What’s Next for the Morgan Falls Trail in Sandy Springs

Walk the boardwalk over Orkin Lake before seven on a weekday morning and you'll likely have it to yourself except for a heron working the shallows and the occasional otter cutting a wake through the mist. That quiet is only about fifteen months old. The city cut the ribbon on this stretch of the Springway Trail on May 2, 2025, and it's easy to assume the project is finished because the section that opened feels complete: paved, lit, benched, landscaped, done.

It isn't done. What opened last year is Segment 2A, a 1.88-mile piece that connects Roswell Road at Cimarron Parkway to Morgan Falls Overlook Park. The full plan calls for a 5.6-mile loop around the park, built in four sections, and 2A is only the first one finished. The real news this year isn't that the trail exists. It's that the city just committed real money to build the next piece, and the rest of the Morgan Falls corridor is filling in around it at the same time.

What You're Actually Walking On

Segment 2A took longer and cost more than planned. Construction broke ground near the Morgan Falls dog park in December 2022 and ran into a problem nobody anticipated: unmapped rock under Orkin Lake, which pushed the timeline into 2025 and helped push the final price tag to $8.5 million, including a $3 million Georgia Outdoor Stewardship Program grant. What you get for that is an eight- to twelve-foot paved multi-use path, retaining walls, pedestrian bridges, and the top-down boardwalk crossing the lake itself.

That's the finished piece. The other three sections, labeled 2C, 2D, and 2E on the city's trail map, don't exist yet, and until recently they weren't fully funded either.

The Segment That's Actually Moving

In February 2026, Sandy Springs City Council approved new agreements with the PATH Foundation to handle design and construction management for the remaining segments, with Segment 2C first in line. It's a roughly 1.6-mile addition, and city staff put the estimated cost at $14.5 million, nearly double what 2A cost for a shorter stretch. The city already had $5 million budgeted toward it and applied for a matching state grant, with final awards expected sometime this summer.

Here's what that money buys. Segment 2C starts at Morgan Falls Overlook Park and follows a tributary of the Chattahoochee through wooded terrain, past rock outcroppings and small waterfalls most residents have never seen because there's no trail there yet, before connecting back toward Roswell Road. When it's finished, the usable loop around Morgan Falls grows from the current 1.8 miles to roughly 3.4 miles, nearly doubling how far you can walk or ride without doubling back on pavement you've already covered.

At the May 2025 ribbon cutting, Mayor Rusty Paul framed the opening as one step in a longer arc rather than a finish line.

"Today, we celebrate not just a finished segment, but progress toward a greater vision."

That framing looks more accurate now than it did then. The Sandy Springs Conservancy, which helped fund 2A's design and secure right-of-way from private landowners, is doing the same legwork for 2C alongside PATH Foundation and the design firm Kaizen Collaborative. As of the Conservancy's June 2026 update, design work is active and the group is still tracking funding for the segments beyond that.

The Rest Of The Corridor Isn't Waiting Either

The trail expansion is the headline, but it's not the only thing changing along this stretch of river.

About 23 acres of forested land along the Chattahoochee in western Sandy Springs, north of the Riverside Swim and Tennis Club at the intersection of Old Riverside and Riverside drives, is becoming Old Riverside Park. The city expects construction to wrap before the end of this year, which means residents who've never had reason to walk that stretch of riverfront will have a new, accessible green space to use by winter.

And on August 15, just two days before this was written, Morgan Falls Overlook Park hosted the inaugural Sandy Springs SUP Showdown, a six-mile out-and-back paddleboard race on Bull Sluice Lake and the Chattahoochee presented by Murph's Surf and the city's Recreation and Parks department, with support from Catalyst Sports for adaptive paddle athletes. A new annual event landing at the same park where the trail work is happening isn't a coincidence. It's a sign the city is actively building this corridor into a destination, not just maintaining a path.

What To Do With All Of This

None of this requires waiting for 2C to open. There's already reason to make the walk part of your week now.

• Saturday mornings: the Sandy Springs Farmers Market runs 8:30 a.m. to noon at City Springs, with local produce, baked goods, and live music, an easy bookend to a trail walk if you time it right.
• Dinner after the walk: Rumi's Kitchen reopened its Sandy Springs flagship on March 6, 2026, after a renovation that started at a planned $3.5 million and nearly tripled before it was done. Chef-owner Ali Mesghali is marking the location's 20th year with a redesigned dining room, a new pastry program led by 2021 Food Network Spring Baking Championship winner Sohrob Esmaili, and a private dining room featuring a floor-to-ceiling mural by artist Dean Barger. Weekend brunch started March 15.
• Late September: the Blue Stone Arts & Music Festival returns for its fourth year on September 25 and 26, a free weekend at City Springs with more than 60 artists and makers alongside live music.

The Part That's Easy To Miss

A trail that opens with a ribbon cutting looks like an ending. What actually happened at Morgan Falls is closer to the opposite. The 1.88 miles that opened in 2025 was the proof of concept, the piece that let the city and the Conservancy show a state grant program and a PATH Foundation partnership that this kind of project works here. Segment 2C, with its larger budget and its route through terrain nobody's built a path through yet, is the part that turns a nice walking trail into an actual loop people plan their Saturdays around. Add a new park a mile downriver, a paddling event that didn't exist last year, and a flagship restaurant reopening at twenty years old, and the corridor around Morgan Falls is being built out on three fronts at once, not one.

If you've lived near this stretch of the Chattahoochee for a while, it's worth walking it again with that in mind. The version you remember from last year isn't the version that's coming.

Sherry Poland has spent years watching how projects like this reshape the way people actually use a neighborhood, not just what it looks like on paper. If you're weighing what a stretch like this means for your own next move in Sandy Springs, or anywhere else in the North Atlanta suburbs, reach out to Sherry Poland for a free consultation or an instant home valuation.