Raleigh’s highly anticipated 3-mile House Creek Greenway is scheduled to open in March. Sunday, I took a little inspection tour. More about that in a sec. First, about that “highly anticipated” description. In Raleigh’s rapidly expanding greenway network, 3 miles isn’t a lot. The system consists of close to 70 miles at this point, and this 3-mile stretch is dwarfed, sizewise, by another stretch also under construction: the 28-mile Neuse…

You ask questions, I try to answer them. Among your recent inquiries: Forest Ridge Park, Raleigh Lance was noodling around on the site, discovered an old post about Forest Ridge Park-to-be in North Raleigh and wondered “if there is any news there. It looks to me like things are moving toward construction starting next spring … .” Things are, in fact, finally moving along with the 586-acre park along Falls Lake,…

While Durham officials circle their wagons and privately mull how to come up with another $2 million to build a pivotal pedestrian bridge over I-40, thereby completing the 22-mile American Tobacco Trail, others outside the city are more candid with possible solutions. Durham discovered the shortfall in July when it opened bids from eight contractors on the project, which also calls for about 4 miles of paved trail. The lowest…

It’s one of the cheapest recreation deals going: for as little as $5 an hour you can captain your own ship on any number of waterways throughout North Carolina. These bargain basement deals are offered at various county, municipal and state parks throughout the state. We ran a preliminary list of such places in June; today, we offer a significantly more comprehensive listing (though if you notice an omission, let…

In the 1990s,  the 2.3-mile Black Creek Greenway — running from Lake Crabtree south to West Dynasty Drive — was the crown jewel of Triangle greenways. Today, the still-popular greenway has expanded to nearly its entire, planned 7-plus-mile length. A crucial 1.4-mile connection earlier this month from Chapel Hill Road at NW Maynard Street to SW Maynard near High House Road means there’s only about a half mile of uncompleted…

Monday is never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast, especially come summer. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease this trying transition from out-in-the-Sun-day to Mon-I-wish-I-were-back-in-the-sun-day, we’re running a new feature every Monday, at least during the summer, called 90-Second Escape. Essentially, it’s a 90-second mini-movie of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a…

The Triangle’s inaugural obstacle-infested 5K, the Gladiator, went off today at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary. Some 776 runners made the passage into Gladiatordom, battling through a gauntlet of tires, crawling under a camo tarp (barbed wire was deemed too dangerous; the Town of Cary also nixed running through a fire pit and that bane of grade school playgrounds everywhere, monkey bars), hoisting over a cargo net wall, walking a…

I am rudderless — unless I have a goal. Stick a carrot in front of me and I can usually get it done. Case in point: earlier this year I vowed to start using my bike more for utilitarian purposes. To date, I believe I’ve gone for coffee on it twice. Appalling as that is, it became even more so when I pulled up a map of everything within a…

Last week, we published a list of municipalities in North Carolina that we knew had greenways. Turns out there was a lot we didn’t know. Since we published that list we’ve heard from an additional 14 municipalities with greenways, from Whiteville’s four greenways totaling a mile in length to Rocky Mount’s 7-mile system to Pinehurst’s 11-mile. Not only we’re we pleasantly surprised that so many municipalities in North Carolina have…

This weekend highlights some of the best North Carolina has to offer in the outdoors. Coast Not long ago, a biathlon/duathlon typically meant running and swimming. More and more, it can mean pretty much anything. Such as running and paddleboarding. That’s the case at Saturday’s Wrightsville Beach Biathlon, where participants will depart from the dock harbor side at the Blockade Runner, paddle four miles through Banks Channel, hop off the…