Cary's Greenways Hit 100 Miles. The Map Still Runs Ahead of the Pavement.

Say you left the Bond Park boathouse on a Saturday morning, aiming to ride the whole way from the lake out to the American Tobacco Trail without ever touching a road. The kiosk map at the trailhead makes it look like one continuous line: Black Creek Greenway feeding into White Oak Creek Greenway, White Oak Creek Greenway threading west, and somewhere past Green Level, the promise of the ATT itself, stretching another 22 miles toward Durham on one end and New Hill on the other. It reads like a finished system.

It isn't, not quite yet. And understanding why tells you more about how Cary actually builds and maintains its trail network than any milestone press release will.

The Number Everyone's Celebrating This Year

Cary is marking a real milestone in 2026: its greenway system has passed 100 miles of paved trail, a figure the town has been building toward since it opened its first greenway back in 1979. That's 46 years to get here, which puts the "100 miles" framing in perspective. This isn't a single grand opening. It's the sum of dozens of separate projects, funded and constructed years apart, that happen to add up to a round number worth celebrating with a full calendar of events.

White Oak Creek Greenway and Black Creek Greenway form the spine of that system, and together they're part of the designated East Coast Greenway corridor, the bike-and-pedestrian route that runs from Maine to Florida. Locally, that corridor includes more than 70 connected miles across the Triangle, one of the more complete urban stretches anywhere along that entire route.

That's the achievement. The catch is that 100 miles of pavement doesn't mean 100 miles of connected pavement, and right now, two of the more visible gaps sit exactly where a lot of residents assume the network already links up.

Where the Seams Still Show: Black Creek Greenway

Black Creek Greenway is Cary's longest and busiest trail, running 7.1 continuous miles from the Old Reedy Creek Trailhead down to the hub at Bond Park, where it meets White Oak Creek Greenway. Since June 2024, the town has been in the middle of a three-year renovation of the northern stretch of that trail, done in three phases specifically so the whole thing doesn't have to close at once.

That new bridge is worth a special trip on its own. It's built with leaf-patterned panels designed to interact with light as you cross, and its opening was significant enough that local news covered it directly. But the project as a whole is a useful reminder: a three-year construction timeline on a trail renovation isn't unusual here. If you haven't ridden the full length of Black Creek Greenway in a while, check current phase status before you go. The town keeps a live construction tracker specifically because the closures move.

The Landslide That Still Doesn't Have a Fix Date

The other gap sits farther south, on the American Tobacco Trail itself. The ATT's Wake County section, about 6.5 miles running toward New Hill and Apex, took damage from a landslide during Hurricane Helene back in 2024. The affected stretch, between the Wimberly Road trailhead and the entrance to Apex's White Oak Greenway, was closed as unstable and impassable at the time.

Two years later, the fix is still pending. The town scheduled a formal repair window from August 1 through October 31, 2026 to finally close the gap for good, and local coverage confirmed those dates heading into summer. But as of the most recent update on Wake County's own trail page, that planned closure has been postponed, with no revised schedule posted yet.

Read that carefully, because it cuts both ways. It likely means the section is passable again for now, at least in some form, since a postponed closure isn't the same as an active one. But it also means the permanent repair, the one that would actually resolve the slope damage from a storm two years gone, still doesn't have a date. If you're planning to ride toward New Hill, check the county's page the morning you leave, not the week before.

None of this touches the Chatham County section of the ATT, which Cary maintains separately. Two bridges there got repaired between mid-February and the end of March 2026, and the town's own status page confirms the trail stayed open the entire time. That's the version of trail maintenance that goes unnoticed, which is the point. It's the version residents actually want.

What This Means If You're Planning a Ride This Weekend

The reliable, currently open long rides right now are the ones that don't depend on the two projects above finishing:

• Bond Park's internal loop system is untouched by any of this. The 2.1-mile Lake Trail circles Bond Lake on a mix of paved and natural surface, and it connects to the shorter Paw Paw and Pine Cone Trails without crossing any construction zone.
• Black Creek Greenway, West Dynasty Drive through Weston Parkway, is fully open, covering both the Phase 1 segment and the Phase 2 segment that reopened in May 2026 with the new Cary Parkway bridge. The stretch north of Weston Parkway up to Old Reedy Creek Trailhead is the piece still closed for Phase 3.
• The Chatham County section of the American Tobacco Trail stayed open through its own bridge repairs and remains the more dependable long stretch of the ATT right now.

What you can't yet count on is a single unbroken ride from Bond Park all the way out to the ATT's southern terminus. White Oak Creek Greenway is described by the town itself as a corridor that "will eventually connect" to the ATT as one continuous trail over seven miles. Eventually is doing real work in that sentence. It hasn't happened yet.

The Data Layer Cary Just Added

One detail suggests the town is taking connectivity seriously going forward, not just celebrating a mileage number. Starting in early March 2026 and continuing through April, Cary installed ten Eco-Counters along its busiest trails. These are low-profile sensors that count pedestrians and cyclists, track direction of travel, and log general speed, all without cameras or personal data. It's the first time the town has had real usage numbers instead of estimates, and it's a reasonable bet that whichever segments show the heaviest daily traffic will move up the priority list for future funding. If you want your favorite gap closed sooner, using the trail is, in a very literal sense, a vote.

Cary has also started rolling out artistic centerline striping along curves and underpass approaches on the Black Creek and White Oak corridors this year, a small safety and wayfinding upgrade that's easy to miss but worth watching for if you ride those sections regularly.

On the Calendar Before the Leaves Turn

The milestone comes with a full year of events, several of which are still ahead:

1. Lazy Daze Arts and Crafts Festival, August 22 and 23, at its usual home near Bond Park.
2. The 100 Miles of Greenways Photo Contest accepts entries through September 1, with selected photos displayed at the Bond Park Community Center and on GoCary buses.
3. Great Trails State Day at Harvest Fest, October 17, closing out the celebration calendar for the year.

The Triangle Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, the nonprofit that's logged more than 8,800 volunteer hours on the ATT since 1998, is worth a follow if you want closure updates and maintenance news that doesn't wait for a press release.

The Map Will Catch Up. It Just Hasn't Yet.

None of this is a complaint about Cary's trail system. A hundred miles of greenway, built over 46 years by a town this size, is a genuine amenity, and most of it is open, well maintained, and free to use every day. The honest read is simpler: the network is still being assembled in phases, on timelines measured in years rather than months, and the gaps that remain happen to sit at exactly the points where residents most want a single continuous ride.

That's the kind of texture you only get by living here long enough to notice which bridge is new, which barricade has been there since last spring, and which trail closure quietly outlasted its own announced end date. We notice it because we're out there too. If you're weighing a move to this side of the Triangle and want the same kind of ground-level read on a specific street or school zone, not just a trail map, DDR Realty is a phone call away.