The Blue Line Reopens in October. The Boardwalk Next to It Might Not.

Is Conestee open right now?

Ask five regulars at the Mauldin Road lot and you'll get five different answers, and none of them are entirely wrong. The preserve has three separate things broken or half-fixed at once, and they run on three separate clocks. Confuse them and you either skip a trail that's been open for a year or show up expecting a detour that was never coming.

Here's the version that actually matches what's on the ground this September.

Three Problems, Three Different Timelines

The habit at Conestee Nature Preserve is to talk about "the closure" as one thing, usually shorthand for anything involving the word ReWa or the words Blue Line. That flattens three unrelated stories into one rumor.

Two of these trace back to the same storm. One has nothing to do with the storm at all. Only one of them has a public deadline you can actually plan around.

The Boardwalk That Beat the Storm

Helene tore through the Upstate on September 27, 2024, and at Conestee it took out the West Bay boardwalk, the roughly 1,000-foot span that connects the main trail system to the lake and wetlands at the center of the preserve. Executive director Erin Knight has described it as the preserve's most popular feature and the thing that made the rest of the trail network make sense.

Rebuilding it wasn't simple. The wetland's soft soil didn't hold a standard boardwalk design, so engineers at S&ME worked out a different approach. Funding came through Fluor's Golf for Greenville fundraiser, which has generated more than $9 million for Upstate nonprofits since it launched in 1989. When the new boardwalk reopened last fall, a group of students from Lead Academy became the first visitors to walk across it.

That fix is done. It's been open for a year now. If someone tells you the West Bay boardwalk is still out, they're working from an old post.

The One Nobody's Given a Date

What's still out, and has been for a while, is a different piece of infrastructure entirely: the boardwalk connecting the Swamp Rabbit Trail on Conestee's Brushy Creek tract to the segment near ReWa. The preserve's own trip-planning page lists it as closed with no target date attached, and trail reports on AllTrails describe the Dark Blue route on Brushy Creek, along with the Red route and sections of Yellow and Green, as still roped off.

That's not a new problem caused by construction equipment. It's the tail end of the same 2024 storm damage, just the piece that's taking longer. The preserve's Helene recovery page notes that a two-story observation deck with a short boardwalk is the last major piece of storm infrastructure left to rebuild, which tells you the list is nearly finished but not quite. If you're headed for the Brushy Creek trailhead off Churchill Circle expecting the full loop, check the preserve's mobile trail guide first. Nearly two years out, this is the piece of Helene that's still working itself out.

What the City Actually Closed

The other closure, the one people usually mean when they mention "the ReWa thing," is unrelated to any of that. The City of Greenville announced on May 8, 2026, that a section of the Prisma Health Swamp Rabbit Trail Blue Line, running from the Parkins Mill Road trailhead south to ReWa's Innovation Campus off Mauldin Road, would close until October. The Parkins Mill Road parking lot closed with it, and the city isn't providing a detour. This is construction fencing around an active job site, not storm debris.

The job is ReWa's Conestee Pump Station project, a $37.5 million build that includes a new pump station and force main, partly funded by a $10 million grant from the South Carolina Infrastructure Investment Program. Once finished, the facility will be able to pump up to 15 million gallons of wastewater a day, giving ReWa the flexibility to route flows from the Conestee area to either its Lower Reedy or Mauldin Road treatment facilities depending on demand. ReWa CEO Rebecca West has called it proactive infrastructure work, the kind of investment that pays off during high-flow events rather than after them.

That closure has a stated end date. If ReWa stays on the schedule the city announced in May, the Blue Line reopens sometime this October, which means the stretch that's been off-limits all summer should be walkable again within a matter of weeks, not months.

The Trail That Showed Up While Nobody Was Looking

While one section of the Blue Line was getting fenced off, ReWa quietly added something new nearby. In 2025, the utility opened the Clean Water Connector Loop, a spur trail that runs across part of its own Mauldin Road Water Resource Recovery Facility grounds. The standout feature is a 2,200-square-foot mural, titled "For the Love of Water," painted directly on one of the plant's filter tanks and depicting herons, salamanders, and other wildlife found along the Reedy River. The project was the idea of Joel Jones, who retired as ReWa's CEO at the end of April 2025. At the ribbon cutting, Jones put it simply: they wanted people to come onto the utility's own land and see what protecting the river actually looks like up close.

It's an odd kind of amenity, a nature trail through a working wastewater plant, but it's there, and it's open right now.

Planning Around the Fall Calendar

None of the closures should keep anyone from making a plan for the next few weeks. The preserve's Hops and Herons Beer Festival returns Saturday, September 26, from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m., with a dozen local breweries pouring, food trucks on site, and live music from the Angela Easterling Duo. It lands squarely in the window before the Blue Line's targeted October reopening, so plan your route around the current detour rather than the one you're hoping shows up by then.

A few other things worth knowing before you go:

• The Greenville County Bird Club leads a guided walk the third Saturday of every month, with both a short and a long route. Conestee holds a National Audubon designation as an Important Bird Area of Global Significance, and the club has logged more than 220 species here.
• The Nature Playscape is open Tuesday through Sunday.
• Dogs are welcome on paved trails only, leashed, capped at two per person on a leash no longer than six feet. Natural-surface trails are off-limits to dogs except service animals, a rule the preserve enforces to protect the wetland habitat.

Reading the Preserve Like a Local

The mistake is treating Conestee as one system with one status. It's closer to three overlapping repair projects moving at three different speeds: a storm fix that's finished, a storm fix that's almost finished, and a utility project with an actual end date on the calendar. Knowing which is which is the difference between skipping a trail that reopened a year ago and getting turned around by a detour that was never announced.

That kind of local detail, knowing which closure is which and why, is the same instinct that matters when you're sizing up a neighborhood for something bigger than a Saturday hike. If you're weighing a move near Mauldin and want the same level of specificity applied to a home search, Andreana Snyder can walk you through it. Schedule a free consultation and get the version of the market that accounts for what's actually happening on the ground, not the version that's a year out of date.