Collierville Already Has a Greenway. It's Just Not the One Making Headlines.

A neighbor posts in the Collierville Community Facebook group asking when the Greenway is finally going to reach their subdivision off Houston Levee Road. Someone replies with a link to a Daily Memphian story about construction near Cordova. Someone else replies that they walked the Greenway that morning, from the Nonconnah trailhead, dog in tow, no construction in sight. Both people are telling the truth. They are just talking about two different trails that happen to share a name.

That mix-up is worth untangling, because it changes what you do this weekend. One of these trails is a genuine regional undertaking still years from reaching town. The other has been open, paved, and walkable in Collierville for a while now, under a name that sounds almost identical.

Two projects, one word

The Wolf River Greenway is the big one, the one that shows up in local news. It is a 26-mile paved corridor being built in phases by the Wolf River Conservancy, a public-private partnership with Memphis Parks and Shelby County, running from the north end of Mud Island in downtown Memphis through the city's north-central neighborhoods, into Shelby Farms Park, and eventually to Germantown and Collierville. As of an August 2026 progress report covered by Action News 5, 16 of those 26 miles are complete, and the trail currently stretches from Mud Island to Cordova. That is real, meaningful progress. It is also progress that stops well short of Collierville.

A Daily Memphian story published the same week put a number on the rest of it: full completion, the kind that actually links up with Germantown and Collierville, is not expected until 2031. Wolf River Conservancy Executive Director Erik Houston framed the goal in that coverage as wanting "every Memphian has access to the beautiful green spaces around them." It is a good goal. It is also a five-year-away goal for anyone living inside Collierville's town limits today.

Meanwhile, Collierville has its own trail network that already exists, is already maintained, and has nothing to do with the Wolf River Conservancy's 26-mile build. It has just been sitting there under similar-sounding names, in some cases even labeled "Wolf River Trail" on hiking apps, which is exactly how the confusion happens.

What's actually under your feet right now

According to TrailLink's current listing for the town, Collierville maintains more than seven trails covering roughly 38 miles, all open today. Three are worth knowing by name if you want an actual place to go this weekend:

• Nonconnah Greenbelt Trail – a 2.2-mile paved stretch running between S. Houston Levee Road and E. Winchester Boulevard at S. Byhalia Road, following Nonconnah Creek with no road crossings to interrupt a walk or ride. A newer 0.7-mile paved segment has also been built near Forest Hill Irene Road and north of Bill Morris Parkway.
• W.C. Johnson Park trails – shorter loop trails, including a reservoir loop that clocks in around 1.4 miles out and back, good for an evening walk without committing to a long ride.
• Collierville-Arlington Trail – a flat, wooded route off Collierville-Arlington Road that the Tennessee Trails Association has described as roughly five miles, often shared with horseback riders, with a trailhead down a dirt lane that is easy to miss if you are not looking for it.

None of these are waiting on a 2031 completion date. They are open now, and they have been for a while.

Why the two get confused

Part of the problem is language. Several trail-mapping sites list "Wolf River Greenway" and "Nonconnah Greenbelt Trail" on the same regional bike-path map, side by side, as if they are segments of one system. They are not. The Wolf River Greenway's official trailheads, per Memphis Parks, are Mud Island, Epping Way, North Highland, Kennedy Park, a Wolf River Greenway East access point, Kirby Parkway, and Shady Grove. Not one of those sits inside Collierville today. The town's own Nonconnah and W.C. Johnson trails were built and are maintained separately.

Here is the distinction laid out plainly:

There is a real connection between the two systems eventually. The Wolf River Greenway is designed to link into the Germantown Greenway once it reaches that far east, and Germantown's own trail system, more than 10 of a planned 22 miles complete per the city's parks department, already runs from the Germantown border out toward Farmington and between Johnson Road Park and Houston Levee Park. So the long-term picture is one continuous network. The short-term picture, the one that matters for a Tuesday evening walk, is that Collierville's trails and the regional Greenway are two separate things that will not physically touch for years.

What this actually changes for a weekend

If you have been holding off on using "the Greenway" because you assumed it was still under construction near Cordova, you have been missing paved miles that are already finished in your own town. A short list of what that looks like in practice:

1. If you want a shaded, flat, no-traffic walk, the Nonconnah Greenbelt Trail between Houston Levee and Byhalia is built for exactly that, and the newer segment near Forest Hill Irene Road gives you a second, less crowded option.
2. If you want something shorter with the dog before dinner, the W.C. Johnson Park reservoir loop is close to a mile and a half, manageable without committing an hour.
3. If you want distance and do not mind sharing the path with horses, the Collierville-Arlington Trail runs about five miles through the woods, though the trailhead down its dirt access road is worth double-checking on a map before you drive out.
4. If what you actually want is the big regional trail everyone keeps talking about in the news, that one is real, it is just not here yet. The nearest completed stretch runs through Cordova, and the piece that eventually threads through Germantown and on to Collierville is not expected until 2031.

None of this requires waiting on anyone else's construction schedule. It requires knowing which trail is which.

The bigger pattern worth noticing

Collierville has quietly built out a fair amount of its own recreational infrastructure while a much larger regional headline project has been grabbing the attention. That is not a criticism of the regional effort. A 26-mile trail connecting downtown Memphis to Shelby Farms and out to the eastern suburbs is an ambitious, genuinely useful thing to be building, and the fact that it is now more than halfway done is worth appreciating on its own terms. It is just not the reason you already have a good place to walk tonight. That reason has been here, under a name easy to mix up, since before the regional project made the news.

If you are the kind of person who keeps a mental map of a neighborhood, this is a small correction worth filing away. The Greenway everyone is waiting for and the greenbelt already beneath your feet are not the same trail wearing two names. They are two different projects, built by two different organizations, on two different timelines. Only one of them is ready for you this weekend.

Questions about how neighborhood amenities like this factor into what a home is worth in Collierville, or which streets sit closest to trailheads like Nonconnah or W.C. Johnson Park, are the kind of local detail Mia Atkinson tracks closely for buyers and sellers working this market. Book a call if you want that kind of ground-level read on a specific street or subdivision.