Parks, trails and greenways

Wake Forest's parks department manages 561 acres of parks, open space, natural land and trails, and the greenway network keeps growing every year. Here's what's out there, where to find it, and what each spot does best.

Joyner Park, the big one

If you only know one park in town, it's E. Carroll Joyner Park at 701 Harris Road. It's 117 acres of old farmland turned public space, with restored farm buildings, a pecan grove, formal gardens, an amphitheater, and three miles of paved trails open to walkers, bikes, in-line skates, and leashed dogs. The park opened in August 2009 after the town put $750,000 in grants and $3.5 million in bond money into the first phase, and it has earned every dollar since.

The trails come as marked loops with their own wayfinding symbols. The half-mile Garden Loop circles the landscaped center of the park past the amphitheater and pecan grove, and the one-mile Field & Garden Loop climbs to the highest point in the park. Come in spring for the daffodils, or on a summer Sunday when the amphitheater fills up for the town's concert series.

The neighborhood parks

The rest of the system is smaller and more local, which is the point. These are the parks you walk to.

Flaherty Park at 1226 N. White Street packs in ball fields, tennis and pickleball courts, a playground, a dog park, a community center, and a quarter-mile paved trail. H.L. Miller Park at 401 Elm Avenue has a half-mile trail, and there's another quarter-mile path behind Kiwanis Park and the library on E. Holding Avenue. Tyler Run Park on Pineview Drive adds a short paved stretch of its own. None of these will fill an afternoon by themselves. All of them will fill a lunch break.

Ailey Young Park at 800 E. Juniper Avenue deserves more attention than it usually gets. The 15-acre park in the Northeast Community has a baseball field, basketball courts, grills, and a playground, and it carries real history. The town also owns the nearby Ailey Young House, a circa-1870 saddlebag house that is the oldest known African American historic resource in Wake Forest, and it's developing the three-acre site as a heritage park and gateway into the Northeast Community. Watch this one.

Water: the reservoir and the pool

The Wake Forest Reservoir is the quiet surprise of the whole system. Built as the town's drinking water source in the early 1960s, the lake is now open to paddle craft and electric boats, with a small concrete ramp next to the parking area. Bring a kayak or a paddleboard. On the west side there's over a mile and a half of soft trail, built in 2012 and 2013 largely by volunteers from Boy Scout Troop 5, and the town plans to eventually loop the trail all the way around.

For actual swimming, Holding Park Aquatic Center is the town's seasonal outdoor pool, walkable from downtown.

The greenways that tie it together

The greenways are where Wake Forest is spending its money, and it shows. In 2022, voters approved $14.35 million in greenway improvements as part of a bond referendum, most of it going to extend the two main corridors.

The Smith Creek Greenway is the workhorse. From the Smith Creek Soccer Center on Heritage Lake Road it runs south past Heritage Middle, Elementary, and High School, then connects to the Sanford Creek Greenway, which continues through a wetland stretch and links up with Rolesville's Main Street Park. A separate section runs from Burlington Mills Road south to the Neuse River Greenway, which puts a 33-mile connection to the Neuse River Trail at the end of your street. That's the detail worth repeating: you can get on a paved trail in Wake Forest and ride, in principle, deep into Raleigh and beyond without dealing with traffic.

The Dunn Creek Greenway heads north from the same soccer center trailhead, under the NC-98 Bypass. Construction on the next phases began in late 2024, and when finished they'll add another 1.8 miles and connect the trail to Ailey Young Park, the Northeast Community, and the Traditions neighborhood. Check the town's greenway pages for current status before you plan a long ride, since sections open in stages.

The town keeps an interactive greenway map that shows every trail, trailhead, and section under construction. Bookmark it. This network changes fast enough that any static list, including this one, has a shelf life.

Where to start

New to town, or just never got past Joyner? Try this order: Joyner Park for the loops and the scenery, the reservoir soft trails when you want dirt underfoot, and the Smith Creek Greenway when you want to cover distance. Then pick the neighborhood park closest to your house and actually use it. That's what it's there for.