Most days, Nathan Griffin and his wife, Elspeth Haire, clip leashes onto their two retrievers and step out their backdoor toward the woods. Enterprise South Nature Park – a network of trails and forest that runs along the western edge of their Flagstone subdivision in Ooltewah – begins just beyond their property line.
For Nathan and Elspeth, this daily ritual is more than a pleasant habit – it’s the reason they moved to Chattanooga.
When they first visited the area in 2023, people at the park told them the land was federally protected, donated for public recreation “in perpetuity” and could never be developed. That assurance guided their home search. When they found a house that backed directly onto the woods, they bought it.
“It’s our dream house,” Griffin says. “We didn’t know anybody in Chattanooga, but we wanted to be close to nature.”
Griffin wasn’t looking for a political fight. He wasn’t thinking about land use policy, zoning or federal deeds. And he certainly didn’t see himself spending nights poring over engineering reports or addressing county commissioners.
Then the map appeared.
Breaking news
The news broke Oct. 8, when the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported that Hamilton County was pursuing a plan to convert hundreds of acres inside Enterprise South Nature Park for industrial use. Hours later, County Mayor Weston Wamp held a news conference and released a color-coded map outlining the proposed conversion area.
Griffin printed the map and placed it on his kitchen table. Something about it felt wrong.
“It wasn’t oriented north to south, so it didn’t look like Enterprise,” he says. “The shapes didn’t match what I hike every day.”
Still uneasy, he and his wife went on their morning excursion. When they returned home, he sat down with the map again.
“I started tilting it,” he says. “Then I noticed the manner in which the (proposed industrial tract) lined up with the park. It ran up against neighborhoods and across trails. My heart sank. My wife’s heart sank. We couldn’t eat or sleep. We were freaking out.”
He checked online for discussion. There wasn’t much – just a single reddit thread and a change.org petition with 19 signatures.
“We said, ‘We have to do something,’” Griffin recalls. He became signature No. 20; Haire, No. 21.
In that moment, the daily hiker also became something else – an unexpected activist.
Door-to-door advocate
The timing of the news coincided with Enterprise South Nature Park’s annual Halloween Spooky Trail Fest, a two-night family event. Through Reddit, Griffin connected with the person who’d created the petition, Ooltewah resident Melissa Ray.
They met for the first time Friday evening at the festival.
“She’d printed ‘Save Enterprise’ T-shirts and flyers with QR codes linked to the petition,” Griffin says. “We talked to hundreds of people. Almost nobody knew about the proposal.”
The next morning, Griffin grabbed a stack of flyers and began knocking on doors in his neighborhood.
“I spoke with 41 people,” he says. “Ninety percent hadn’t heard the news.”
Where no one answered, he left a flyer in the door.
“I talked a lot of people who have been living in the neighborhood for more than 30 years. I heard over and over, ‘This is the reason we bought our house.’ Their faces dropped.”
Griffin and Ray returned to the festival Saturday evening to repeat the process. By that time, the petition was gaining momentum.
“Those first few days were a blur,” he says. “The past five weeks have been crazy.”
From kitchen table to nonprofit
Within a few days of the initial outreach, Griffin, Haire, Ray and Ray’s partner, Hadrien Turner, began coordinating their efforts. They built a website, launched social media accounts, prepared materials for community meetings and began attending county commission and city council sessions weekly.
“It’s been more than a full-time job for all of us,” Griffin says.
Those efforts formalized into Save Enterprise South Nature Park, the volunteer group the four created to coordinate research, educate residents and advocate for preserving the park.
Nov. 17, the group officially received its 501(c)(3) nonprofit designation. Its petition had just surpassed 10,000 signatures.
The nonprofit structure will allow the group to accept donations for awareness campaigns and to coordinate with environmental partners.
The organization’s mission – laid out in a press release – centers on education, advocacy and stewardship. Volunteers have spent the past month researching legal requirements for land conversions, consulting subject matter experts and preparing public comment resources for residents.
