The American Tobacco Trail Is Closed in Apex, and There's No Detour Around It
- September 17, 2026
If your usual loop starts at the Wimberly Road lot and heads south toward New Hill, you already found the orange fencing. Wake County shut down that stretch of the American Tobacco Trail on September 2, and it's staying that way through the end of October while crews repair a hillside that gave way during Hurricane Helene back in 2024. If you haven't run into it yet, you will the next time you try.
Here's the part most people miss when they hear "trail closure": there isn't a marked way around this one. Wake County has been direct about it. Anyone reaching the closed section from the north can bail early onto the White Oak Creek Greenway and continue toward Cary, but anyone coming from the south has to turn around at Wimberly Road, full stop. The parking area itself is closed too, so it's not just the trail that's off limits, it's your usual place to leave the car.
The damage traces back to a 2024 landslide during Hurricane Helene, and the repair itself is not a quick patch job. Crews are removing unsuitable soil, rebuilding and stabilizing the slope with native trees and vegetation, enlarging the drainage ditch at the base, and installing a new pipe to carry water away from the trail bed. That's civil engineering, not a weekend fix, which is part of why the timeline stretched from an original August start to the current September 2 date, and why the county itself still frames "end of October" as a target rather than a guarantee.
Local coverage from WRAL and ABC11 both confirm the same window, and both carry the same message from Wake County Commissioner Shinica Thomas:
"Our crews are working as quickly and safely as possible to restore this section of the trail. We appreciate everyone's patience while we complete these necessary repairs and look forward to reopening the trail as soon as it's safe to do so."
The American Tobacco Trail runs 22 miles from Apex to downtown Durham, crossing Wake, Chatham, and Durham counties along the way. Of all the towns it touches, Apex holds more miles of it inside town limits than any other Wake County community. That fact changes how you should read this closure. A construction notice that reads as a minor inconvenience in Durham or a quick detour in Cary is, for a lot of Apex households, the removal of the trail entirely.
The closed segment sits between the Wimberly Road trailhead and the White Oak Creek Greenway entrance, which happens to be the exact stretch most Apex-based trail users rely on to head south toward Jordan Lake and New Hill. Cary-side users heading north still have a workaround, since they can peel off onto White Oak Creek Greenway before hitting the barricade. Apex-side users heading south don't get that option. Their nearest access point is the one that's locked.
None of this means Apex runs out of places to go. It means the next six weeks are a good excuse to rediscover what's already inside town limits.
All three are leash-required for dogs, which matches the rules you're already used to on the ATT itself.
The county has already moved this closure's start date once, from an initial August 1 target to the September 2 date that actually held. That track record is worth remembering before you plan a longer fall ride around the assumption the trail reopens exactly on Halloween. Check Wake County's American Tobacco Trail page before you commit to a route that depends on that section being open, especially if you're driving out from another part of town specifically to use the Wimberly Road lot.
The bigger picture here is the one that rarely makes it into the news coverage. This isn't a trail with too many miles and one annoying gap. It's a corridor where a single closed stretch removes the busiest access point for the town that uses it more than anywhere else on the route. If you've lived in Apex for a while, you already know the ATT isn't just a recreational amenity tucked at the edge of town. For a lot of households, it's the daily walk, the weekend long run, the place you take out-of-town family to show them why this corner of Wake County feels different from the subdivisions further out. Losing access to it for two months is a real disruption, even if it's a temporary one.
That's also, in a smaller way, what makes Apex worth paying attention to if you're weighing where to put down roots. A town that tracks and maintains more miles of a regional trail than any of its neighbors is telling you something about how it spends its infrastructure dollars and what its residents actually use day to day. Trails like this don't get built or defended by accident.
If you're already living here and riding out this closure with the rest of us, hopefully this saves you a wasted trip to a locked gate. And if you're the kind of person who reads a post like this and starts wondering what it would take to actually move into a neighborhood with this kind of access built in, that's a conversation Jeff Peterson Realty has all the time. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what a walkable, trail-connected corner of Apex could look like for you.
