For years, if you wanted real mountain biking near Wake Forest, you needed to already know somebody. The land that's now Old Creedmoor Nature Preserve sat across the Wake-Durham line with no trailhead sign, no map, and no legal standing. It had singletrack because local riders built it themselves, rerouted it themselves, and kept it alive by word of mouth. The best protection that unofficial network had was that almost nobody outside the riding community knew it existed.
That changed this spring, and it changed alongside two other projects that most residents probably haven't connected as one story. Across roughly three weeks in May 2026, Wake Forest cut the ribbon on a newly protected 65-acre preserve, opened the two long-awaited final phases of its main greenway, and reopened a stream-damaged park in the middle of downtown. None of these were announced as a package. Taken together, they close a loop that didn't exist a year ago.
Three Openings, Three Weeks Apart
On May 8, the town held back-to-back ceremonies for Dunn Creek Greenway Phases 3 and 4, then walked a few blocks to reopen Miller Park behind Town Hall the same morning. Later that month, the Triangle Land Conservancy held its own ribbon cutting a few miles north for Old Creedmoor Nature Preserve, the conservancy's eighth public property in the region.
None of these three had much to do with each other on paper. One was a nonprofit land deal that started in 2020. One was a bond-funded greenway extension that broke ground in late 2024. One was a stream repair project behind Town Hall. What they share is timing, and what that timing produced is a town where several residential pockets went from having no connected outdoor access to having quite a lot of it, almost overnight.
The Trail Everybody Already Knew About, Now Made Legal
Old Creedmoor sits at 13509 Old Creedmoor Road, right on the county line, close enough to Falls Lake that its trails now tie into the Mountains-to-Sea Trail corridor. The property was originally slated for more than 40 houses. Around 2020, the developer working the land reached out to the Triangle Land Conservancy after recognizing what the parcel actually was: 65 acres of forest and stream buffer with an already-thriving, if unofficial, trail network built by the mountain biking community. Rather than clearing it, the developer kept a small frontage parcel for houses and let TLC take the rest.
TLC didn't just fence it off. Working with Triangle Off-Road Cyclists and Engineers Without Borders, the conservancy rerouted the erosion-prone sections of the old bandit trails, added bridges, and built in marked alternate routes for more advanced mountain bikers, the kind with jumps and technical features that aren't open to foot traffic. TLC's executive director, Sandy Sweitzer, put the stakes plainly at the opening: with green space in the Triangle disappearing quickly, this kind of protection matters more than it used to.
The result is close to four miles of multi-use trail that didn't exist in any legal sense a few years ago. It skews more approachable than the intermediate and advanced terrain at nearby Beaverdam State Recreation Area and the New Light Trail system, though the marked technical routes give more experienced riders something too. Rules are straightforward: helmets required, no e-bikes, dogs on a six-foot leash, dawn to dusk, and trails can close after heavy rain since the whole property sits inside the Upper Neuse River Basin, the same watershed that supplies drinking water to Raleigh and half a million other customers across the region.
The Math Nobody's Doing on Dunn Creek Greenway
The greenway story is really a pacing story, and the pacing tells you something the ribbon cutting alone doesn't.
| Segment | Completed | Miles added |
|---|---|---|
| Original segment (Smith Creek Soccer Center to NC-98 Bypass) | 2012 | 1.0 |
| Phase II downtown connector (to Deacons Ridge and Cardinal Park) | September 2017 | 0.3 |
| Phase 3 (to Ailey Young Park and Traditions) | May 2026 | 1.8 |
| Phase 4 (Flaherty Park to Del Webb) | May 2026 | 0.62 |
From 2012 to 2017, the town built 1.3 miles of Dunn Creek Greenway. Then the mileage stopped growing for years while the town worked through right-of-way acquisition and waited on the 2022 bond referendum, in which voters approved $14.35 million for greenway improvements across the Dunn Creek and Smith Creek corridors. Construction on the next phases didn't start until December 2024, under contractor Crowder Construction. When Phases 3 and 4 opened this May, they added 2.42 miles in a single stretch, nearly double everything built in the previous decade combined.
Phase 3 does the heavy lifting on connectivity. It crosses Wait Avenue and three separate streams, using precast concrete Permatrak boardwalks instead of wood specifically because they hold up better and stay less slippery when wet. That engineering choice lets the greenway push north from its old dead end and tie directly into Ailey Young Park and the existing trail network already built inside the Traditions neighborhood. Phase 4 is shorter but does something arguably more useful for day-to-day residents: its 0.62 miles link Flaherty Park, Orchards at Traditions, Flaherty Farms, and the Del Webb 55-and-up community into the same corridor. Four separate residential pockets that used to have their own disconnected paths now share one system.
The Same Morning, Downtown Got Its Park Back
While the greenway ceremony was happening near Flaherty Park, a second ribbon cutting was underway a few miles away at Miller Park, the two-acre wooded park tucked behind Town Hall at 401 Elm Avenue. The project addressed a stream running through the park that had been eroding for years, along with aging trails and drainage problems. Funded through the American Rescue Plan Act and 2024 general obligation bonds, the restoration rebuilt the stream banks, added boardwalk sections, and reworked the park's accessibility.
Steven Meyer, the town's capital improvement program manager, described the goal as preserving Miller Park as a wooded refuge in the middle of downtown while fixing the infrastructure problems underneath it. Ruben Wall, the town's parks and recreation director, connected the timing to something broader: more greenway access, he said, tends to get people moving, and a more walkable town supports the health of the community as a whole. Wake Forest Business and Industry Partnership president Jason Cannon made a related point about why local businesses care, arguing that companies increasingly weigh a town's parks and trails alongside everything else when deciding where to locate. The town also used the ceremony to recognize three longtime advocates for the project, Jan Ammons, Candace Davis, and former mayor Vivian Jones, all of whom pushed the greenway vision years before any of this broke ground.
What This Actually Changes If You Live Near Any of It
Put the three projects on the same map and the practical difference becomes clear. Someone living in Del Webb at Traditions or Orchards at Traditions can now walk or bike out of their neighborhood, through Flaherty Park, onto the Dunn Creek Greenway, and reach Ailey Young Park without touching a car. Someone downtown near Miller Park has a quieter, better-maintained stretch of woods a few minutes from Main Street instead of a park that's spent the last couple of years torn up for stream repair. And someone who wants actual singletrack, not just a flat paved path, has a legally protected, professionally maintained mountain biking destination a short drive north at Old Creedmoor, something that simply didn't exist in sanctioned form before this year.
None of these three projects were built to work together. They were funded through different mechanisms, on different timelines, by different organizations, and they happened to land in the same season. The effect on daily life in Wake Forest is the same either way: a set of scattered, half-finished pieces became one usable system in a matter of weeks, and most of the people who benefit from it probably still think of it as three unrelated pieces of good news.
If you're weighing a move to a part of Wake Forest where this kind of outdoor access is now part of daily life, Chad Ross has been tracking how this town's neighborhoods actually function for decades, not just how they're listed. Call or text him for a personalized market consultation.
