Shaping The Greenway – Gaining Momentum

From the boardwalks, paved trails and dirt paths already lining its banks, the Wolf River presents itself as a stream of intense contrasts.

Barely 90 miles long, it curls through hardwood forests, spreads out into Okefenokee-like swamps and winds past neighborhoods affluent and poor from Germantown to North Memphis.

Today, more than ever before, momentum is building to establish a greenway, or linear park, all along the Wolf. While trails are already built in areas such as Germantown, new paths for hikers and bikers are being laid out near Collierville and under design in Memphis, where a 22-mile greenway will cost at least $1 million per mile.

In addition, the Wolf River Conservancy, a conservation group that has pursued the greenway goal for more than two decades, is working with partners to acquire acreage all along the river.

All this on a river that once was so polluted and malodorous that Memphis leaders helped get it rerouted away from Downtown.

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