Stand at the corner of Beverly Road this month and you'll see the same thing you've seen for years: Creekside Taphouse's gravel lot, the little PennyCup coffee window across the street, and beyond that, a stretch of woods and meadow that most Haw Creek residents have driven past without a second look. By the time the leaves turn, that patch of ground is supposed to become a trail. Not a huge one. Not a scenic overlook with a parking area and interpretive signs. Just a natural surface path that finally lets people in Haw Creek walk to the places they already drive to.
The reason this is worth pausing on isn't the trail itself. It's how long it took to get here.
The trail that stopped short in 2002
Haw Creek Park has had a heritage trail since its grand opening on May 18, 2002, complete with commemorative markers documenting the schools, churches, and community figures that shaped the valley. That path was always meant to be the first link in a larger Haw Creek Greenway, a project that traces back to an $18 million parks and greenways bond referendum that failed by just 357 votes in 1999. The park got built. The connective tissue around it didn't.
For more than two decades, that's where things sat. Haw Creek got its park, its heritage trail, its markers. What it didn't get was a way to walk from that park to the library, the elementary school, or the small commercial cluster along New Haw Creek Road without getting in a car first. Anyone who has tried to walk from the Beverly Road end of the neighborhood to Haw Creek Park knows the roads out here are narrow and winding, built for cars, not strollers.
What got the money moving again
The Haw Creek Community Association, the same group that built Haw Creek Park and Masters Park, spent years assembling the funding to finish the job. A resident-led campaign raised $11,115, and that local buy-in helped unlock a $127,784 grant from Buncombe County's Open Space Passive Recreation Bond, the largest single piece of the funding stack. The county commissioners approved it unanimously on November 18, 2025, a vote that had already been delayed once by Hurricane Helene.
Wildlands Engineering donated the design work, with senior water resource engineer Jake McLean drawing the greenway plans. That's not a detail that shows up in a press release. It's the kind of thing you only know if you've been reading the Haw Creek Community Association's own project updates, which is exactly where this comes from.
With the funding finally in place, HCCA has set a target of opening the greenway to the public this fall, or sooner if construction moves faster than expected.
What the finished path actually connects
This isn't a greenway that runs for miles. It's a short, mostly flat trail that does a very specific job: it links pieces of Haw Creek that residents already use separately, so they don't need a car to move between them.
Based on HCCA's own description of the route, here's what falls along it:
- The trailhead, starting on Beverly Road directly across from Creekside Taphouse and PennyCup
- Haw Creek itself, with the trail offering the first public access point to the namesake creek that gives the valley its name
- The East Asheville Public Library, connected on foot for the first time to the residential streets nearby
- Haw Creek Park, tying the new trail into the existing heritage path from 2002
- The neighborhood's small commercial area, the handful of local businesses that anchor daily errands
- The elementary school, giving families a walkable route that doesn't require crossing New Haw Creek Road on foot with no sidewalk
None of these are new destinations. They're places Haw Creek residents already go. What changes is how you get there.
The piece that still isn't finished
The greenway alone doesn't complete the picture. HCCA has been clear that the trail becomes genuinely useful for "hundreds of residents living in the valley" only once the New Haw Creek Road sidewalk project is also finished, since that sidewalk is what makes the trailhead reachable on foot from the rest of the neighborhood without walking along a road shoulder.
That's worth knowing before you get too excited about a car-free Saturday morning. The greenway is the missing middle link. The sidewalk is the piece that turns it into an actual network instead of a nice trail that's still a little awkward to walk to.
A fall worth walking into
Timing matters here, because East Asheville already has a fall calendar built around Highland Brewing, whose Clawtoberfest on September 26 kicks off the neighborhood's own Oktoberfest season with the return of its Clawhammer Märzen lager, stein-holding games, and live music. If the greenway opens on schedule, this is the first fall where a Haw Creek resident could plausibly walk from home to the library, cut through the park, and still make it to Clawtoberfest without ever getting in the car.
The neighborhood's dinner options haven't needed a greenway to be worth the drive. RendezVous, the French bistro Michel Baudoin built inside a converted Haw Creek church, still serves the same farmhouse-style menu that made it a follow-up act to his longtime downtown restaurant Bouchon, with pétanque courts out back for anyone who wants to play before their table's ready. Copper Crown, tucked near the Beverly Hills and Oteen border, has spent over a decade building a reputation as the neighborhood's dinner hub, drawing on Southern, Italian, and New Orleans influences with a bar program that leans into local beer and wine.
None of that changes because of a trail. What changes is whether getting to any of it, or to the library, or to the park, requires backing out of a driveway first.
What to watch for this fall
If you live in Haw Creek and want to know when the trail actually opens rather than when it was supposed to, a few things are worth tracking:
- HCCA's own greenway updates, since the association has been the most reliable source on funding and timeline throughout the project
- Progress on the New Haw Creek Road sidewalk, which determines how walkable the trailhead actually is from the rest of the neighborhood
- Any signage or announcement at the Beverly Road corner, the physical starting point across from Creekside Taphouse
The 1999 bond referendum failed by 357 votes and the valley waited 27 years for the rest of the story to catch up. This fall, if the timeline holds, it finally does.
If you're already part of this neighborhood and thinking about what comes next for your own place in it, whether that's a move within Haw Creek or simply understanding how projects like this shape the value of staying put, TFM Carolina knows this valley from the ground up. Get Started whenever you're ready to talk it through.
