Today’s 90-Second Escape: Exploring the Neuse River Trail

Looking for yet another way to take advantage of the gorgeous fall weather? We stumbled across this Escape from 2013 on the Neuse River Trail, the 28-mile run of greenway from the Falls dam south to the Johnston County line (with another 5 miles into Clayton).

At the time, the trail was a link or two shy of completion; today, you can ride the whole ribbon with but one road to cross (a sleepy country two-lane). Learn more about the trail here.

A great fall escape, as you’re about to see.

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Today’s 90-Second Escape: Cruisin’ the greenway

Couldn’t do it all in Sunday’s springlike weather? If cruisin’ the greenway was one of the things you didn’t have time for, we take you on a 90-second ride on the 5.5-mile stretch of paved path from the Wake County line into Clayton (from a piece shot shortly after the greenway opened in spring of 2012.

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Triangle voters showed once again they love their greenways and are willing to pay for them.
Bond packages in Raleigh and in Wake Forest both passed yesterday by landslide margins, providing funding for two key greenways.

• In Raleigh, 68 percent of voters approved $92 million in parks bonds that include $4.4 million for a 3-mile stretch of greenway linking the Crabtree Creek Trail with Umstead State Park.
• In Wake Forest, two-thirds of voters said yes to $4.6 million for greenway construction.

Here’s why both projects are significant:

Raleigh

For more than a decade, the 3-mile connection between the Crabtree Creek Trail and Umstead State Park was in legal limbo, caught in a kerfuffle between the quarry that owns most of the land, the city and local homeowners. When the greenway access part of the dispute was resolved last year, it paved the way for including the project in yesterday’s bond package.
Why is this 3-mile stretch especially important?

The resulting 17-mile Crabtree Creek Trail will link Raleigh’s Neuse River Trail, the backbone of Raleigh’s greenway system, with Umstead State Park via Crabtree Creek. Utilizing 13 miles of bike & bridle trail in Umstead, it will then be possible to connect with Cary’s Black Creek Greenway, which links with Cary’s White Oak Greenway, which is a couple miles shy of linking with the American Tobacco Trail. The Neuse River Trail links with another 5 miles of greenway into Clayton.

What’s that mean to you, the walking/running/bike riding consumer?

• It will be possible to ride a bike on path prohibited to motorized vehicles from Clayton in Johnston County to downtown Durham.
• The 15.6-mile Walnut Creek Greenway also connects to the Neuse River Trail, running west to N.C. State’s Centennial Campus and, with a short sidewalk connector and road connection, on to Lake Johnson. That means you could ride from Umstead to Lake Johnson on greenway via the Crabtree Creek/Neuse River/Walnut Creek trails, though a faster greenway route would be to catch the Reedy Creek Greenway out Umstead and pick up the N.C. Museum of Art and Rocky Branch greenways to the Walnut Creek Trail and Lake Johnson.
• With the Crabtree-to-Umstead connection and a few short road hops, we will have roughly 150 miles of innerconnected, off-road, mostly paved, bike-friendly trail in the Triangle.

The Raleigh bond package also includes $2 million to correct a hiccup on the Crabtree Creek Trail at Lassiter Mill Road that has long vexed walkers, runners and bikers along that stretch.

Wake Forest

As the Neuse River Trail is the spine of Raleigh’s greenway system, so is the Smith Creek Greenway to Wake Forest’s.
Currently, there are two segments to the Smith Creek Greenway:

• 1.15-mile stretch running from Burlington Mills Road south across the Neuse River to Raleigh’s Neuse River Trail (see above).
• 0.63-mile stretch that runs from Heritage Lake Road south through the Smith Creek Soccer Center to Rogers Road.

Yesterday’s bond money will fund a link between the Smith Creek Greenway ending at Rogers Road with the Heritage High School/Middle School/Elementary School complex, then east along Sanford Creek to Mill Bridge Nature Park. That construction will include 2.4 miles of greenway trail and 1.25 miles of sidewalk and multi-use path in the vicinity of Heritage Elementary, Middle, and High Schools, and will link with 0.85 miles of existing greenway along Sanford Creek. The town is also using $3.4 million in federal Congestion Mitigation & Air Quality grant money on the project.
The project will result in a roughly 4-mile stretch of continuous paved path that, as the town notes, “will connect major activity centers in Wake Forest.”
Eventually, the plan is to build 2.5 miles of greenway linking the two stretches of the Smith Creek Greenway with the Neuse River Trail.