Griffin has also been part of meetings with local officials. He says the group has met with Parks and Recreation Director Matt Folz, Development Services Director Nathan Janeway, Commissioner Steve Highlander and Commissioner David Sharpe. They’ve also hiked with State Representative Greg Vital to show him the area firsthand.
“We’re trying to inform people,” Griffin says. “That’s it.”
Building a new map
Griffin’s background helped shape how he approached the unfolding issue. He holds a degree in economics and an MBA and works as a national accounts manager for the American Red Cross. He’s also participated in trail-building workshops at Enterprise South, giving him insight into the park’s trail network, its terrain and the considerations that go into sustainable recreation planning.
Wanting a clearer picture of the proposal, Griffin built his own detailed map. He pulled up the Hamilton County Tax Assessor’s website, opened the GIS mapping tool and imported the county’s proposed industrial boundary. Then he overlaid Enterprise South’s official trail map, the neighborhood parcels and the park roads.
“I didn’t create anything new,” he says. “I took the county’s boundary and overlaid it with the actual park map and GIS data. Once you do that, the picture becomes clear.”
What emerged contradicted the message from Wamp’s news conference. The area labeled “inactive land” in the county’s presentation wasn’t empty at all; it contained the Storybook Trail, a short loop designed for children, the Sunshine Trail with its small reading library, a section of the Atlas mountain bike system and a network of unofficial but well-used footpaths on the park’s eastern side.
“It ran up against neighborhoods and across trails I walk every day,” Griffin says. “That’s when everything shifted.”
Land worth protecting
As the situation unfolded, Save Enterprise South Nature Park obtained letters Griffin says reveal the underlying motivation for the proposed conversion.
In the months leading up to Wamp’s public announcement in October, state leaders – including Gov. Bill Lee, U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann and state Sen. Bo Watson – along with Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce President Charles Wood and several federal officials, sent letters to the U.S. Interior Department suggesting that the conversion would spur further economic development in the Chattanooga region.
“By enabling continued expansion at Enterprise South, this proposal strengthens a nationally recognized hub for advanced manufacturing and job creation,” reads a Sept. 2 letter from Blackburn to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.
“Enterprise South stands as a proven engine for industrial development and the creation of high wage jobs,” Watson wrote in his Aug. 29 letter.
Griffin says the officials’ apparent lack of transparency with the public frustrated him.
“Any land conversion has to go through (the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation) and the National Park Service, and both require public input. That’s part of the process.”
Undeterred, Griffin began examining Enterprise South’s contributions to the region including its scenery and its measurable economic and environmental value.
A 2022 impact study by the Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association (SORBA) estimated that mountain biking alone brings roughly $7 million a year into the Chattanooga-area economy. Other research he reviewed found that Enterprise South’s forested acreage reduces stormwater runoff and air pollution costs by roughly $3 million annually, providing ecosystem services that would be expensive to replace.
“Enterprise South is not just a forest,” Griffin says. “It’s an economic and quality-of-life engine.”
Griffin also points to University of Tennessee at Chattanooga research showing a net gain of 3,900 young adults moving into the city in recent years, a trend tied in part to outdoor access.
“People aren’t coming here just for jobs,” he says. “They’re coming for a lifestyle. Enterprise South is part of that.”
To Griffin, the data reinforces what his neighbors have been telling him since he began knocking on doors in October: the value of the land is ecological, economic and personal.
Steeped in history
As Griffin immersed himself in the issue, he began piecing together the history of the park.
Enterprise South sits on former Army property once used for ammunition storage. In 2003, the Department of Defense declared the land excess, and the Department of the Interior transferred approximately 2,800 acres to the city of Chattanooga and Hamilton County through the National Park Service’s Federal Lands to Parks program.
The deed requires the land to be used for public recreation “in perpetuity,” with any change subject to approval by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
“It was their land and they gave it to us for free,” Griffin says. “It was a gift.”
