"These bridges restore vital trail connections for hikers, bikers and equestrians, while protecting the integrity of Steele Creek and the surrounding ecosystem." That's what John Gordon, President and CEO of Leroy Springs & Company, said at the ribbon cutting for two new bridges at Anne Springs Close Greenway. It's a tidy sentence for a press release. It undersells what actually happened.
For close to two years, if you hiked, biked, or rode a horse at the Greenway and wanted to get from the Adventure Road entrance to the Blue Star side, you couldn't take the direct route. You looped around. Regulars built that workaround into muscle memory the way you learn to avoid a pothole on your street. The direct route reopened in August 2025. A lot of people are still taking the pothole route, because nobody sent a memo that said the pothole got fixed.
What actually closed, and why it took this long
The trouble started in January 2024, when the Steele Street bridge collapsed during heavy rain. Greenway officials called it a structural failure. That bridge carried vehicles, not just foot traffic, which meant the closure did more than inconvenience hikers. It cut off a road-level crossing that had been part of how people moved through that section of the property for years.
Around the same time, the Greenway made the harder call on its second crossing: the swinging footbridge near the prairie, built nearly 40 years ago by Comporium, had reached the end of its life. Erosion, flash flooding, and cabling technology that hadn't been updated in decades left it structurally unsound. Rebuilding a swinging bridge in the same spot wasn't a workable option, so the Greenway decommissioned it entirely.
That's two crossings gone at once, both feeding the same corridor between Adventure Road and Blue Star. The fix took until August 2025 and cost $1.77 million, funded through the Greenway's endowment, corporate sponsors, and individual donors. The replacements are steel-truss pedestrian bridges, engineered to sit above the 100-year floodplain so a repeat of January 2024 is less likely to take them out again.
Here's the detail worth sitting with if you used to cross at Steele Street: the old bridge carried cars. The new one doesn't. That crossing is foot, bike, and horse only now, permanently. If you used to drive that connector as a shortcut, that option is gone, not detoured.
Before and after, entrance by entrance
| Entrance | During the closure (2024–2025) | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Adventure Road | Rerouted around Steele Creek to reach Blue Star side | Direct pedestrian bridge access restored |
| Blue Star | Same reroute, opposite direction | Direct pedestrian bridge access restored |
| Steele Street crossing | Closed entirely after the January 2024 collapse | Reopened as pedestrian-only steel-truss bridge |
| Prairie swinging bridge | Closed, then removed | Replaced by a new steel-truss crossing nearby, original swinging bridge gone for good |
The practical result: more than 200 acres of trail that required a workaround for the better part of two years no longer does.
The loop system you can run again without the long way around
If you've stuck to shorter out-and-backs near the entrances because the connected loops felt like too much of a production with the detour, the math changed. Paradise Loop, the 3.1-mile flow trail out of the Complex kiosk, still intersects the Tunnel Trail about halfway through. From there, Tunnel Trail runs a mile to meet Mill Pond, which covers 1.4 miles after passing under Highway 460. Mill Pond connects to Prairie Loop, another three-plus miles with views of the Norfolk Southern tracks and Stumpy Pond, before looping back.
Strung together, that's a stretch of trail running well past six miles that used to require a detour around Steele Creek to complete without backtracking. Cyclists in particular are being asked to actually use it again. The Greenway's own note after the bridge opening specifically encouraged riders to return to the designated bike trails in the area instead of the temporary reroute, which tells you the old habit had enough staying power that it needed a nudge to break.
What the calendar looks like now that access is back
The timing works out well for fall. The Greenway's Fall Artisan Market runs Saturday, October 3, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The next afternoon, October 4, the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra performs at the Greenway from 3:30 to 5 p.m. That's an artisan market and a symphony performance on back-to-back days, both worth planning a full weekend around if you haven't been out that way in a while.
The Gateway Canteen, at the Lake Haigler entrance, keeps its own seasonal rhythm through the fall: live music Fridays and Saturdays from 6 to 9 p.m., a tradition that runs March through October, so there are still several weekends left on the calendar before it pauses for the season.
None of this is new activity created by the bridge project. It's activity that got harder to reach for two years and is now exactly as easy to get to as it used to be, which is worth remembering if your mental map of the place still has a detour drawn on it.
A few things worth knowing before your next visit
- Hours are 7 a.m. to sunset, seven days a week.
- Annual membership runs about $90 for an individual and $180 for a family of up to six in the same household, which pays for itself quickly if you visit more than a handful of times a year.
- Dogs are welcome on a six-foot leash everywhere except the dedicated Mary Warner Mack Dog Park, which requires its own membership add-on.
- No motorized equipment is allowed on any trail, a rule that hasn't changed and isn't going to.
The Greenway logged more than 300,000 visitor trips last year and ran on nearly 12,700 volunteer hours in 2025 alone. That's not a small user base to have been quietly rerouting for two years. If the fix has been live for over a year and this is the first you're hearing the direct routes are back, you're not the only one.
Why this matters if you already call Fort Mill home
This isn't a story about property values or growth projections. It's a story about a piece of infrastructure that most of Fort Mill treats as a given, the way you treat your own driveway, until it isn't there and you have to relearn how to get around. The Greenway sits at the center of a lot of daily routines here, dog walks, weekend rides, the occasional Saturday market. When a routine gets interrupted for two years, the interruption becomes the new normal in people's heads even after the original problem is solved.
If you've been avoiding the Adventure Road to Blue Star stretch, or driving the long way instead of hiking straight through, this fall is a good excuse to go find out what the map actually looks like now. The Fort Mill most residents know includes this Greenway as a default weekend option. It's worth actually using it as one again.
For more on what's happening around Fort Mill, including the full account of the bridge project from the Anne Springs Close Greenway itself and the original closure coverage from WCNC, both are worth a read if you want the full timeline. The Greenway's current fall calendar is also listed through Share Charlotte.
If you're thinking about what else has changed in Fort Mill lately, or just want a conversation about the neighborhood from someone who pays attention to these details, Liz Koelling is always happy to talk. Let's Connect.
