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The Capital Area Greenbelt is a 20 mile ring of parks and paths around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with spurs to Veterans Park and the Farm Show Complex. It is not a rail trail. It follows the Susquehanna River through Riverfront Park, climbs to Reservoir Park on Allison Hill, and runs beside Spring Creek through the Cameron and Paxtang parkways. Wildwood Park and its lake on Paxton Creek anchor the north side, next to the Harrisburg Area Community College campus. Most of the loop is paved, with crushed stone in the park sections and signed street connections between them. Grades stay gentle, with about 260 feet of climbing over the whole route, most of it on the approach to Reservoir Park.
Capital Area Greenbelt
Your comfort. Prognosticated.
-Cory
In a typical year the Capital Area Greenbelt has about 121 to 164 days of excellent weather for popular activities such as hiking, dog walking, running, e-biking, birding, biking, and walking, with April, May, and October the best months.
Hourly comfort scores for the next 15 days of weather, tuned to your activity and your own thresholds.
Plan your visit to this trail. Get the best windows for a comfortable outing.
Enjoy the Capital Area Greenbelt!
In half of past years, color along the Capital Area Greenbelt peaks October 26 to November 7, typically around November 1. The trail has 29% deciduous coverage, with the majority being chestnut oak, red maple, white oak, yellow-poplar, northern red oak, and black oak.
Mira Lloyd Dock came home from Europe and told Harrisburg in 1900 that the city could be beautiful. At the time roads were unpaved, trash piled up along the river, and sewers ran straight into the Susquehanna. Her speech launched the local City Beautiful movement. The city hired Boston landscape architect Warren Manning, a disciple of Frederick Law Olmsted. Manning drew an 18 mile parkway that would connect the parks and encircle the city. Work began with a carriage road along Parkway Creek, and the city dammed Paxton Creek in 1908 to make Wildwood Lake. The Cameron and Paxtang parkways along Spring Creek were the first pieces built. By the 1920s the project was abandoned and never finished. No railroad ever ran the loop. Less than a mile of the route was once occupied by tracks serving the South Harrisburg steel mill. Shirley Disend started organizing cleanup days on the old parkways in 1985. In 1990 Norman Lacasse secured USDA Forest Service money for a master plan, and the Capital Area Greenbelt Association formed that year to restore the ring. Volunteers built a footbridge in 1991. A steel deck bridge over the Amtrak line went in during 1997 and tied Riverfront Park to the southern parkways. Grants through the 1990s brought the 20 mile loop close to completion. The first Tour de Belt ride ran in 2001 with 100 cyclists. The Parkway Trail System of mountain bike trails opened in 2016.
Parkway Trail SystemWildwood Park trailsWalnut Street Bridge
