated trail that will eventually run from Maine to Florida. That connection is not marketing language. Black Creek Greenway links to White Oak Greenway at Bond Park, and White Oak runs another seven miles to the American Tobacco Trail, which continues on toward downtown Durham.
What is new this year is not the mileage. It is the fact that Cary started measuring how that mileage actually gets used. The town installed ten Eco-Counters along its most heavily traveled trails between March and April 2026, low-profile sensors that count pedestrians and cyclists, track direction of travel, and log general bike speed categories without capturing images or personal data. That data now feeds into the town's Open Data Portal and will shape which segments get funded next.
In other words, Cary is no longer just building trail. It is watching which parts of the system people wear out first, and Black Creek is clearly one of them, which is exactly why it is the segment getting rebuilt right now.
What Actually Opened This Spring
On May 4, 2026, the town reopened Phase 2 of the Black Creek Greenway renovation, the stretch running from Livingstone Drive to Weston Parkway. The headline change is not the resurfaced trail itself but the new pedestrian bridge that opened alongside it at NW Cary Parkway.
The numbers are worth sitting with. The bridge spans 285 feet, rises roughly 50 feet above Black Creek, and weighs more than 400,000 pounds, making it the tallest pedestrian bridge in Cary according to town officials and confirmed by CBS17's coverage of the reopening. It replaced a 650-foot sidewalk gap where no safe crossing existed before, funded in part through the 2019 Shaping Cary's Tomorrow bond referendum and matched with state Locally Administered Projects Program dollars.
The bridge is also, formally, a piece of public art. Cary commissioned artist Vicki Scuri to design the structure's leaf-patterned steel panels, titled "Bridge within Nature | Nature within Bridge," meant to echo the tree canopy the bridge passes through. The town also finished a new traffic signal with pedestrian push buttons at Cary Parkway and Norwell Boulevard, closing off one more gap in that stretch's safety picture.
If you have not walked this section since spring, it is worth the trip on its own. This is not a repaved trail with a new sign. It is a genuinely different piece of infrastructure than what stood there a year ago.
What's Still Closed, and Why "Winter" Is the Only Timeline You'll Get
The same day Phase 2 reopened, Phase 3 closed. This final stretch, from Weston Parkway to the Old Reedy Creek Trailhead near Lake Crabtree, is undergoing the same widening and realignment work that brought Phase 2 up to Cary's current 12-foot greenway design standard. Town officials have said this phase is anticipated to reopen this winter, without a firmer date attached.
That gap matters more than a generic "trail closed for construction" notice suggests, because of what it disconnects. Black Creek Greenway runs 7.1 miles from Old Reedy Creek Road to the greenway hub at Bond Park, Cary's largest municipal park. Anyone trying to ride or walk the full corridor toward Bond Park, or push on further to White Oak Greenway and the American Tobacco Trail, currently hits a wall at Weston Parkway.
A few things to know if you're planning a route through here before winter:
- The closed section runs specifically from Weston Parkway to the Old Reedy Creek Trailhead, not the entire Black Creek corridor.
- Everything from Livingstone Drive south through the new bridge and on toward Bond Park is open and freshly rebuilt.
- The town has said detour information is posted online for anyone who needs to get through the area rather than around it.
- The work involves grading and drainage adjacent to Lake Crabtree to meet flood pool requirements, one reason the town is holding to a season rather than a firm date.
None of this means the network is any less usable this fall. It means one of its most connected miles is mid-transformation, and the smart move is routing around Phase 3 rather than planning a ride that assumes it's open.
The Fall Calendar Built Around the Trail Network
While Black Creek finishes its final phase, the rest of Cary's park system is running its usual fall lineup, and several of the season's best-known events sit directly on or near the greenway hub at Bond Park.
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Sept. 4, 2026 | Bands, Bites, and Boats (final evening of the season) | Bond Park Boathouse |
| Oct. 2, 2026 | Pumpkin Flotilla, pumpkin drop-off | Bond Park Boathouse |
| Oct. 17, 2026 | Great Trails State Day paired with Harvest Fest | Good Hope Farm |
Bands, Bites, and Boats has run on the first Friday of the month since April, pairing a local band with a rotating pair of food trucks and after-hours boat rentals on Bond Lake. September 4 marks the last evening of that run before Bond Park shifts into pumpkin season, with the Pumpkin Flotilla's drop-off event landing October 2.
Two weeks after that, Cary folds into a statewide observance. Great Trails State Day falls on the third Saturday of October every year, and this year the town is pairing it with Harvest Fest at Good Hope Farm, the town's historic organic working farm. There is no public parking at the farm itself, so the town runs a free shuttle for the event, a detail worth knowing before you show up expecting to park at the gate.
If You're Walking or Riding Black Creek This Fall
A few habits make the current, half-finished state of the trail easier to work around:
- Start from the Bond Park side if your goal is the new bridge. You get the payoff without running into the Phase 3 closure.
- Check the town's project page before heading toward Weston Parkway, since the reopening date will move as grading work near Lake Crabtree wraps up.
- Keep to the trail's basic etiquette, since it now applies to a section seeing real reconstruction dollars and heavier counted traffic: stay right unless passing, cap your speed at 15 miles per hour, and keep dogs on a leash no longer than six feet.
- If you're timing a visit around one of the fall events, build in the walk or ride itself as part of the plan rather than just driving to the parking lot. That's the whole point of a hub like Bond Park.
Cary's greenway system did not get less useful while one mile of it sat torn up. It got more specific. The 100-mile number is true, but the mile that matters to your Tuesday evening walk depends entirely on which segment you're standing on, and this fall, one of the most connected ones is still finishing its rebuild.
If you're already spending your weekends on this stretch of trail and start wondering what a home near North Cary Park or the Bond Park corridor is actually worth these days, Kelly Shields put together a two-minute way to find out. Her Get Your Free Home Valuation tool is a good starting point, and her Cary neighborhood guide rounds up more of what's changing across town this season.
