If you were walking a dog on Granny White Pike near Travelers Ridge Drive in late January, you didn't need a park closure notice to know something had gone wrong. Downed trees and snapped power poles littered the road, and by that Thursday the National Guard had rolled in with chainsaws and heavy equipment to help Nashville Electric Service crews clear it, according to WSMV. That storm didn't stay on the road. It went straight into the woods behind it, into the 2,684 acres of Percy and Edwin Warner Parks that most Forest Hills residents treat less like a city park and more like a backyard.
What happened next is the part most people missed, because it didn't happen all at once. Percy Warner didn't flip from closed to open on a single date. It came back in layers, over roughly ten weeks, and the order those layers came back in says something real about how the park is actually built and maintained, not just how big the storm was.
The Closure Lasted Longer Than the Headlines Made It Feel
Warner Park Nature Center staff put a number on the damage within a week: about 2,700 trees down on or across trails and roads in the park, enough to close the whole system and damage two of the Nature Center's own buildings, the center said on Facebook. By mid-February that estimate had grown. Metro Parks and Recreation told reporters the citywide total had climbed to roughly 6,000 downed or destroyed trees, with about 2,000 of those concentrated in the Warner Parks alone, worked by nine tree crews and 125 employees, per WSMV's February 18 report.
Here's the timeline as it actually unfolded:
- Late January 2026: ice storm hits Middle Tennessee, downs trees and power lines directly on Granny White Pike inside Forest Hills city limits
- February 26: Edwin Warner Park reopens first, with paved trails, roads, and greenways cleared
- March 21: Percy Warner Park reopens, but only its primitive trails, paved trails, bridle trails, and shelters
- Into April: the mountain bike trails and Vaughn's Creek Cross Country Course reopen roughly two to three weeks later, Metro Parks told local media
- Into spring: Burch Reserve, the section of the Warner Parks system north of Highway 100, remains closed the longest, the Nashville Banner reported
Two full months between storm and reopening, then another few weeks before the last pieces came back. If you only half-followed the news, you probably remember "the park reopened in March" and nothing more specific than that. The specifics matter, because they weren't random.
"I rode horses in here, rode my bike in here, hiked in here a ton," said Michael Davie, a board-certified master arborist working the cleanup, describing what the closed park meant to him personally, per NewsChannel5.
Why the Bike Trails Came Back Last
The part worth sitting with is that the hiking trails, bridle paths, and paved roads all reopened together on March 21, while the mountain bike network and the cross country course lagged weeks behind. That's not the order you'd guess if you assumed narrow singletrack in dense woods would be harder to clear than wide paved loops.
The explanation is in how the two trail systems came to exist in the first place. The hiking trails at Percy Warner were built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, and they've been Metro Parks' core infrastructure ever since, maintained by Nature Center staff with the help of seasonal workers and volunteers. The mountain bike trails are a much newer layer. Metro Parks didn't start building that network until 2011, and it did so specifically in partnership with the Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association, whose members still handle much of the trail maintenance and volunteer coordination, according to the city's own mountain biking page.
So the reopening order wasn't a coincidence of terrain. It followed the maintenance structure underneath it. The trails Metro Parks staff have run for ninety years got professional tree crews first. The trails built and sustained through a volunteer partnership took longer to coordinate back into service. If you've ever wondered why Forest Hills' park feels so well-kept for something so large and so wooded, this is the answer in miniature: most of it runs on a mix of city staff and an unusual amount of organized volunteer labor, and a crisis is when that split becomes visible.
What's Actually Underfoot Now
As of this summer, the recovery is functionally finished. AllTrails' own trail notes for the park's forest routes now read that cleanup from the ice storm is complete, with only cosmetic debris remaining, a small but telling sign that the heavy lifting is done and what's left is leaf litter, not hazard trees.
Here's what that looks like trail by trail:
| Trail | Distance | Character | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mossy Ridge Trail (red blaze) | 5.2 miles, 836 ft elevation gain | singletrack through hardwood ridges | fully open |
| Warner Woods Trail (white blaze) | 2.5-mile loop | wooded interior with a view from the Allée Steps | fully open |
| Percy Warner Paved Loop | roughly 11.2 miles | closed to vehicles, popular with walkers and cyclists | fully open |
| Hookman Hill and the SORBA-built MTB network | multiple connected trails | technical singletrack, log-overs, creek crossings | reopened weeks after the main park |
| Burch Reserve | north of Highway 100 | primitive trails | last section to fully reopen |
If your usual route is Mossy Ridge or the paved loop out of the Chickering Road entrance, you're not going to notice much difference from a year ago. If you ride, the mountain bike trails came back with the same features SORBA volunteers built into them originally, including the creek crossing about six-tenths of a mile from the top of Hookman Hill.
The Steeplechase Was the Real Test
Roughly a month after the last sections reopened, Percy Warner hosted its 85th Iroquois Steeplechase on May 9, 2026, drawing more than 30,000 spectators for seven races with a combined $730,000 in purses, headlined by the $250,000 Grade 1 Calvin Houghland Iroquois, according to the event's official race-day page. The event debuted a reimagined Magnolia Garden hospitality space and a new live music stage in Centerfield that same year. None of that happens on a park still working through storm damage. If there was ever a stress test for whether Percy Warner's recovery was real or cosmetic, hosting Nashville's largest single-day outdoor event on schedule was it.
What's Running at the Nature Center Right Now
The park's rhythm this month is the same one it's had for decades, just picking back up where the storm interrupted it. Warner Park Nature Center is running hummingbird migration banding research this month, letting visitors watch the process up close, listed on the city's parks events calendar. The Full Moon Pickin' Party bluegrass series continues at the Equestrian Center, drawing families and dog owners for live music and food trucks under one of the more scenic spots in the park system. Summer naturalist camps organized by Friends of Warner Parks are winding down for the season, with the Last Day of Summer at Nature Play marked on the same parks calendar, a reminder that the nonprofit's volunteer base is part of the reason the trail system exists in its current form at all.
None of this is new to the neighborhood. It's just back, and back is worth noticing after a winter that made you wonder if it would be.
Forest Hills residents don't need a reason to appreciate what's in their own backyard. But if this year taught the neighborhood anything, it's that the park's resilience isn't just about tree cover regrowing. It's about a maintenance model, staff and volunteers working the same ground for different reasons, that held up under about the worst test Middle Tennessee could throw at it.
If you're weighing a move into Forest Hills, or already call it home and are thinking about what's next, Gary Ashton and the team know this neighborhood at ground level, not just on a map. Get Your Home Featured.
