Ask a regular on the Robert McCorkle Trail why McQueen's keeps closing, and you rarely get a shrug. You get an answer, often before you finish asking: it's built on the water, and the water always wins eventually.
That's the short version of what happened again this year. On August 3, 2026, McQueen's Trail closed to the public until further notice while Chatham County crews began a restoration project to repair washouts and erosion left behind by Tropical Storm Debby and Hurricane Helene. The county's announcement tells you the trail is closed. It doesn't tell you why this particular six miles of shell and crushed rock seems to close on a cycle, while a paved loop three miles inland, one plenty of the same walkers and cyclists use without giving it a second thought, has never once needed a press release.
That's the part worth knowing if you treat a trail as part of your week rather than a photo backdrop: McQueen's closures aren't bad luck. They're structural. And the island already built its workaround decades ago without ever calling it one.
A Railroad Bed That Was Never Built to Last This Long
McQueen's Trail runs along the footprint of the old Savannah & Atlantic Railroad, which carried beachgoers from Savannah to Tybee Island starting in 1887. Once Highway 80 opened to cars in 1923, the railroad had no reason to exist, and the bed sat until Chatham County converted it into a walking and biking trail. It parallels the South Channel of the Savannah River almost the entire way, which is exactly why people love it and exactly why it keeps failing.
A trail built on a former rail bed at sea level, running alongside tidal marsh with no buffer from Highway 80's exposure, is going to take on water during spring tides even in a calm year. Add a hurricane and the damage compounds. County crews have rebuilt sections of this trail more than once in the past decade, and each time the fix has been the same basic idea: sink a timber bulkhead, backfill with limestone and rip rap, and hope the next storm respects the new wall. It usually does, for a while.
This year the storms were Debby and Helene, both from the 2024 season, and the damage was severe enough that Chatham County commissioners approved a $1.85 million restoration contract on June 26, 2026, awarded to Savannah-based TIC – The Industrial Company after five contractors submitted bids ranging as high as $2.74 million. The scope includes extending bulkhead shore protection into stretches of the trail that were never armored in the first place, building new retaining walls, and replacing washed-out fill along the trail's western route.
Commissioner Brian Hussey, who represents District 4 and has lived in Chatham County his whole life, put the trail's value in blunt terms when the contract was approved:
"This is how people got to Tybee years ago before there was a road and a bridge."
That's true, and it's also part of the problem. McQueen's was designed to move people to a beach town before cars existed. It was never designed to survive as recreational infrastructure competing with modern tides and modern storms, and the county's repair history reads like proof of that: reopen, hold for a few years, take another hit, repeat.
What's Actually Closed, and For How Long
The closure that began August 3 covers the full trail, from the section near Fort Pulaski Road down to its western end at Bull River. County officials have said the trail will remain closed until further notice while work is underway, and the contract itself runs 240 calendar days, which is roughly eight months. If that clock started when the closure began, it points toward a reopening somewhere around the end of March 2027.
Treat that date as a working guess, not a promise. McQueen's has a well-documented history of missing its own targets. A prior restoration cycle in the early 2020s slipped from a projected summer completion to fall, then to winter, then finally to the following spring, entirely because of the same tidal conditions the new bulkhead is meant to solve. Crews working along open water lose days to high tide that a typical road or sidewalk project never has to account for. Anyone circling a return date on the calendar should circle it in pencil.
The Trail Three Miles Inland That Never Makes the News
While McQueen's rebuilds itself for what feels like the third or fourth time, the Robert McCorkle Bike Trail keeps doing what it's always done, which is nothing newsworthy at all.
McCorkle runs 3.4 miles, starting near Highway 80 and following Johnny Mercer Boulevard before turning onto Walthour Road and then Concord Road, where it passes two of the island's actual gathering points: Abolt-O'Brien Park and the Charlie Brooks Sports Complex. From there it continues down Wilmington Island Road under a stretch of oak canopy before ending near the Savannah Country Club, with a short half-mile spur along Cromwell Road adding a bit more distance for anyone who wants it.
The difference between the two trails isn't just where they go. It's what they're made of and what they were built to do:
- McQueen's is shell and crushed rock, laid on a low-lying rail bed with no restroom facilities or water refill points anywhere along its six miles, according to Chatham County Parks' own trail page.
- McCorkle is paved, runs on sidewalks and residential streets set back from open water, and passes two parks with restroom facilities, giving runners and cyclists a place to actually stop.
- McQueen's connects a fort to a river mouth, a scenic destination in itself. McCorkle connects neighborhoods to a sports complex, a park, and a country club, the kind of stops people are already headed to on a normal Tuesday.
One trail was built to showcase the marsh. The other was built to get people from one part of the island to another. That distinction is the entire reason one keeps ending up in county repair bids and the other doesn't.
Why This Matters Beyond the Detour
None of this means McQueen's isn't worth having back. It's still one of the few places on the island where you can watch container ships move up the South Channel while a dolphin works the same stretch of water, and the county's decision to armor sections that were never previously protected suggests this repair is meant to hold longer than the last one did. That's a reasonable bet worth making.
But if your daily walk, your dog's routine, or your training route depended on McQueen's being open, the fix isn't waiting around for a spring 2027 date that may or may not hold. It's rerouting to McCorkle now, the way plenty of longtime residents already have without treating it as a downgrade. The two trails were never really substitutes for each other. One was recreation. The other was always infrastructure, even if nobody called it that until this summer made the difference obvious.
That's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a trail map or a county press release, but it's the sort of thing you pick up fast once you've lived on Wilmington Island long enough to know which paths hold up and which ones need a little patience every few years.
If you're weighing a move to Wilmington Island, Skidaway Island, or anywhere else along this stretch of coastal Georgia and want the kind of on-the-ground read that only comes from actually living here, The Landings Home Team is happy to talk through what daily life actually looks like in each community. Let's Start a Conversation.
