Radnor Lake Is Getting a Second Entrance, and Green Hills Will Feel It First

Saturday, 9 a.m., Otter Creek Road. The gravel lot at Radnor Lake's west entrance filled twenty minutes ago. Cars now line the shoulder past the entrance sign, engines idling, drivers hoping a hiker with wet shoes and a leashed dog is on the way out. If you live in Green Hills, you have been one of those drivers. The lake is your park too, a short drive from most addresses in the neighborhood, and on any clear weekend morning it feels like the rest of Nashville knows it.

That crowding problem is not going away this year. But for the first time in a decade, a second way into the park is under construction, and it is not opening where most people would guess.

The Only Way In, For Now

Radnor Lake currently has two entrances. The larger one sits off Granny White Pike on the east side, with the Walter Criley Visitor Center and most of the park's parking. The smaller one is off Franklin Road on the west side, the entrance most Green Hills residents actually use because it is the short way in. That west lot feeds Otter Creek Road, which happens to be the only stretch inside the park where a leashed dog is allowed and the only surface where jogging is permitted. Every other trail, including the full Lake Trail loop, prohibits both.

Friends of Radnor Lake, the nonprofit that partners with the state to steward the natural area, has put the park's annual visitation at roughly two million visits. Two entrances were not built for that kind of traffic, and the west lot in particular was never meant to double as the neighborhood's overflow parking. On a good-weather Saturday, that is exactly the job it ends up doing.

Nine Acres at a Noisy Intersection

In December, Radnor Lake State Park closed on nine additional acres at the corner of Franklin Road and Old Hickory Boulevard in Brentwood, a few miles further out along the same road as the current west entrance. The purchase capped roughly twenty years of negotiation and cost about $8 million, funded through a partnership between Friends of Radnor Lake, the Harris family, who had owned the land, and the State of Tennessee.

This is not a new habit for the organization. Between 2011 and 2017, Friends of Radnor Lake and the state worked together on a similar string of deals that added 89 acres to the park. The Harris Ridge parcel is the largest single piece of that longer campaign, and the first to come with a plan for public access rather than simply expanding the park's protected footprint.

The land itself is not scenic yet. It holds dilapidated houses slated for demolition, illegal dumping that needs to be hauled out, and invasive plants that crews plan to replace with native grasses. Friends of Radnor Lake says that cleanup work is expected to run through this year.

What is planned once the site is cleared is a new trailhead with its own one-acre parking lot, the first new vehicle access point at Radnor Lake in years. From there, a route the organization calls the Harris Ridge Trail will eventually climb over the ridge and connect to the existing park near Otter Creek Road, a one-way hike that park officials have put at roughly 2.5 to 3.5 miles.

Park manager Steve Ward described the contrast to a Nashville television reporter this way:

"The noise of the intersection is where you're gonna start this hike, you're gonna hike to one of the quietest places in Nashville within 3 miles."

He was equally direct about the payoff, telling the same reporter the finished ridge views would rank among the best in Middle Tennessee.

What "Sometime In 2026" Actually Means

Here is the part worth being straight about. Friends of Radnor Lake's own project updates note that the state has not yet assigned additional park staff to build the new trail, and that volunteer labor on Harris Ridge will continue into 2027. Park officials have said they hope to open the property sometime this year, but they have also said the trail itself will follow "after additional projects are completed," which in parks-department language means no fixed date has been set.

Read plainly, that means the rest of 2026 is about clearing land, not cutting a ribbon. The acreage is real, the funding is closed, and the route is mapped. Whether a finished Harris Ridge Trail is walkable by Thanksgiving or still a demolition site with survey stakes is genuinely open, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing.

A few things worth knowing in the meantime:

• The new trailhead sits at Franklin Road and Old Hickory Boulevard in Brentwood, several miles past the current Otter Creek Road lot in Green Hills. It will be a separate access point, not an expansion of existing parking at the entrance most locals already use.
• Radnor Lake remains a Class II Natural Area and day-use only. That classification does not change with the added acreage, and the same rules that govern the current trails will govern the new one.
• Otter Creek Road stays the only place inside the park where dogs and joggers are welcome. If your Saturday routine includes either, plan it there rather than on the Lake Trail loop, where both are prohibited regardless of how empty the trail looks.

The Rest Of The Saturday

None of this changes what already makes a Green Hills weekend work while the ridge gets cleared. The Bluebird Cafe still runs its songwriters-in-the-round shows most nights out of a ninety-seat room tucked into a Hillsboro Pike strip mall, the kind of listening room where a table books up before you remember to reserve one. Parnassus Books, the independent store novelist Ann Patchett co-owns a few blocks away, keeps a running calendar of visiting authors that gives a weekday evening somewhere to go besides another restaurant. And the cluster of dining built up around The Mall at Green Hills, North Italia, Santo, etch, Emmy Squared Pizza, gives a hike-then-dinner Saturday more range than it had even a few years back.

What the new acreage changes is not any of that. What it changes is the ceiling on how many people the neighborhood's park can comfortably absorb on a single morning. For most of this year, that ceiling stays exactly where it has always been, and the shoulder along Otter Creek Road will keep filling with parked cars by 9 a.m. The nine acres at Franklin and Old Hickory are the first real evidence, after twenty years of quieter land deals, that the ceiling will not stay fixed forever.

If you are watching Green Hills for reasons that go beyond a Saturday hike, whether that means a move up, a downsize, or simply a clearer read on where the neighborhood is headed, The Milam Group tracks changes like this one as part of daily work across Williamson and Davidson counties. Schedule a Personalized Market Consultation when you are ready to talk specifics.