When will you be able to take the greenway anywhere in the Triangle? To ride your bike, say, from East Raleigh to a Bulls game in downtown Durham or from Cary to hang out on Chapel Hill's Franklin Street on a fall weekend?

That won't happen until the spine of the Triangle's emerging greenway network, the American Tobacco Trail, is completed.

The ATT, to bring the uninitiated up to speed, is a 23-mile rails-to-trails project conceived in the late 1980s by the nonprofit Triangle Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. Following an abandoned rail line, it will run north from near New Hill in western Wake County, through a northeast sliver of Chatham County, then into Durham County, where it ends at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. Currently, 13 miles of the trail are open. The remainder?

Here's a quick update.

Wake County

Sometime in October, says Tony D'Amico, manager of the Wake County portion of the ATT, expect the final mile of Wake's 6.5-mile contribution to the trail to open. Currently, the Wake trail runs from the ATT's southern terminus west of Apex off New Hill-Olive Chapel Road north to White Oak Church Road. The soon-to-open final mile will end at the Chatham County line. The surface of the Wake section is a finely crushed, foot-hoof-and-tire-friendly gravel, and is open to hikers, bicyclists and equestrians.

Chatham County

Chatham County's 4.7-mile stretch of the ATT for a while was viewed as the suspect link in completing the trail. The ATT runs through the northeast corner of the county and is removed from Chatham's population base. As a result, the county was reluctant to chip in money for a project that might benefit only a small portion of its residents.

The project got a boost last year when President Bush signed a $286.4 billion transportation spending bill that earmarked $1.6 million for completion of the American Tobacco Trail in Durham and Chatham counties. A chunk of that will go toward building two bridges on the Chatham portion of the trail. Those bridges -- one 170 feet, the other 160 feet -- will use the footings from original trestles that supported rail traffic until the late 1970s.

The bridges are entering the design phase, according to Bill Bussey, president of Triangle Rails-to-Trails. He's hopeful that the bridges may be constructed by fall 2007.

Once the bridges are done, says Bussey, the Chatham portion of the trail will open. In fact, he says, the trail is already being used by a number of folks, with access at O'Kelly Chapel Road (heading south 1.4 miles to the missing bridge over Panther Creek, and heading north for a mile to the Northeast Creek trestle), and also at New Hope Church Road.

Durham County

The first section of the ATT to open was in Durham, a 3.2-mile stretch dedicated in June 2000. The last section of the ATT to come online may also be in Durham.

Durham has about eight miles of trail open: a 6.5-mile stretch from the ATT's north end at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park south to N.C. 54, and a mile and a half from Massey Chapel Road south of the Chatham line.

Only about a mile is left to build, says Bussey, but it's one contentious mile: the gap between the segment ending at N.C. 54 and that ending just north of Massey Chapel Road. In that gap will be a pedestrian bridge over I-40.

That bridge might be there already had Durham not gotten a look at Raleigh's pedestrian bridge over the I-440 Beltline near the N.C. Museum of Art. When that impressive bridge opened in 2004, Durham decided to re-evaluate its plan for a more utilitarian span. A replacement design has yet to be approved, prompting the TRTC to launch a petition drive encouraging Durham to hustle its buns and come up with a design. Bussey says the petition has about 1,500 signatures.

Get Out! Get Fit! will be keeping a close eye on this one.

So when will those other trails, the ones that will tap into the ATT in Apex, Raleigh, Cary and Durham, be done?

Come back every other week to Get Out! Get Fit! for updates on the Triangle's Greenway and trails systems. And find more fitness and outdoors news at the Get Out! Get Fit! blog: http://blogs.newsobserver.com/joemiller.