The Trail Named for Your Ridge Isn't Finished Yet. Here's the One That Already Is.

Step out the gate at Bear Mor Ridge on a summer morning and the Highlands Plateau Greenway map makes a promise: a trail called Big Bear Pen, running right past your own ridge, connecting you on foot to the rest of town. Follow the signage far enough and you'll find sawhorses instead of a finished path. The Greenway's own trail page is blunt about it: "Currently under construction, Big Bear Pen Trail passes through Rhododendron Park with a panoramic view of the mountains surrounding Highlands." The connector is real, it has a route on paper, and it's not done.

That's not a complaint. It's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're actually walking these trails instead of reading a brochure about them. And it changes the practical question for anyone living on Big Bear Pen: if the trail with your neighborhood's name on it isn't finished, what walk out of Bear Mor Ridge actually works right now, today, in August 2026?

The answer runs through two names that predate your gate by a century and a lake that most visitors never find on their own.

What the Greenway Actually Connects

The Highlands Plateau Greenway didn't start as one trail. It started as a scattered set of paths that a nonprofit began stitching together in 2008. The organization describes its own growth plainly: "Since its incorporation in 2008, the Greenway has doubled from five to ten miles of trails from Sunset Rock to Big Bear Pen, to the Botanical Garden and the Bowery Road, to the Rec Park, Oak Street Lane, and Mirror Lake, and to Oak Street." Two years later, the whole network earned a formal distinction: the Highlands Plateau Greenway was designated a National Recreation Trail by the Secretary of the Interior on May 3, 2010.

That history matters for one reason. Big Bear Pen isn't a standalone loop, it's one spoke in a system that was built to link neighborhoods to downtown without a car. The spoke nearest your driveway is still being built out. The spokes on either side of it aren't.

Here's what the near end of the network actually looks like on the ground right now:

The construction gap sits on the segment closest to home. Everything past it is walkable today.

The Loop That Already Works

If Big Bear Pen were finished, it would likely feed into the same corridor that already gets foot traffic from residents on the near side of downtown: the short stretch off Oak Street that the Greenway calls the Mill Creek Trail. A recent visitor's guide from the Highlands Chamber points a first-time hiker to exactly this spot, describing "the Highlands Plateau Greenway trail, specifically the Mill Creek trail off Oak Street," where following the arrows to the bridge leads to "a beautiful creek with a little bench where you can sit and enjoy the sounds of the rushing water." It's a five-minute detour, not a destination hike, and that's precisely why it works as a daily habit rather than a weekend project.

From there the network opens toward Sunset Rock, a granite overlook inside Ravenel Park that AllTrails clocks at a trail "located in Ravenel Park," considered "an easy hike that covers 1.5 mi, with an elevation gain of 236 ft." The Highlands Chamber's own trail notes call it "a popular spot for a short hike with a great view, and just a few hundred yards from downtown Highlands." Locals treat it less as a hike and more as a scheduled appointment with the horizon: pack dinner from a spot on Main Street, walk up before the light goes flat, and watch the sun drop behind Brushy Face Mountain from the rock itself.

The quieter counterpart to Sunset Rock's view is the Lindenwood Lake Loop at the Highlands Biological Station, a route AllTrails lists as "an easy hike that covers 0.6 mi, with an elevation gain of 13 ft," taking "about 0.5–1 hr to complete." The Greenway's own routing notes describe the full version of the walk: start on the Nature Center Trail, cut through the azalea garden by the amphitheater, pick up the Lindenwood Lake Loop along the eastern shore to a boardwalk, then climb the Coker Rhododendron Trail through "an old-growth hemlock-hardwood forest" before returning past a dam with a Chimney Swift tower where "the dam area offers excellent birding opportunities for waterfowl, and spring and fall migrants." None of it requires a car. All of it sits within the same connected system that Big Bear Pen was meant to plug into.

Where the Loop Actually Lands

Follow the Greenway the other direction from Bear Mor Ridge and it lands you at the Rec Park, and the Rec Park has had a real operational change worth knowing about before you plan a Saturday around it. The pool's reservation system is gone. The town's own page states it directly: "The Highlands Pool Complex is a year-round facility and is located on the Recreation Park property, next to the Civic Center. Due to a staffing shortage, access to the pool will now be granted on a first-come, first-served basis. We will not be accepting reservations at this time." Occupancy now tracks lifeguard staffing directly, and the tiers are specific: with two lifeguards on duty, capacity is 20 people, with three it rises to 50, and with four full staffing it reaches 80. Lap swimmers get a hard stop too: out no later than 9:45 a.m. Monday through Friday. If your household treats the pool as a drop-in plan rather than a scheduled block, arriving early in the week still beats a Saturday afternoon gamble.

Pickleball at the same complex runs on a fixed weekly rhythm rather than open play every day. The Chamber's current listing is specific: "visit the Highlands Recreation Center at 600 North Fourth Street and reserve a court. Of course, you can play pickleball there, too – Monday, Wednesday and Thursday." Three days a week, not seven, which matters if you're timing a walk from Bear Mor Ridge around a game rather than a swim.

The Rec Park sits alongside a short list of other town-run spaces worth knowing by name rather than category: the Highlands Dog Park, the Ice Rink, and Harris Lake Park, described by the town as "a small neighborhood park located on a beautiful lake near downtown Highlands, NC." None of them require a membership. All of them sit inside the same walkable radius the Greenway was built to serve.

The Saturday That Doesn't Move

One fixture on the plateau's calendar hasn't shifted in years and won't this season either. The Highlands Farmers Market runs, in the Chamber's words, "most Saturdays April thru October in Kelsey-Hutchinson Park on Pine Street in Highlands," and this year's listings confirm the market is running on its usual clock, with Laurel Magazine's event calendar showing it returning "to Kelsey-Hutchinson Founders Park most Saturdays from 8:00 A.M. to Noon" straight through late summer. It's close enough to Bear Mor Ridge to fold into the same morning as a Greenway walk. Leave early enough and you can hit Sunset Rock before the heat sets in, loop back through Mill Creek, and land on Pine Street with time to spare before the stalls start packing up at noon.

The Point of Knowing the Gap

None of this changes what Bear Mor Ridge is on paper: a gated cluster of homes on Big Bear Pen, close enough to downtown to skip the car most days. What it changes is the assumption that the name on your street guarantees a finished path to everything else. It doesn't, not yet. What it does guarantee is a system built over eighteen years by a nonprofit that keeps extending it, one spoke at a time, and a set of routes on either side of your unfinished connector that already work exactly as intended.

Walk the loop that exists. The one that carries your name will catch up.

If you're weighing a move to Bear Mor Ridge or anywhere else on the plateau and want a read on how a neighborhood actually lives day to day, not just what the listing says, the Michaud Rauers Group team knows these trails, these parks, and these Saturday mornings from the inside. Schedule a Complimentary Luxury Listing Consultation and let's talk about what the plateau actually offers before you decide where on it to land.