The Big Creek Greenway's Closed Stretch Isn't Getting Fixed. It's Getting Rerouted.

Anyone who runs the Forsyth County section of the Big Creek Greenway on a regular basis already knows the orange construction fencing at the Bethelview Trailhead by heart. It's been there since fall 2024, blocking the boardwalk that used to carry the trail from mile marker 8.5 to just south of Kelly Mill Road, and for a while the assumption among regulars was the same one you'd apply to any other pothole or downed limb: county crews would patch it, reopen it, and life would go back to normal within a season or two. That is not what is happening. Forsyth County isn't repairing this stretch of boardwalk. It's replacing the way the trail crosses this part of the creek entirely, and the fix is now tied to a road-widening project that won't be finished for years.

What's Actually Closed

The closed segment sits in the middle of the Greenway's Forsyth County run, which stretches nearly 16 miles from the trail's start near south Forsyth County up to the Sawnee Mountain Preserve Visitor Center on Spot Road. Phase 4, the piece between the Bethelview Trailhead and the point just south of Kelly Mill Road, has been shut down since the county flagged safety concerns with the aging boardwalk structure. That's roughly two miles of the trail's midsection gone, which matters more than it sounds like on paper: it's the stretch that runs through the wettest part of the corridor, the part built on boardwalk instead of poured concrete because the ground beneath it floods.

That distinction is the whole story. The rest of the Greenway, the sections built on concrete through drier ground near Fowler Park and the newer paved miles up toward Sawnee Mountain, isn't part of this project. This is specifically about the boardwalk segments sitting over wetland, and wetland construction behaves differently than a sidewalk. Boards that sit in standing water for sixteen years don't fail the way concrete does. They rot from underneath, unevenly, in ways that aren't always visible from the surface until a board gives.

Why a Patch Job Was Never on the Table

If you used this section of trail before the closure, you probably remember the loose boards and soft spots near the marshy stretches, the kind of thing regular users learn to step around without thinking much of it. That wear was the visible surface of a structural problem the county had been watching for a while, and by fall 2024 it had crossed the line from cosmetic to unsafe.

The county's response wasn't a resurfacing contract. It was a full redesign, procured through a progressive design-build process, which means the contractor and engineering team are working the problem together from the start rather than the county handing over a finished blueprint and asking for a bid. That approach takes longer up front but is built for exactly this kind of problem: a structure that has to perform in wetland conditions for decades, not just look finished on opening day. Forsyth County Parks & Recreation Director Kirk Franz has described the project as an investment in the long-term safety, durability and accessibility of one of the county's most heavily used trail systems, and the pace of the last year reflects that framing. This is being engineered to last, not rushed to reopen.

The Detail Most Regulars Don't Know Yet

Here's the part that changes how you should think about this closure. The Greenway rebuild isn't happening in isolation. It's being coordinated with the Georgia Department of Transportation's widening of SR 9, which includes a new bridge over Big Creek. Once that bridge is in place, the Greenway will be able to pass underneath it instead of crossing the creek and its wetland margin the way the current boardwalk does.

That's a genuine reroute, not a repair. The current path through this section exists because it had to cross the creek somewhere, and the boardwalk was the answer available in the mid-2000s when this phase was first built. The new bridge gives engineers a cleaner option: route the trail under a modern structure instead of over aging wood pilings sitting in the floodplain. It also explains why this has taken longer than anyone hoped. The county isn't just designing a new boardwalk, it's designing sections around a bridge that another agency is still building, plus evaluating newer materials like Perma Trak in place of traditional lumber, plus running the environmental permitting that any construction in a wetland requires. As of the most recent county update this spring, the project was still in design and engineering, with construction schedules to be released once that phase wraps.

The most recent visible activity came in late February, when crews closed the section between Fowler Park and the Bethelview Trailhead for about two weeks to do geotechnical boring, the process of testing soil density and strength to make sure the foundation can support the new helical piers and decking. It's a small, technical step, but it's evidence the project is moving, not stalled.

What This Means If You're Planning a Route This Fall

None of this is bad news for anyone who uses the trail regularly. It just changes what "using the Greenway" means for a while.

• The northern stretch from Sawnee Mountain Preserve down toward the closed section is still open and still one of the more scenic out-and-back options in the county, with the visitor center as a natural start point.
• Fowler Park remains a solid access point for the southern approach, with parking and restrooms, even though the trail dead-ends at the closure rather than connecting through.
• There's no firm reopening date yet. The county has been clear that schedules come after the design phase closes out, so treat any specific month you hear secondhand as a guess until it comes from Forsyth County Parks & Recreation directly.
• If you're used to a single long run or ride that strings the whole Forsyth County trail together, plan on driving between the two open sections rather than expecting a continuous route this fall or winter.

The project is funded through SPLOST IX at a budget of $33 million, which is a meaningful number for a trail improvement and a signal of how seriously the county is treating the wetland engineering problem rather than treating it as routine maintenance.

The Trail Isn't Going Anywhere

It's worth saying plainly: this is a closure with an end point, not a sign the Greenway is being deprioritized. The county has spent close to two decades extending this trail in phases, from the original opening in 2009 through the later push up to Sawnee Mountain Preserve, and the current project reads as the same pattern continuing, just with a harder engineering problem to solve first. For anyone whose weekend routine runs through Fowler Park or starts at the Sawnee Mountain Visitor Center, the practical move right now is simple: use the open sections, watch for county updates before assuming a reopening date, and expect the trail that comes back through Bethelview to look different from the one that closed, because it's being built to cross under a bridge instead of over a wetland.

If you want the same kind of on-the-ground read on what's changing across Forsyth County, from trail projects to what they mean for the neighborhoods around them, that's the kind of local detail Ligas & Co. tracks year-round.