Ask five people in Riverwood Plantation about the nature park off Furys Ferry Road and you'll get five different answers. One will tell you it's closed since the hurricane. Another will insist you're thinking of the waterfall by the locks. A third will shrug and say they haven't been since their kids were in preschool. All three are half right, which is exactly the problem.
Reed Creek Nature Park & Interpretive Center has been running a full calendar of programs well into 2026, but the online information about it is a mess of outdated warnings, mixed-up landmarks, and reviews that never got updated. If you've been skipping it because you read somewhere that the boardwalk was shut down, it's worth sorting out what's actually true before you write off a free, kid-friendly wetland fifteen minutes outside the neighborhood.
Two Places Named Reed Creek, and Only One of Them Is This One
Part of the confusion is the name itself. Reed Creek runs through the area twice in local conversation. There's Reed Creek Falls, a small waterfall inside Savannah Rapids Park near the locks, the spot most people photograph when they think of the Augusta Canal. Then there's Reed Creek Nature Park & Interpretive Center, a separate 14-acre facility on Park Lane, built along the same creek further downstream. They share a name and a body of water. They do not share an address, a parking lot, or a set of trails. If a neighbor told you Reed Creek was closed after Hurricane Helene, there's a decent chance they were talking about storm damage at the canal side, not the nature park most families actually mean when they say they're taking the kids to see the turtles.
The nature park did take damage from Hurricane Helene in 2024. Reviewers who visited afterward described the boardwalk as inaccessible for a stretch, and some of that secondhand frustration is still floating around on review sites that never got refreshed. What's harder to pin down, even now, is whether every foot of that boardwalk is back in full service. Columbia County's own facility page for Reed Creek describes the 0.4-mile boardwalk as a current feature of the park with no closure notice attached. AllTrails, on the other hand, still flagged a partial boardwalk closure as of its last update in June 2026, while noting visitors can still enjoy other sections of the park. Two sources, two different pictures of the same trail. The honest answer is that it's worth a call before you load up the stroller, not because the park is shuttered, but because the boardwalk's exact condition seems to be the one detail nobody has nailed down consistently.
What isn't in dispute is that the park is operating, staffed, and running programs on a regular schedule. That's a meaningfully different situation than "closed indefinitely," which is the impression a lot of people still carry.
What's Actually There Right Now
Reed Creek is a 14-acre park built around a working wetland, and most of what makes it worth the drive doesn't depend on boardwalk conditions at all.
- The Wetland Interpretive Center is free to walk into, any day it's open, and holds live animal exhibits, educational displays, and nature-themed toys for younger kids.
- A wrap-around covered porch lined with rocking chairs looks straight out over the wetland, which is a genuinely pleasant place to sit even if you never set foot on a trail.
- The CSRA Master Gardener's Demonstration Garden and an attached Pollinator Garden sit near the wetland entrance, planted with native species and maintained by local master gardener volunteers.
- Forested trails run along the creek in addition to the boardwalk itself, giving you a walking option even on days the wetland crossing is being watched more closely.
- The center is staffed by Environmental Educators who will lead a guided walk through the park if you ask, not just point you toward a trailhead.
None of this requires you to time a visit around a special event. It's the kind of place you can show up to on a random Tuesday afternoon and still get something out of.
The Program Calendar Columbia County Has Kept Running
The recurring programming is where Reed Creek stops being a pass-through stop and starts being something families build a routine around. A weekly session called Lil Waders: Water Wonders runs every Tuesday from 11 a.m. to noon for preschoolers, and it's still showing up on Columbia County's own events calendar well into 2026, which is a better signal of a program's health than any single review.
Program | When | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|
Lil Waders: Water Wonders | Tuesdays, 11 a.m. to noon | Preschoolers, registration required |
Guided swamp tours | Weekends, call ahead | Families, mud boots and dip nets provided |
Afterschool Nature Club | Weekday afternoons | Homeschooled students |
Great Georgia Pollinator Census | Each August | All ages, statewide University of Georgia event |
Beyond the weekly preschool class, the center has a history of running Water Wizards on Saturdays, a class that teaches kids the basics of meteorology, and an Afterschool Nature Club aimed at homeschooling families who want a standing outdoor session during the week. Weekend visitors have described guided swamp tours where staff hand out dip nets and let kids wade in with mud boots to see what's actually living in the wetland, not just look at it from the boardwalk. In the spring, the center has hosted an annual Chocolate Festival with an illuminated boardwalk walk after dark, a small but memorable detail for anyone who's only ever pictured the park in daylight.
The park also participates each August in the Great Georgia Pollinator Census, a statewide count organized by the University of Georgia where visitors spend fifteen minutes watching a pollinator plant and logging what lands on it. It's the kind of program that only works because a facility like Reed Creek maintains an actual pollinator garden year-round, not just for one week in August.
Trish Hobbs, the park's coordinator, put the appeal of the place plainly in an interview a few years back, and it still holds up as a description of what Reed Creek is trying to be inside a fast-growing part of Columbia County:
"We're the last little patch in this busy Martinez area that's a wildlife habitat and sanctuary."
That's not marketing copy. It's a description of a 14-acre wetland surrounded on all sides by subdivisions and retail, which is exactly the kind of thing that's easy to forget exists until you're standing on the porch listening to it.
Getting There From Riverwood Plantation
Reed Creek sits at 3820 Park Lane, off Furys Ferry Road, a short drive from Riverwood Plantation for anyone heading that direction from Washington Road. It's close enough to fold into an errand run or a Saturday morning without needing to carve out a whole afternoon, which is probably the biggest reason it's worth reconsidering if you've mentally filed it under "closed" or "too far."
Worth Checking Before You Skip It
The honest takeaway here isn't that Reed Creek is fully back to whatever it looked like before 2024, because the sources don't agree cleanly enough to say that with confidence. The takeaway is that the park is staffed, programmed, and open on a regular basis right now, which is a very different situation than the one a lot of secondhand reviews describe. If the boardwalk itself is the draw for your visit, a quick call to the Interpretive Center before you go will settle what an old TripAdvisor post or a stale AllTrails flag can't.
For a deeper look at how Riverwood Plantation's own sidewalks, paths, and green space fit into daily life in the neighborhood, our guide to the neighborhood's parks and everyday conveniences covers what's inside the community itself.
If you're weighing a move to this part of Evans and want someone who actually knows the difference between Reed Creek Falls and Reed Creek Nature Park, not just the median price on a portal, The Fairey Team works this stretch of Columbia County every week. Get a free home marketing plan, sell smarter, and give back while you're at it.
