Art Lander’s Outdoors: Shelbyville’s Clear Creek Park Greenway offers natural escape from urban backdrop

Trails through green spaces in urban areas provide a welcome escape, an opportunity to stretch your legs, walk the dog, go for a bike ride, or engage in other active or passive outdoor recreational pursuits.

One such area in central Kentucky is the Clear Creek Park Greenway, in Shelbyville, designated as Heritage Land on the State Nature Preserves website.

Clear Creek Park Greenway (Map from Shelby County Tourism; click for larger image)

The 27-acre Greenway, a thin forest buffer along Clear Creek, is the centerpiece of 130-acre Clear Creek Park, which includes a botanical garden, ball fields, dog park, swimming pool, golf center, fishing lake and amphitheater. The land is owned by the Shelby County Fiscal Court, purchased with assistance from the Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund.

Established in 1990, the Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund (KHLCF) is the primary source of state funding for the purchase and management of natural areas. It is used to purchase land from willing sellers for nature preserves, state parks, state forests, wildlife management areas, environmental education areas, wild rivers and wetlands. The KHLCF Board protects each site in perpetuity with a conservation easement or deed restriction.

The four priorities for land conservation in Kentucky are: habitat for rare and endangered species, wetlands important to migratory birds, areas that perform important natural functions that are subject to alteration or loss through development, and areas to be preserved in their natural state for public use, outdoor recreation and environmental education.

The fund has helped protect and conserve over 94,000 acres of Kentucky’s natural areas on 172 tracts and in 67 counties.

Visit the Kentucky State Nature Preserves website for detailed information.

Greenway Trail

The 3.5-mile Greenway Trail is paved, and divided into three sections, traversing subdivisions, fields and woodlands.

The trail starts at Painted Stone Elementary School (Photo by Art Lander Jr.)

The trail starts at Painted Stone Elementary School, on Warriors Way, off Ky. 53 (LaGrange Road), near its junction with Freedom’s Way. The trailhead is in the parking lot behind the school.

The trail ends at Stratton Park, in downtown Shelbyville, at 2nd Street and Washington Street.

One popular destination is the Brentwood Trail, a side trail that starts in the Lake Shelby tailwaters. There’s a gravel parking lot, and a picnic shelter across Burks Branch Road from the lake. Brentwood Trail heads west, intersects the Greenway Trail, and continues westward to Troon Court, in the Brentwood Subdivision, off Ky. 53.

The Clear Creek Park Greenway offers a diversity of active and passive recreational opportunities, including hiking, bicycling, roller skating, wildlife viewing, bird watching, and provides access to the creek for fishing, canoeing, and kayaking.

Clear Creek is a tributary to Brashear’s Creek, which flows into the Salt River at Taylorsville, in Spencer County.

The riparian forest along Clear Creek includes black willow, box elder, silver maple, sycamore, pin oak, and bur oak. The upland sites are dominated by black walnut, shagbark and bitternut hickory, northern red oak, sugar maple, Ohio buckeye, American basswood, and blue and white ash.

There are a few spring wildflowers that can be found including wood poppy, Dutchman’s breeches, yellow trout lily, squirrel corn, spring beauty, and sessile trillium. River cane is rapidly expanding along the creek. In all, 67 plant species and 133 bird species have been observed in the park.

Clear Creek (Photo by Art Lander Jr.)

For updated information, telephone 502-633-5059, or visit www.shelbycountyparks.com.

Shelbyville is a scenic, historic community founded by Squire Boone (1744-1815), an explorer, long hunter, gunsmith, land surveyor, Revolutionary War soldier and the brother of legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone.

Shelby County honored Squire Boone with a bronze statue in 2018. The statue faces east, and is located where highway US 60 splits into Main and Washington streets, just west of the busy intersection with highway Ky. 55 — Boone Station Road.

On a tract of land along Clear Creek in 1776, Boone carved his name and date on a piece of creek rock, rubbed it with red berries, and called it Painted Stone Station. Three years later he returned to the site and established the settlement, living there until 1786.

When you walk or bike along Clear Creek you are tracing the footsteps of this celebrated Kentuckian.

Art Lander Jr. is outdoors editor for the Northern Kentucky Tribune. He is a native Kentuckian, a graduate of Western Kentucky University and a life-long hunter, angler, gardener and nature enthusiast. He has worked as a newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and author and is a former staff writer for Kentucky Afield Magazine, editor of the annual Kentucky Hunting & Trapping Guide and Kentucky Spring Hunting Guide, and co-writer of the Kentucky Afield Outdoors newspaper column.