Can you actually walk from Rosedale to Birkdale Village without getting in a car? Since the summer of 2024, the answer for a specific slice of Huntersville has been yes. For everyone else in town, including anyone starting from the Main Street side of downtown, the answer is still no, and the reason why says more about how this town's trail network actually works than any map of it does.
The confusion is understandable. Local coverage of the greenway tunnel under I-77 made it sound like Huntersville had finally solved its walkability problem in one stroke. That's true for one corridor. It is not true for the town as a whole, and the gap between those two facts is worth understanding if you live here and have ever wondered why your own walk to Birkdale still involves Sam Furr Road and a steering wheel.
The Crossing That Used to Be the Problem
For years, Interstate 77 cut Huntersville's east and west sides off from each other in a way no sidewalk could fix. The Torrence Creek Greenway existed on both sides of the highway, but getting from one segment to the other meant driving around it.
That changed when Mecklenburg County finished the Torrence Trib. II section, a roughly 300-foot tunnel running 30 feet below the interstate, connecting the greenway at Rosewood Meadow Lane (where Rosedale Nature Park sits) to the CATS Park and Ride lot on Compass Street. The town held a ribbon-cutting on Monday, July 15, 2024, and the tunnel itself became a small landmark in its own right: it's lit by "State of Flow," a public art installation by Adam Buente of Project One Studio, whose lighting work turns what could have been a plain concrete underpass into something people actually stop to look at.
Huntersville Mayor Christy Clark called the project "a lasting legacy that will be enjoyed for many years to come" at the opening, and Peter Cook, deputy department director for Mecklenburg County Parks and Recreation, noted the section "connects many neighborhood access points," pointing to the number of people he saw arriving on foot from the surrounding streets rather than driving in. The project cost $5.6 million and added two bridges along with roughly 2,700 feet of boardwalk to get there.
Where That Trail Actually Leads
Here's the part that doesn't always make it into the coverage: the tunnel by itself doesn't reach Birkdale Village. What it does is connect to the Gilead Road trailhead, where Torrence Creek Greenway meets the existing McDowell Creek Greenway, forming a combined 3.6 miles of paved trail. From there, McDowell Creek Greenway continues on its own as a 3.1-mile out-and-back route that already had a direct line into Birkdale Village, with parking listed at 16815 Cranlyn Road, along with access to Robbins Park, the Westmoreland Athletic Complex, and Magnolia Estates Drive on the Cornelius side.
Put those two pieces together and the walk is real. If you're starting near Rosedale, the tunnel gets you under I-77 without a detour onto Gilead Road proper, and the McDowell Creek spur was already sitting there waiting to take you the rest of the way to a table in Birkdale. That combination didn't exist before 2024. It does now.
What You Pass Along the Way
The route isn't just a way to get somewhere. Rosedale Nature Park itself, the trailhead on the east end, opened in March 2022 as a 13-acre park behind the Rosedale and Market Square shopping centers, and it gave Huntersville its first dedicated dog park. Parks and Recreation Director Michael Jaycocks told Lake Norman Publications at the time that a dog park had been "always in the top five" requests in resident surveys going back years, but the town struggled to find a location that didn't compete with the parking demands of its athletic fields. One attendee at the opening, Erin Stephens, said the addition meant she and her Bernese Mountain Dog no longer had to drive "to Cornelius or Denver or anywhere else" for that kind of space.
Keep walking west along the Gilead Road corridor and you pass through Holbrook Park, which adds pickleball courts, tennis courts, a shelter, and a playground to the route, making the whole stretch feel less like a single-purpose trail and more like a string of reasons to leave the house.
The Half That's Still on the Map, Not the Ground
The part that hasn't caught up is downtown. Huntersville's own trail description for The Vine, the roughly 0.9-mile Downtown Greenway that runs from the Town Hall area near NC 115 to Statesville Road, states plainly that the connector "will eventually connect to a Mecklenburg County greenway that is being constructed under I-77 to Rosedale Nature and Dog Park, and thus to the existing Torrence Creek Greenway." Eventually is doing real work in that sentence. As it stands, if you live near downtown and want to reach Rosedale or Birkdale on the trail system, the connective tissue between The Vine and the rest of the network isn't built yet.
The westward and northward expansion of McDowell Creek Greenway tells a similar story. According to Mecklenburg County's own project tracker, the segment extending from Chilgrove Lane to Highway 73 received notice to proceed with construction in September 2025, and a companion segment running from Gilead Road west to Beatties Ford Road is still in design and real estate acquisition, with plans for two pedestrian bridges and a 60-space trailhead once it moves forward. A fifth segment, extending the network north toward East Catawba Avenue in partnership with the Town of Cornelius, is in the same early planning stage. None of that changes what already works between Rosedale and Birkdale. It does mean the rest of the promised network, the part that would eventually tie downtown into all of this, is still years out rather than already on the ground.
There's one more piece worth watching on the northwest side of town: a planned neighborhood park near Fire Station No. 4, still in concept design, with a splash pad, pickleball courts, and a modern playground on the drawing board. It's not funded construction yet, but it's the kind of project that tends to show up on trail maps a few years before it shows up in real life, the same way Rosedale did.
What's Waiting at the End
Assuming you're on the side of town where the walk already works, Birkdale Village itself has changed since the last time you might have made the trip. Dressler's, the longtime American restaurant near the center of the Village, closed for a remodel, and Fin & Fino has taken its place as a seafood-forward spot with a raw bar and a menu built around small plates meant for sharing. The bar program is led by Brittany "BK" Kellum, whose cocktail list has become part of the draw on its own. The restaurant's patio sits close enough to the Village's bandstand that live music carries over during evening service, which is worth knowing if you're picking a table for a quiet conversation versus one for people-watching.
That kind of turnover is normal for a shopping and dining district that's been anchoring this end of Huntersville for two decades. What's new is that more people can now reach it on foot from the Rosedale side than could two years ago, and that's arguably the more durable change than any single restaurant swap.
Where This Leaves You
If your daily loop already runs through Rosedale, Holbrook Park, or the Gilead Road corridor, the tunnel and the existing McDowell Creek spur give you a genuine car-free route into Birkdale Village that didn't exist before 2024. If your daily loop runs through downtown Huntersville instead, the connection promised on the town's own trail map is still a future project, not a present one, and it's worth checking the county's construction updates before you plan a walk that assumes it's already there.
Christy Walker & Associates spends a lot of time walking these same corridors with clients who are deciding which side of Huntersville actually fits how they want to spend a Saturday. If you're weighing a move to a stretch of town where the trail network already does what people say it does, we're glad to talk through what's built, what's funded, and what's still just a line on a map.
