Thursday commences a month-long celebration of our statewide trail-in-progress, the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. To find out what all is planned for the tribute, TIONC caught up this morning with Friends of the MST Executive Director Kate Dixon. We’ll share what all is going on with Mountains-to-Sea Trail Month as October unfolds, but thought we’d go ahead and share our conversation about the MST through the Triangle, which was especially encouraging.

Saturday, the FMST will conduct its first trail workday in Eno River State Park. The FMST’s role in helping forge new trail through the park — the MST follows the Eno from Hillsborough downstream to Falls Lake — has been a long time coming, says Dixon. “State Parks requires every trail project to be run through the state Division of Water Quality,” says Dixon. That’s hurdle No. 1. Plus, she says, Durham and Orange counties, through which the linear park runs, require that such projects be reviewed through the lens of their Federal Emergency Management Act programs. While this may not sound like good news — that progress is being bogged by bureaucracy — it is in that construction is actually about to begin. (If you want in on Saturday’s action, contact Fred Dietrich at fred.dietrich@duke.edu. More info on Saturday’s workday here.)

Construction of the Beaver Creek greenway in Smithfield.

As construction begins along the Eno, the MST’s path west from Hillsborough will soon become official. Dixon says the Orange County Commissioners will begin the process of officially approving the route from Alamance County through Orange on Oct. 13. That process is expected to last into December, at which point the official route on paper can start becoming the official route on land.

The most encouraging news, though, is in Wake County. Currently, about 46 miles of the MST exists along the south shore of Falls Lake; another 14 is in the works. At Falls dam, the MST will follow the Neuse River for 26 miles to the Johnston County line. Much of that work will begin this fall, thanks to funds made available through the federal Recovery Act. Further, says Dixon, Clayton, which is just inside the Johnston County line, is fast-tracking a greenway project that will link downtown with the Neuse/MST along Sam’s Branch, then link with the Wake greenway upstream and the 2.75-mile Buffalo Creek greenway, which is under construction along the Neuse downstream in Smithfield.

“Wake County and Raleigh have pledged to have the trail completed to Johnston County by 2012,” says Dixon, and “Clayton’s greenway will likely be completed before that.” That would result in a 30-mile greenway, the longest continuous stretch of paved trail yet in the Triangle.