If you've been waiting since spring to get your regular loop back along Crabtree Creek near Lassiter Mill Road, here's the part nobody posted on the neighborhood group: the closure didn't end in June. It just changed shape.

For anyone who runs, walks, or bikes this stretch of greenway on a normal week, that distinction matters. A short seasonal detour is an inconvenience. A construction footprint that sits on the same half-mile of trail for the better part of two years is something you plan around, not something you wait out.

Two Separate Closures, One Continuous Headache

Here's what actually happened, in order. Back in April 2026, the city closed the section of Crabtree Creek Trail between Lassiter Mill Road and Rothgeb Drive for a streambank restoration project just east of the Rothgeb Drive trail entrance. That closure ran through June 30, 2026, with a detour routed along the sidewalks on Lassiter Mill Road and then onto Marlowe Road, where there's no sidewalk at all, so anyone using that detour on foot or by bike was sharing pavement with cars for a stretch.

That project wrapped on schedule. If you checked the city's greenway alerts page in early July, the Lassiter Mill Road to Rothgeb Drive segment showed clear.

What most residents haven't clocked is that a second, larger project picks up almost exactly where the first one left off, on the opposite side of the same bridge. The Crabtree Creek Trail Improvements at Lassiter Mill Road project covers the section between Hartford Street and Lassiter Mill Road, and as of late June the city was still finalizing contracts and coordinating with its contractor, with construction expected to begin in August 2026. That puts the start of this new phase right now, this month, on the calendar the city itself published.

This one is not a quick fix. The completion target is Fall 2028.

What This Round Actually Involves

The spring project was about stream health. This one is about the trail itself. The scope includes upgrading a section of trail that's currently unpaved, doing additional streambank work just west of Lassiter Mill Road, removing the old timber boardwalk and steps along Hartford Street, and making improvements to the Lassiter Mill Road vehicular bridge that the trail runs alongside.

The city frames the goal as strengthening what it calls the cross-city connection of the Crabtree Creek corridor. That's not just planning language. Crabtree Creek is one of the main routes of Raleigh's Capital Area Greenway System, and to the east it connects the trail all the way out toward the Neuse River Trail, Wake Forest, and Knightdale. A rough, unpaved gap and a deteriorating timber boardwalk are the kind of thing that quietly caps how usable that whole connection is, especially for anyone on a bike or pushing a stroller.

So the project makes sense on paper. It just means the exact stretch of trail that sits closest to North Hills is going to be a construction zone, on and off, for roughly two and a half years running from this past April through Fall 2028, with only a few weeks in between where the whole corridor was actually clear.

The Timeline, Side by Side

It's easy to lose track of which closure is which when they sit back to back on the same short stretch of trail. Here's how the two line up:

The two projects sit on opposite sides of the Lassiter Mill Road bridge, which means that specific junction, the point where the greenway crosses one of the busier connector roads near North Hills, has been under some form of active construction disruption for most of this year and will stay that way for a while longer.

Why This Particular Half-Mile Carries So Much Weight

Crabtree Creek Trail isn't a short neighborhood loop. It runs southeast from William B. Umstead State Park all the way to the Neuse River Greenway Trail at Anderson Point Park, a corridor that stretches over 19 miles when you count the full system between the White Oak Creek Greenway in Cary and Anderson Point. Along the way it connects to Kiwanis Park, the historic Lassiter Mill site, and North Hills Park, plus the Mine Creek Greenway and House Creek Greenway on the west side.

Lassiter Mill Road sits almost exactly in the middle of that network, close enough to North Hills that it functions as the default access point for a huge share of daily trail traffic in this part of the city. When this segment slows down, it doesn't just shorten your run. It changes how the whole system feels to use, because it's the hinge that most local loops pass through on their way to somewhere else.

How to Still Get a Real Loop In

None of this means the greenway is off limits for the next two years. It means the shape of a good loop changes depending on which direction you head.

• Heading west from North Hills Park toward Umstead, you'll pick up the trail well clear of the Hartford Street to Lassiter Mill Road construction zone, and you can still connect through to Mine Creek Greenway or House Creek Greenway for a longer out and back.
• Heading east past Kiwanis Park and the historic Lassiter Mill toward Rothgeb Drive, the streambank restoration closure that ran through June is done, so that segment should be passable again, though it's worth checking the current status before you head out since active construction on the adjacent phase can still affect access points nearby.
• If you're routing a longer ride toward the Neuse River Trail, expect to treat the Lassiter Mill Road crossing itself as the one variable to plan around rather than the whole eastern half of the system.

The most reliable habit, if you use this trail regularly, is to check the city's greenway alerts page before a longer outing rather than assuming last month's status still holds. Closures here have a pattern of ending and starting again in the same general area, which is exactly what's happening right now.

What to Watch For Through 2028

Two things are worth keeping an eye on as this project moves forward. First, the detour for this new phase hadn't been published as of this writing, so anyone using this stretch regularly should watch for an updated route once construction crews actually mobilize. Given how the spring detour worked, routing pedestrians and cyclists onto Marlowe Road without a sidewalk, it's worth paying attention to whether the next detour handles that stretch any differently.

Second, the bridge work is the piece most likely to affect how the trail feels once it's finished. A rebuilt Lassiter Mill Road crossing paired with a paved connection where there's currently an unpaved gap and an aging timber boardwalk would genuinely improve one of the more awkward pinch points in the whole Crabtree Creek corridor. It's just going to take until Fall 2028 to get there.

For now, the honest read is that the trail near Lassiter Mill Road isn't back to normal. It's between two closures that happen to share a boundary, and the second one is the longer of the pair.

If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in different pockets of North Hills, from greenway access to the walk to the Commons, that's the kind of ground-level detail that doesn't show up in a listing description. Eric Mikus at Raleigh Luxury Listings spends as much time tracking what's happening on the trails and streets here as he does tracking the market, and he's glad to talk through either one.