Park at the west lot off Otter Creek Road after 9 a.m. on a Saturday this month and you'll likely lose the argument for a spot to someone who got there first. That part of Radnor Lake hasn't changed. What has changed, if you look past the parking lot and toward the ridge on the far side of the dam, is a trail corridor that didn't exist a few years ago and won't finish for a few more. Most of what residents know about this park in 2026 is the ice storm story: trees down, trails closed, volunteers out with rakes, reopened ahead of schedule. That story is over. The one that actually reshapes how Oak Hill uses this park is still being built, tree by tree, on the Brentwood side, and almost nobody talks about it because there's nothing to see yet from the lot everyone already uses.
What the storm actually did, and how fast it undid itself
Early this year, an ice storm brought down enough canopy inside Radnor Lake that park staff described entire sections as unrecognizable. Park Manager Steve Ward told reporters that what started as hundreds of downed trees on the first day had quadrupled by the second, as gusts brought down more of the icy canopy. The park closed indefinitely. Initial estimates put a reopening as far out as May.
It didn't take that long. Friends of Radnor Lake organized six special volunteer days starting February 21, capping each one and asking volunteers to commit to three-hour shifts clearing debris by hand where machinery couldn't reach. Ranger Brandon Jarratt, describing the damage on the Lake Trail, put it simply: the trail was covered with trees. By the second wave of volunteer work, 33 people were clearing the access trail and rehabilitating the South Lake Trail in a single day. On February 27, park officials announced the park would reopen at 1 p.m. that Monday, March 2, sixty days sooner than the original projection.
If you walked the Lake Trail in early spring, you likely walked past the result of that volunteer math without noticing it. The mulch under your feet on stretches of the Access Trail and South Lake Trail came from wheelbarrows pushed by neighbors, not a contractor.
The road that finally stopped being a problem
Before the storm, the park's other ongoing project was Otter Creek Road itself. The stretch running past the lake had been structurally undermined since the 2010 flood, and in 2025 the state closed pedestrian access to the South Lake and South Cove trails while crews rebuilt the roadbed. That project ran from June through October 2025 and added something the old road never had: a wood guardrail along the lake side, which improved wheelchair access alongside the existing automated wheelchair program based at the visitor center. It's easy to miss this as a resident because it reads as one more temporary construction inconvenience that came and went. But it's the reason the road you walk your dog on today handles wheelchairs and strollers more safely than it did two years ago.
The trail nobody's finished yet
Here's the part that doesn't show up in any storm-recovery recap. For more than twenty years, Friends of Radnor Lake has been working with the Harris family and the State of Tennessee on something called the Harris Ridge Trail Project, a slow, land-by-land acquisition effort to build a corridor connecting the existing park to Old Hickory Boulevard and Franklin Road in Brentwood. When finished, it will be a 3.5-mile strenuous trail built to National Trail Standards, complete with a bridge over Lakemont Drive and a new 100-car parking area and trailhead on the Brentwood side.
That parking number is the detail worth sitting with. Right now, Radnor Lake functions with essentially one public vehicle entrance for most visitors, the west lot off Otter Creek Road, which is exactly why it fills before 9 a.m. on any weekend with decent weather. A second, purpose-built 100-car lot on the opposite side of the park doesn't just add convenience for hikers coming from the Brentwood side. It changes the math on crowding for the lot Oak Hill residents already fight over, because a meaningful share of future visitors will simply never touch Otter Creek Road at all.
The project isn't finished, and the timeline is measured in years, not seasons. Volunteer work on Harris Ridge is scheduled to continue through 2026 and 2027, and as of this year the state hasn't added dedicated staff for the new trail, meaning current park rangers are absorbing the planning work on top of everything else they manage. Friends of Radnor Lake has been explicit that this is a decades-long partnership, having spent from 2011 to 2017 alone acquiring 89 acres toward the corridor. If you've lived near this park for a while, the pace probably feels familiar. If you moved to Oak Hill more recently, it's worth knowing that the empty ridge east of the Lake Trail isn't empty by accident. It's mid-acquisition.
What's actually open and running this month
A few operational details matter more in August than they will by winter:
- Ranger-led canoe floats run during the summer months only and require advance registration through the Tennessee State Parks events calendar. If you've been meaning to get out on the water this season, the window is closing, not opening.
- The Barbara J. Mapp Aviary Education Center, home to seven non-releasable birds of prey, is open to the public Wednesdays and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
- Monthly volunteer days pause after this fall. Friends of Radnor Lake doesn't hold them in October, November, or December, so if working on the Harris Ridge Trail or general trail maintenance is on your list for 2026, September is close to the last call before the spring restart.
- Dogs, joggers, and bikes are still restricted to Otter Creek Road and the gravel dam road. Every other trail, including the Lake Trail and South Cove Trail, remains foot traffic only, a rule tied to the park's Class II Natural Area designation, which prioritizes passive recreation over exercise use.
Why this matters more to Oak Hill than to anyone else
Radnor Lake drew over two million visitors in 2024 alone, most of them day-trippers from across greater Nashville. For Oak Hill residents, it's not a destination. It's the thing at the bottom of the street. That proximity means the park's operational rhythms, when the aviary is staffed, when volunteer season pauses, when a new entrance is quietly being carved out of the ridge, actually affect daily life here in a way they don't for someone driving in from Green Hills or downtown.
The ice storm gave the park a dramatic, finite story with a clean ending: closed, cleared, reopened, done. The Harris Ridge Trail Project doesn't have that shape. It's the kind of change that arrives one acquired acre and one volunteer weekend at a time, and the people most likely to notice it happening are the ones who walk past the same trailhead often enough to see the ridge look slightly different from one season to the next.
"That's why people love Radnor Lake," Ward said after the storm, describing how everyone in the park community has a favorite stretch of trail. The corollary is just as true. The people who'll notice when a second favorite stretch opens on the Brentwood side are the ones paying attention now, before there's anything to see.
If you want to help write the next chapter of that trail, Friends of Radnor Lake takes volunteer registrations for its remaining 2026 dates, and the current canoe float and program schedule is listed through the Tennessee State Parks events calendar.
Oak Hill's relationship to this park has never been about scenery alone. It's about knowing which gate to use, which weekend to skip, and which slow-moving project is about to change the answer to both. If you're new to the neighborhood and want more of that kind of ground-level detail, whether it's about Radnor Lake or anything else that makes Oak Hill work the way it does, Michael Morris West is always glad to talk it through.