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How long it will take to complete such an ambitious work is hard to say, says Carolina Thread Trail Executive Director Karl Froelich. But within five years, he adds, those threads should start to take the recognizable form of perhaps the nation’s largest urban trail network.
“We should have 350 to 400 miles in five years,” says Froelich. “And that might be the most significant part of the Thread Trail because that’s where people will want it the most. Right now, we’re going where the interest and energy is.”
Interest in the Thread Trail was sparked in 2005 by the Foundation for the Carolinas. Energy soon followed and the project was launched in 2007 with the support of regional financial heavyweights Bank of America, Duke Energy, Wells Fargo, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in addition to the Foundation. The timing was fortunate, coming just before the financial implosion of 2008.

220 miles in seven years
In the Thread Trail’s first seven years, 14 counties have developed Thread Trail master plans and 220 miles of Thread Trail have been built. Most of that mileage is in sections of two or three miles scattered across the 7,300-square-mile 15-county region. Those threads are great if you live nearby, but far from the economical, environmental and recreational juggernaut that an interconnected 1,500-mile network will create.
Most obviously, the Thread Trail would add enormous recreational value to the region, the health benefits of which would be a big plus in a time of mounting concern over our expanding waistlines. The trail would bring environmental benefits, adding protection to the waterways that many trails tend to follow. And there’s the potential economic impact such a trail network would bring.
“Property values would go up near where the trail goes,” says Froelich. “The trail would also generate festivals, attract tourists and result in new business creation, from bike shops to restaurants. The added tax revenue alone would be $7 to $8 million.”
“Within 10 years,” Froelich adds, “the trail would pay for itself.”

Making the connections
In order for all that to happen, the trail needs to become more connected. Currently, the longest continuous strip is 15.5 miles, a stretch known as the Ridgeline Trail running from Crowders Mountain State Park near Gastonia to Kings Mountain State Park across the line in South Carolina.
In addition to the seed money provided at the Thread Trail’s inception, funding comes from a variety of sources. So far, $16.8 million has come from private sources, $27.5 million from public (federal, state and local), and $7.6 million in land donations.
Many of the land donations come through the five regional land trusts working with the Thread Trail (Catawba Land Conservancy, Davidson Lands Conservancy, Foothills Conservancy, Katawba Valley Land Trust, Land Trust for Central North Carolina and the Nation Ford Land Trust).
The land trust involvement is emblematic of how these preservation groups have evolved over the past decade or so.
“It’s a symbol of the way land trusts are changing what they do,” says Reid Wilson with the Raleigh-based Conservation Trust of North Carolina, which acts as an umbrella group for the 24 land trusts operating in North Carolina. “Trying to connect all of these communities is a real change. It’s smart of them to embrace that approach.”

Building communities
In lean times for government support, local communities have gotten creative in finding funding.
Concord, for instance, plans to run Thread Trail greenway down a 14-mile stretch of the Rocky River through town. A segment in the Moss Creek neighborhood opened earlier this month, says Mark Kincaid, deputy director with Concord Parks & Rec., and because neighborhood kids can use it to get to and from school, they were able to secure partial funding through a Safe Routes to Schools grant through the N.C. Department of Transportation.
Kincaid says another stretch of the greenway will help make possible safe pedestrian passage through the traffic-saturated Concord Mills/Charlotte Motor Speedway area.
There is no one type of trail being pushed for the Thread. Of the 220 miles now down, Froelich says 28 percent are natural surface, 30 percent are “improved surface” (such as paved greenways), and 42 percent are sidewalk connectors.
Froelich’s organization operates as a support group for the 15 counties and 76 local governments that have signed on to the Thread so far. In general, he says, the trail is growing where there’s the most enthusiasm for it.
Developers are also contributing to the Thread. In Rock Hill, S.C., near the recently opened 2.2-mile Catawba Indian Nation Trail, Newland Communities plans to build a three-mile trail that will help extend the Thread.

