Walk the Tunnel Trail at Flying Creek Nature Preserve far enough and you hit a mural. Local artist Hannah Legg painted it inside the pedestrian underpass the city built beneath Veterans Drive, and it is genuinely good, the kind of thing that makes you slow down and look. Keep walking through it, though, and you come out the other side into raw woods. No trail. No signage. Just the lot the city has set aside for a future 36-acre adventure course of mountain-bike and rugged hiking terrain that does not exist yet.
That tunnel is the most honest thing in Fairhope right now. The city built the crossing before it built the destination, which tells you almost everything you need to know about how fast Fairhope's newest green spaces are actually knitting together, and how much of what feels finished is really phase one of something longer.
Two finish lines, less than a year apart
Fairhope closed out two of its biggest public works projects within about eleven months of each other, and residents could be forgiven for assuming they're part of one connected system. They aren't, at least not yet.
The Fairhope Municipal Pier, a quarter-mile stretch into Mobile Bay that has anchored the waterfront since 1895, reopened on June 20, 2025 after a construction push that touched nearly every inch of it: 8,900 square feet of reinforced seawall, a rebuilt fountain, ADA ramps down the bluff, a new restroom building, and ninety-plus-year-old landscaping redone around the Rose Garden. The full Working Waterfront project, funded through a mix of RESTORE Act oil-spill settlement money and a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant, wasn't formally closed out until the city held a public rededication at the pier on March 26, 2026, nearly a year after the first crowds walked back onto the boards for the Fourth of July. The Blind Tiger, the seafood restaurant that opened at the pier's end in August 2024, has spent the past two summers watching that whole renovation happen around its dining room.
Just over two miles away, Flying Creek Nature Preserve opened its first phase on August 23, 2025. The city spent $8.75 million in 2013 to buy the original 72-acre parcel, known for decades as "the Triangle," specifically to stop a high-density subdivision from going in there. It has since grown to 108 acres. What's open today includes a longleaf pine restoration area, a butterfly garden, bird blinds, and a little over three miles of trail with names that mean something if you know the property: Carriage Trail follows the route Fairhope residents once used to reach town by wagon a century ago. The John Martin Nature Center, a visitors building at the entrance, is the former home of the Dyas family, donated to the city by the nonprofit Triangle Conservancy.
Both projects are, by any fair measure, done. Neither one is finished reaching toward the other.
What's already rideable, right now
Here's the part that doesn't require asterisks. The pier sits directly on the Eastern Shore Trail, a roughly 22-mile paved and boardwalked route maintained by the Baldwin County Trailblazers that has existed in pieces since the late 1990s and connects North Daphne all the way down to Weeks Bay. If you start downtown, this is what you can already do on foot or by bike, today, without waiting on any future phase:
- From downtown Fairhope, pick up the trail near the Fairhope Flower Clock and follow it past Fairhope Colony Cemetery straight to the pier
- From the pier, continue south along Scenic 98 through Battles Wharf toward The Grand Hotel in Point Clear, where the terrain flattens out and stays flat
- Head north instead and the trail threads through Montrose, where it gets noticeably hillier, before continuing into Olde Towne Daphne and eventually reaching Village Point Park Preserve
None of that is new. It's been buildable in sections for over two decades, funded piecemeal through federal transportation grants and matching city dollars going back to a $1,016,250 federal earmark in 1998. What's new is that the pier at the end of it is finally back to full strength after two years of construction, seawall repairs included, and it's worth treating that stretch of trail as freshly worth a Saturday morning even though the pavement itself hasn't moved.
The two links Fairhope has promised but hasn't built
Flying Creek is a different story, and this is where the tunnel matters.
City planning materials describe Phase 2 of the preserve as including "more multi-use trails and amenities as well as a direct connection to the Eastern Shore Trail." That's a real plan, but it's still a plan. There is no marked path today linking Flying Creek's internal trail network, the Connector, Primitive, Feeder, and Gully trails, to the Eastern Shore Trail corridor that runs along Scenic 98 a short distance away.
Separately, and this is the part with the tunnel in it, the city has already built physical infrastructure for a connection that goes somewhere else entirely. The Tunnel Trail's pedestrian underpass beneath Veterans Drive was constructed specifically to link the preserve to a future 36-acre parcel across the road, one the city has earmarked for mountain-bike and rugged-hiking terrain as part of what would eventually become Flying Creek's more adventurous side. The tunnel exists. The trails on the far side don't, yet.
Mayor Sherry Sullivan has been candid about the scale of what's still coming. At the August 2025 opening she told the crowd the preserve is "more than just a park, it is a long-term investment in our environment and in the health and well-being of our community," and added that what's open today is "only going to get about four or five times better." That's an honest way to frame a phase-one park. It's also a reminder that if you're picturing Flying Creek as a finished, fully looped trail system today, you're picturing Phase 2 or Phase 3, not what's actually on the ground.
What this means for your weekend right now
If you live in Fairhope and want a car-free Saturday that starts downtown and ends at the water, that route already works and has for years. Park at the deck behind the Hampton Inn on Section Street, walk or bike the Eastern Shore Trail to the pier, cast a line off the end (a valid Alabama saltwater fishing license is all you need, no admission fee), grab a table at The Blind Tiger, and if you're out early enough on a still summer morning, keep an eye on the water. The pier remains one of the better spots on this stretch of bay to catch a jubilee, the shrimp-and-flounder rush toward shore that shows up a handful of mornings each summer.
Flying Creek, for now, is its own separate trip. The entrance sits on Main Street/Scenic 98 heading toward Montrose, close enough to downtown that it doesn't feel remote, but there isn't yet a dedicated off-road path linking the two systems the way city planning documents eventually promise. Drive over, walk the longleaf pine section, let the kids find the mural in the tunnel, and treat Phase 2 as something to watch for rather than something to expect this year.
And if you're downtown on a Thursday between now and November 12, the fall farmers market is back behind the Fairhope Public Library, closing at 5 p.m. instead of 6 once November arrives. It's a fine bookend to either walk.
None of this is a complaint about the pace of city projects. Fairhope just finished paying for and rebuilding a 130-year-old pier and simultaneously opened a 108-acre preserve that didn't exist five years ago. That's a lot of new ground in one town in under two years. It just isn't one piece of ground yet, and knowing exactly where the seam is, tunnel and all, is the difference between planning a walk that works and one that ends in the woods.
If you're weighing a move to this part of the Eastern Shore and want to know which streets actually put you within walking distance of the pier, the trail, or the preserve, Bo Nichols works this corridor closely enough to walk you through it block by block. Reach out to book a consultation or request a home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
