The Half-Mile Where Davidson's Best Trail Loop Still Doesn't Close

Walk the West Branch Rocky River Greenway south from Abersham Park on a Saturday morning and the pavement does exactly what you expect. It threads along the creek, ducks under a canopy of sweetgum and tulip poplar, and delivers you into Fisher Farm Park, all 200 acres of it, where four miles of mountain bike trails fan out toward an archery range. Then, at the park's southern edge near Shearer Road, the trail stops. Not because the park ends. Because the greenway does, for now, in a gap that has taken eighteen years and a lot of patient conversation to even get scheduled.

That gap sits between Fisher Farm and the Narrow Passage neighborhood, roughly half a mile of missing pavement that would finally connect the two ends of what's already the town's most-used stretch of trail. The right-of-way fight behind it wrapped up in 2025. The construction timeline behind it has already slipped. If you've been treating this as a settled project because the land deals are done, the town's own numbers say otherwise.

What's actually finished right now

None of this is a knock on what exists. The loop from Abersham to Fisher Farm is real, paved, and dog-friendly, and it's the backbone of a lot of ordinary Davidson weekends. Fisher Farm alone offers enough terrain that families use it for an entire Saturday morning without ever leaving the property, and the greenway connecting it to Abersham gives that same crowd a car-free way to get there from the neighborhoods north of downtown.

The bigger network around it keeps growing too. The town lists over six miles of walkable greenway space, including the 2.8-mile Randall R. Kincaid Trail, and Mecklenburg County's parks system separately counts 4.5 miles of greenway and 5.2 miles of urban trail linking downtown Davidson to downtown Cornelius and Bailey Road Park. None of that is in question. What's in question is the specific link that would let someone start at Fisher Farm and end up at Narrow Passage without getting back in a car.

The eighteen years it took to get here

The reason that half-mile took so long has nothing to do with paving crews or funding shortfalls. It has to do with land.

The Davidson Lands Conservancy spent nearly two decades negotiating right-of-way access with property owners east of town, work that finally closed out in 2025. Mecklenburg County bought the first parcel for the project back in 2007. Seven more property owners had to agree to give up access after that. Most were glad to talk, and they wanted to understand exactly what they would be giving up before signing on. Ed Harris, the conservancy's treasurer and a retired real estate investor who worked the project for years, described the pace bluntly: it just takes a long time, he said, comparing the process to knocking your head against a rubber tree plant.

One family living off Shearer Road, the Gazzaways, took time deciding whether to let the trail cross the back edge of their three acres. Their worry wasn't abstract. Trent Gazzaway was concerned about people wandering off the trail onto private land, or parking on the street and cutting through his yard to reach it. Since their road is private and street parking isn't allowed there, the town agreed to put up a fence along the property line to settle it.

The route itself was designed around exactly these concerns. It runs along the farthest boundaries of the properties it crosses, on the far side of a creek, through wetlands, and alongside a 100-foot natural gas easement, which keeps it well clear of anyone's backyard. Much of the new section will be built as boardwalk rather than a graded path, specifically to limit disruption to that wetland buffer.

Mayor Rusty Knox, who helped close the final two agreements this past spring, called those last parcels the linchpin. The town paid about $62,900 for one of them; the county bought the other. As Knox put it, it's a huge connection, at the end of the day.

The timeline that already moved

Here's the part that matters if you're planning your fall around this trail actually closing the loop.

As of mid-2025, once the land deals were done, the expectation from both the conservancy and the town was that construction bids would go out in early 2026. That's the timeline you'll still find repeated in coverage from last summer.

The town's own project page tells a different story now. Updated in February 2026, it lists the Fisher Farm to Narrow Passage connector as currently in the design phase, with construction estimated to begin in 2027, not this year. That's not a rumor or a delay someone's speculating about. It's the status straight from the town's public works department, under project manager Jesse Bouk.

So if your mental map of this trail still has "opens sometime in 2026" attached to it, that map is a year out of date. The land is secured. The route is designed around the wetlands and the easement. The boardwalk plan is set. What's not set is a start date any sooner than 2027, and that's worth knowing before you build a training plan or a standing Sunday ride around a connection that isn't there yet.

Knox has also floated a second, even earlier-stage route: a loop connecting Abersham Park to downtown Davidson by way of Grey Road, the kind of full circuit that would let someone start downtown, hit Fisher Farm, and come back around without retracing their steps. That one hasn't gone through the right-of-way process at all yet. It's an idea Knox likes, not a project with a budget or a design phase. The pattern holds either way: this network gets built parcel by parcel, negotiation by negotiation, and each piece takes exactly as long as it takes to convince the person who owns the land.

What that means for the rest of the season

None of this affects the parts of the trail that already work, and there's plenty happening on them right now. The Davidson Farmers Market keeps its Saturday morning schedule going, drawing more than 35 producer-only vendors from within a hundred miles for the kind of walk-and-shop routine that pairs naturally with a morning on the greenway. Davidson College's fall calendar is moving too. Fall Break just wrapped on September 21 and 22, and Family and Orientation Weekend lands October 16 through 18, the same weekend as Carolina BalloonFest, which means campus and trail traffic both pick up around the same dates.

If your routine already runs Abersham to Fisher Farm and back, nothing changes this fall. If you've been waiting for the day you can keep going past Fisher Farm and come out at Narrow Passage without turning around, that day is still on the other side of a construction timeline that just got longer. The land fight that made it possible took eighteen years to finish. The paving is going to take its own time too.

Living near a trail that's still being built one negotiated easement at a time is its own kind of Davidson experience, and it's one more reason people who already know this town keep paying attention to what's happening at its edges. If you're thinking about what a home near this stretch of greenway is actually worth, or what's changing around it, Mary Kay Portaro knows this ground well enough to walk you through it.