The Carrollton Greenbelt Is Adding Miles. Most Regulars Are Still Missing the Best Part.

If you walk the Greenbelt on any kind of schedule, you probably have a route. Maybe you park at Lakeshore, do the lake loop, and turn around before the trail dips toward the ballfields. Maybe you're a Hays Mill regular who never crosses past the university side. That's normal. The GreenBelt is long enough that most people who use it every week have still only seen a third of it.

Here's what most of those regulars don't know: the loop they think is finished is actually mid-project right now, and one of its most loaded stretches sits about a mile from Adamson Square, hiding in plain sight.

The Trailhead You've Driven Past a Hundred Times

Head west from the square on Alabama Street, past Columbia Drive, and you hit Hobbs Farm Park just before the bridge. It's one of the Greenbelt's official trailheads, and if you've only ever used it to park and walk, you've been skipping most of what's there.

The Hobbs Farm loop itself is short, under a mile, easy enough that AllTrails clocks the average walk around sixteen minutes. But the park around it carries some of the system's best amenities. The disc golf course is regularly ranked among Georgia's top public courses, and it's busy enough that the Carrollton GreenBelt books organized tournaments there. There's a public kayak launch on the Little Tallapoosa River, a gazebo that sits out in the middle of the water, and an outdoor fitness setup called the Hobbs Farm Fit Court, built with a grant from the Atlanta-based Mary Alice and Bennett Brown Foundation. It draws walking groups from the Senior Activities Center and health classes run through Tanner Health System, which means on a weekday morning it's less a quiet trail spur and more a small community gathering point.

None of that shows up if you're just passing through on your way to somewhere else on the loop.

The Roundabout Landing at Your Trailhead

One end of the trail is about to change in a more literal way. Laura's Park, at 480 Hays Mill Road, is one of the GreenBelt's two named endpoints on the main loop mileage, and it sits right at the intersection getting a full redesign.

According to a July 2026 profile in Georgia Trend, a $9.2 million grant, matched by more than $2 million in local funding, is paying for a roundabout at Maple Street and Hays Mill Road, complete with new bike lanes, upgraded signals, better pedestrian crossings, and decorative streetscape lighting. That's not a project happening somewhere abstract across town. It's landing at the doorstep of one of the trail's main access points, the same lot where TrailLink marks the start of the GreenBelt's mileage count.

If you use that entrance regularly, expect some construction noise and shifting traffic patterns before the payoff arrives: a safer, better-lit crossing exactly where cars and cyclists currently have to negotiate an intersection that wasn't built with either in mind.

The Loop Is Quietly Getting Longer

Here's the part that surprised even people who think they follow this stuff closely. For years, the GreenBelt has been described as an 18-mile loop, the largest paved trail system of its kind in Georgia. That's still the number on most maps and trail apps. But the same Georgia Trend piece notes that a recently renewed SPLOST is funding new spurs to the trail, and the system is now referenced in county economic development materials as a 20-mile network.

That two-mile gap between what your GPS app tells you and what the county is now planning around isn't a rounding error. It means new connector paths are already funded and in motion, likely reaching into parts of the city that don't currently have easy trail access. If you've ever wished the loop came closer to your street, this is the mechanism that would make that happen, and it's already paid for, not just proposed.

Lakeshore's Quiet Second Act

If Hobbs Farm is the stretch people skip, Lakeshore Park is the one that changed under everyone's nose. Longtime users know it as a trailhead with parking, restrooms, and a water fountain. What a lot of people missed is that it added a 19-court pickleball complex last year, and it's not sitting empty. It's already hosted multiple tournaments and started offering youth pickleball classes, according to the same Georgia Trend reporting.

That's a real shift in what the trail corridor offers beyond walking and biking. Carroll County Chamber of Commerce President Rhyne Owenby summed up the broader pattern this way:

"We have all the amenities that people want, restaurants, retail, outdoor activities and the GreenBelt with lots of great things for families to do."

The line reads like chamber-of-commerce boilerplate until you match it against what's actually happening on the ground: a funded roundabout at one trailhead, new spurs paid for by SPLOST dollars, a disc golf course good enough to host tournaments, and a pickleball complex that went from zero to multiple tournaments inside a year. That's not marketing copy. That's a trail system still under active construction, both literally and in terms of what people are choosing to build around it.

What This Means for Your Next Walk

None of this requires you to change your routine, but it might be worth breaking it once. If your usual loop skips Hobbs Farm Park, take the detour. Bring a disc if you have one, or just walk past the course and watch a round in progress. If you park at Laura's Park, plan for some construction disruption over the coming months as the Maple Street and Hays Mill Road work gets underway, and expect a noticeably different intersection once it wraps.

The GreenBelt has always been sold as a finished amenity, something Carrollton already has. The more accurate read right now is that it's a project still adding pieces, funded by money that's already been allocated rather than money someone hopes to get. For people who use it every week, that's worth knowing before the detour signs go up.

If you've got questions about a specific part of town near the trail, or you're just curious how a stretch of the GreenBelt affects day-to-day life in a particular neighborhood, Kelly Berry and The Home Team know these streets well enough to talk through it, no pressure, no pitch required.