Greenway gambolin’: Salem Creek Trail
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
The mud’s deep enough to bury a Buick around here, so I decided it was as a good a day as any to stroll the length of the Salem Creek Trail, a four-mile greenway that starts at a shopping center on the west side of Winston Salem and ends on the east side at Salem Lake. The trail has a lot going for it: almost entirely paved, passing through at least one construction zone, prone to flooding after strong rains, and home to a long line of utility towers.
OK, so I was being sarcastic there. Like San Jose’s Guadalupe River Trail — strategically situated beneath a busy airport’s final approach — this greenway is only here because there was no profitable way to develop the land it passes through. Power companies presumably acquired right-of-way for transmission towers along Salem Creek because it was a permanent geographical feature: not going anywhere, and not likely to be molested by marauding developers. The power towers are the scourge of the trail, I’ll admit, but there’d be no trail without ‘em, I suspect.
Such is life: so much compromise, so little free beer.