Tipping point: the north-south spine
That five-year figure Froelich mentioned earlier isn’t when he expects the Thread to be complete. Rather, that’s when he hopes to reach the “tipping point,” at which enough of the basic Thread will be complete that local communities will be scrambling to make a connection. That tipping point will come, he says, with completion of the north-south spine. That spine would the north-south backbone of the trail, running from Statesville on the north, south into uptown Charlotte, on into York and Lancaster counties in South Carolina, and finally to Great Falls, S.C. That’s a 140-mile run, about 40 miles of which is finished.
“When the spine is finished, 1.8 million people will be within five miles of the Thread Trail,” says Froelich. “That would make it one of the longest urban trails in the country.”
(One of the longest urban trails in the country currently exists in the Triangle, where a 110-mile stretch of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail runs from near Hillsborough east and south to Clayton.)
Whether the Thread Trail reaches Froelich’s goal of as many as 400 miles in five years, he says, depends on one thing:
“It will all be dictated by how quickly the communities want to move forward.”

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Thread Trail by the numbers

• 2005 Year conceived
• 2007 Year launched
• 15 No. of counties involved
• 76 No. of communities involved (to date)
• 1,500 Estimated miles of trail eventually
• 220 No. of miles currently complete
• 28 percentage of completed trail that’s natural surface
• 30 percentage of completed trail that’s “improved surface” (such as paved greenway)
• 42 percentage of completed trail that’s “sidewalk connector”

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More on the Thread Trail

For a quick rundown of existing Carolina Thread Trails, check out our online guide here.
For a breakdown of Thread Trails by city, check out our guide here.
For more on the Carolina Thread Trail, go here.

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Coast

The sun and warmth may be late in arriving, but it’s getting to Wilmington just in time for this weekend’s Azalea Festival. And that’s especially good news if you’re a runner and like to participate in one of the festival’s keynote events, the Azalea Festival 5K/10K/Fun Walk on Saturday.

The races start at 8 a.m. from the Mayfaire Town Center in Wilmington, with proceeds benefitting the Cape Fear Volunteer Center Big Buddy Program, which pairs at-risk kids with adult role models. It’s a good course for an early season PR, btw.

Logistics: Saturday, April 5, 8 a.m. (race day registration is from 7-7:30 a.m.), Mayfaire Town Center, Wilmington. More info here.

Saturday forecast: High of 74 with a chance of thunderstorms.

Piedmont

Tree climbing: it’s something you likely did as a kid, something you likely did a lot. In fact, if you search the recesses of your childhood memory banks, no doubt some of the most vivid memories of growing up involve being stuck high in a tree wondering, How did I get this high up? And perhaps more importantly, How will I get back down?

Then you hit 12 and you never climbed a tree again. Unless you’re a member of the Charlotte Arborists Association, which this weekend hosts its 2014 Tree Climbing Competition at Freedom Park in Charlotte. The three-day event starts Friday, includes professional competition, and on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. there’s a free Family Fun Climb, in which experienced tree climbers will show you the ropes (and hang tight to them should you slip).

Logistics: Competition Saturday and Sunday, April 5-6, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Family Fun Climb Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free. Freedom Park in Charlotte. More info here.

Saturday forecast: High of 74, fog.

Mountains

There are a lot of 5Ks out there, so it takes a little something extra to grab our attention. Saturday’s Black Mountain Greenway Challenge 5K/10K has two somethings extra. One, it starts and ends at a brewery, Pisgah Brewing in Black Mountain. And two, it raises money and awareness in the Black Mountain Greenways Commission’s quest to build more greenways.

And, frankly, there’s a third plus: it’s in Black Mountain, a great gateway to the Pisgah community that’s just off I-40 and quick to get to, for a mountain town, from much of the state.

Logistics: Saturday, April 5, 2 p.m., Pisgah Brewing, Black Mountain. $27 for the 5K, $30 for the 10K. More info: greenwaychallenge@gmail.com or 828.775.9251.

Saturday forecast: High of 65, partly sunny.

photo courtesy Black Mountain News

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Those are our thoughts on the weekend. Find more options at the sources listed below.

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