"We hear so much about the Beltline. We have the Beltline without all the big buildings." Mayor Steve Tumlin said that on the morning of Friday, September 18, when he and the City Council broke ground on the first phase of the Rottenwood Creek Trail. The ceremony took place at Aviation Sports Complex on Aviation Road. The ground the trail actually opens up runs a short distance east, along Rottenwood Creek and straight through Wildwood Park.
That's the change for anyone who already knows the gravel lot on Barclay Circle. Wildwood has long been somewhere you drive to, walk the loop, and drive home from. Two projects are turning it into a junction. One is already finished, and the other has a construction crew on it. Put together, they make the park the point where the trails on Marietta's east side meet.
Start with what's there today. The City lists Wildwood Park at 1050 Barclay Circle as 28.11 acres beside Life University. It has a one-mile jogging trail and a fenced, mulched off-leash dog area of 1.4 acres.
The park got a big upgrade only a year ago. In October 2025 the City finished an 18-basket disc golf course along with parking-lot work, new fencing at the dog area, benches, a drinking fountain, and a public restroom. The ribbon-cutting was set for October 30, 2025. The money came from two sources: a $500,000 federal Land and Water Conservation Fund grant and $1.1 million from the City's 2009 Parks Bond. The course has done well. On UDisc it holds a 4.3 out of 5 from 1,266 ratings.
So the park the trail is about to pass through has just been rebuilt as a place to stay awhile. That matters for what comes next. A refurbished park makes a good trailhead because it already has the restroom, the water fountain, and the parking a trail user looks for.
The first connection is already open. The Marietta Daily Journal reports that Wildwood Park and A.L. Burruss Nature Park are "once again united" now that a trail through Life University has reopened.
The word "again" carries some history. Eric Black, Marietta's Parks, Recreation and Facilities Director, told the paper that the City acquired both parks through the federal Lands to Parks program. When Burruss was first developed, it was called Wildwood Park Extension. The two parks sit on either side of Life University, next to Dobbins Air Reserve Base. A trail through campus first linked them in 1991, and the agreement between the City and the university ran until 2010. The two sides have now renewed it.
One detail changes how you get to Burruss. As part of the reconnection, the City closed the parking lot at the Burruss entrance. Burruss is now reached through Wildwood. The Wildwood lot already did double duty for the dog park and the disc golf course. Now it serves as the front door for a second park as well.
The numbers back that up. Black said the two parks average about 9,000 visitors a month combined. The round trip from Wildwood to the Green Trail Loop at Burruss is 2.8 miles. Wildwood's own loop is one mile, so the reconnection nearly triples the distance you can cover without moving your car.
"It's a nice place to get out and walk. You can ride bikes here," Black told the Journal. "It's a great place for people to come walk their dog, just get away and unwind."
The second connection is the one under construction. Public Works Director Mark Rice described Phase 1 as a 2.94-mile segment from Alumni Drive on Kennesaw State University's Marietta campus, running east to Franklin Gateway at the Franklin Gateway Sports Complex. Based on the project's GDOT notice and the City's facility listings, here's the route from west to east:
The path will be paved and 10 feet wide, which leaves room for bikes and walkers side by side. Rice put the cost at $16.9 million: $12.3 million from Atlanta Regional Commission grants and $4.6 million from 2016 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax dollars. The Journal gives an estimated completion date of April 2029. From this October, that's about two and a half years of construction along the creek.
The groundbreaking was a while coming. The City first scheduled it for June 4, 2026, then postponed it and moved it to September. City Manager Bill Bruton said the idea for the Rottenwood section began 13 years ago, and the larger goal of linking Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River goes back to 2002. Most of Phase 1 runs through Ward 1. Councilwoman Cheryl Richardson, who represents the ward, called it "a network of trails that connects across the city into other cities all the way to the mountain."
Black also pointed to a link the maps don't show yet. He told the Journal the Rottenwood Creek Trail could connect to the Burruss Nature Trail at Barclay Circle through Life University. "One good thing about this trail, it's literally right across the street," he said. If that happens, the reopened campus path and the new creek trail meet at the same street corner, and that corner is Wildwood's.
The clearest sign that Wildwood is being planned as a junction is in the parking design. A Section 4(f) notice from GDOT and the City, written in 2020 when the project was being reviewed, laid out the plan. The existing gravel lot would be paved and reconfigured. Two new lots would be added, consistent with the City's master plan for Wildwood Park.
The notice spells out the sequence:
Keep in mind that this is a planning document from 2020. It isn't a current construction schedule, and the City hasn't posted a 2026 notice about closures or parking changes at Wildwood. Still, the intent is clear. A park that already parks dog walkers, disc golfers, and now Burruss visitors is being given more pavement and a second access road, because it's expected to park trail users too.
Phase 1 stops at Franklin Gateway. The Journal reports that Phase 2 begins there and heads south and east across I-75, ending at Delk and Bentley roads. There it would tie into the Bob Callan trailhead at Terrell Mill Road. The Georgia Department of Transportation has approved a concept report, and the next step is engineering and design. Our research found no construction date or committed funding for that phase.
Here's why that connection matters. The Bob Callan Trail already runs through Cumberland to the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, with a trailhead at Interstate North Parkway and Cumberland Boulevard and six boardwalk sections. At the other end of the plan is the Mountain to River Trail. It runs 13.5 miles, 3.5 of them in Marietta, from Kennesaw Mountain through the Kennestone area and downtown to Brown Park and the City Cemetery. The City's stated goal for the finished Rottenwood Creek Trail is to connect those two, creating an east-west route between Kennesaw Mountain and the river.
Once that route is complete, Wildwood sits roughly midway along it, with a campus path to Burruss branching off at Barclay Circle. Until then, the park offers what it offered this fall: the one-mile loop, the 18 baskets, the fenced dog area, and a 2.8-mile round trip to Burruss. The Rottenwood construction site will be part of the walk until about April 2029.
If you're curious how a trail being built a few blocks away might shape your corner of east Marietta, or you just want to swap notes on the Burruss loop, The Carlson Orange Team would love to hear from you. We follow these projects because our neighbors use these parks. Talk to Your Real Estate Family.