The remainder of the former Army site – roughly 3,000 acres – became Enterprise South Industrial Park, now home to Volkswagen and other manufacturers.
For Griffin, the distinction matters. One section was purchased for industrial use. The other was given under a promise of permanent public access.
“That’s why people bought homes here,” he says.
Understanding the proposal
Wamp says the county’s concept is to lift federal protections from 600 acres of Enterprise South Nature Park and apply equivalent protections to McDonald Farm, the 2,027-acre property the county purchased in 2021 for $16 million.
Griffin sees the framing as misleading.
“It’s a false choice,” he says. “They’re pitting two natural areas against each other. McDonald Farm could be preserved without taking protections away from Enterprise South.”
A 2024 consultant analysis found that only about 10-14% of McDonald Farm is flat enough for industrial development and recommended recreation and agriculture as the most viable uses. Griffin notes that McDonald Farm sits 33 miles away in a rural area near the Rhea County line.
Using census data and transportation modeling, he conducted a drive-time accessibility study.
“Within a 20-minute drive, Enterprise touches about 182,000 people,” he says. “For McDonald Farm, it’s around 5,000.”
A growing concern
Another piece of the puzzle came from Croy Engineering’s February 2025 preliminary report on a proposed two-mile extension of Hilltop Drive to Volkswagen Drive.
When Griffin met with Janeway, the development services director explained that the primary purpose of the project is to relieve growing congestion at Exit 11, one of the county’s most heavily traveled interchanges. With a surge in population, significant new development and a large apartment complex under construction nearby, traffic at the exit has intensified substantially.
Janeway noted the county conducted a full study earlier this year, and the findings underscored the need for an additional route to ease pressure on the interchange and improve overall traffic flow.
Croy’s report shows two potential road alignments that would cross the eastern edge of Enterprise South.
“Both alternatives require property acquisition from the park,” Griffin says. “Both have expected impacts to the Atlas bike trail or to streams, wetlands and open waters.”
Croy estimated the road’s cost at $22.5 million. Griffin notes the county anticipates seeking State Infrastructure Fund grants, which require new economic development along the project corridor. That, he says, implies the sale of surrounding land for industrial use.
“Basically, this road can’t happen without the land conversion happening,” he says.
County records show commissioners approved an initial engineering contract for the road in April and expanded it in August with a unanimous vote. The potential impact on Enterprise South was not mentioned publicly before the vote.
What’s at stake
Griffin hears regularly from homeowners worried about property values, air quality and flooding. His own neighborhood has flooded before; he fears that replacing forested hillsides with pavement will worsen runoff.
“Pollution doesn’t stop at a fence line,” he says. “Trees act as a buffer. They help with air pollution, stormwater – everything.”
Wildlife concerns also surface frequently. Recently, Save Enterprise South Nature Park hosted two wildlife biologists who installed trail cameras and conducted drone surveys to document animals moving through the park – coyotes, foxes, raccoons and even a black bear.
And for Griffin, there’s also the broader context: Chattanooga’s designation in 2025 as North America’s first National Park City, a recognition that emphasized outdoor access as a core part of the region’s identity.
What comes next
The county mayor’s office must formally introduce the deed conversion proposal to the Hamilton County Commission. If commissioners vote in favor, the proposal goes to Chattanooga City Council. Only if both bodies approve could a land conversion application be submitted to the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and then to the National Park Service.
The process is multi-layered and could take months. Until then, the future of the park remains uncertain.
Griffin still takes his daily hikes, pausing at the same trailheads he’s walked since moving to Chattanooga. He never expected to step into public debates, he says, and he still doesn’t think of himself as an activist. But the place that drew him to Chattanooga has also tied him to the community around it, stitching him into a landscape he and his wife now consider home.
“We love it here,” he says. “This is home. Enterprise South was placed under public stewardship, and we have a responsibility to protect it. Whatever happens, we’ll stay engaged and do everything we can to keep this land what it was meant to be.”