The Red Rock Trail System crossed 175 completed miles this year, and if you've seen that number on a flyer at the Piggly Wiggly or in a Freshwater Land Trust newsletter, it sounds like the county basically finished the job. It didn't. The 19 miles that matter most to anyone trying to walk or bike between Ruffner Mountain, Red Mountain Park, and Railroad Park are still, as of this summer, mostly unbuilt or unopened. The countywide total keeps climbing because of trail work happening in places like Hoover and Vestavia Hills, projects that are real and useful but have nothing to do with closing the loop that actually connects Jefferson County's three biggest downtown-adjacent greenspaces.
If you live here and you've been waiting to string together a run from Homewood into Birmingham without touching a road shoulder, the 175-mile figure isn't the number to watch. The 19-mile one is.
What the 175-Mile Number Actually Counts
As of 2026, 175 miles of trails have been completed under the Red Rock Trail System, a network that Freshwater Land Trust has been building out since 2010 across six major corridors: Jones Valley, Village Creek, Five Mile Creek, Shades Creek, Cahaba River, and Turkey Creek. That figure is a countywide sum. It includes brand-new mileage in Hoover, sidewalk-adjacent connectors in Vestavia Hills, and long-established trail through Ruffner Mountain and Red Mountain Park that's been there for years. It's a useful gauge of how much the region has invested in outdoor infrastructure overall, but it tells you nothing about whether any two specific parks are actually connected to each other yet.
That distinction matters because the piece of this system most residents in Homewood, Mountain Brook, and central Birmingham actually care about isn't the systemwide total. It's a much smaller, much more specific project called the Red Rock Action Plan.
The 36-Mile Loop Is a Different Project
Freshwater Land Trust released the Red Rock Action Plan in 2023, and its current mileage tally, still standing as of this year, shows 19 miles of trail left to build before the 36-mile loop around greater Birmingham closes. That loop isn't abstract. It links three major greenspaces: Ruffner Mountain, Railroad Park, and Red Mountain, which together are the closest thing Jefferson County has to a downtown outdoor core.
So while the countywide network has grown by roughly 15 miles in Hoover alone this year, the loop that would let you walk from Ruffner Mountain to Red Mountain Park without leaving a trail still needs 19 more miles of construction, by Freshwater Land Trust's own current accounting. Those aren't overlapping numbers. Hoover's new trails run along the Cahaba River and Shades Creek corridors on the south side of the county, well outside the loop's footprint, and they support Hoover's Parks and Public Spaces Plan, a long-term initiative focused on expanding outdoor recreation opportunities and improving quality of life for residents, a separate goal from stitching Ruffner to Red Mountain.
The Segment That's Built and Still Closed
The clearest example of how "under construction" and "usable" are two different things sits in Crestline and Eastwood. A new $500,000 agreement between the City of Birmingham and the Freshwater Land Trust, approved by the City Council in October 2025, is moving forward the trail that will eventually connect the Irondale Furnace Trail in Mountain Brook to the Flora Johnston Nature Preserve in Birmingham, with a path running west along Shades Creek. The route passes through key neighborhoods like Eastwood and Crestline, making it a vital link in the county-wide Red Rock Trail System.
It's already in the ground. It is also not open.
"We've asked people not to run or ride their bikes or push strollers on it yet."
That's Birmingham City Councilor Hunter Williams, describing the segment as it stood in October 2025, when he confirmed the trail is already under construction and will bring long-term value to the community. If you've driven past a fresh strip of asphalt along Shades Creek near Crestline and wondered why nobody's using it, that's why. Built and open aren't the same milestone, and the Red Rock system has more than one segment sitting in that gap right now.
The Segment That Did Open
Contrast that with Homewood, where the loop actually gained usable ground. In January 2025, the city celebrated the Shades Creek Greenway Expansion, a 1.4-mile trail project connecting residents to the ever-growing Red Rock Trail System. The extension isn't a stub either. It begins west of the Wildwood Shopping Center across from John Carroll Catholic High School and links up with the original section at Columbiana Road, tying into the original 2.5-mile section that begins at the Target near Brookwood Village and continues along Shades Creek, ending at Columbia Road near the Homewood Soccer Fields.
The scale of daily use on that corridor is worth sitting with. City figures put annual traffic on the Homewood trail at roughly 145,600 visits a year, drawing in everyone from Samford University students to families driving over from other parts of the county. That's not a quiet greenway waiting to be discovered. It's already one of the most heavily used pieces of infrastructure in the city, and the January 2025 extension pushed it further west toward Red Mountain Park, though the connection between the two remains a planned future link rather than a finished one.
Put the two projects side by side and you get the real state of the loop in one comparison: Homewood built 1.4 miles and opened them to the public. Birmingham built 1.3 miles of trail through Crestline and, as of last fall, was still asking people to stay off it.
Where the Rest of the New Mileage Is Going
Some of the year's other trail news has nothing to do with the loop at all, which is part of why the 175-mile headline is easy to misread. Hoover picked up around 15 miles of newly counted trail this spring, most of it strung along the Cahaba River and Shades Creek on the city's south side, a stretch of the county where Hoover already claims more Cahaba River frontage than any other city on the watershed, about 20 miles of it. Separately, Birmingham's Crossroads Trail, part of Corridor A in the Action Plan, is under development to connect the historically isolated Smithfield neighborhood to downtown, a project aimed at reconnecting a community cut off by I-65 rather than at closing the Ruffner-to-Red Mountain gap.
None of this is padding. It's real trail, built for real neighborhoods. But if your mental model of "the trail system" is the 36-mile loop specifically, Hoover's 15 miles and the Crossroads Trail are additions to a different ledger. They boost the countywide number without moving the loop closer to done.
What's Actually Walkable Right Now
None of this means there's nothing to do outdoors in Jefferson County while the loop fills in. The anchors on either end of the gap are both fully open and have been for years. Red Mountain Park spans more than 1,500 acres along the Red Mountain Ridge and offers over 18 miles of hiking and biking trails, along with the popular Remy's Dog Park. On the other end, Ruffner Mountain covers over 1,000 acres of oak, hickory, and pine forest with more than 11 miles of hiking trails, though it's worth knowing before you load up the bike rack that bicycles aren't permitted on Ruffner's trails, while Turkey Creek Nature Preserve and Red Mountain Park both allow multi-use access.
Outside the loop entirely, Vestavia Hills has its own trail work moving forward on the south side of the county, funded in part by a federal Recreational Trails Program grant that will fund additional trails at Altadena Valley Park, including about 2,850 feet of new asphalt trail and a bridge repair. It's another example of the same pattern: real investment, real value to the people nearby, and no bearing on whether you can walk from Homewood to downtown Birmingham without a car.
The honest version of the trail story this year isn't "the county just finished 175 miles of trails." It's that Jefferson County is running two separate trail-building efforts at once, one expanding the system's total footprint into places like Hoover, and one slowly, unevenly stitching together the three parks at its center. Homewood's stretch is open. Birmingham's is built and barricaded. Understanding which project a given headline is actually describing is the difference between planning a Saturday hike and showing up to a trail that isn't ready for you yet.
If you're weighing whether a neighborhood near the loop, or near Ruffner, or along the Cahaba corridor in Hoover, fits how you actually want to spend your weekends, that's the kind of on-the-ground detail RCRE Group tracks for clients across Jefferson County. Reach out to our team when you're ready to talk about what life actually looks like in the neighborhood you're considering.
