This trip log may contain an afffiliate text link. If one clicks/taps on this link and then makes a purchase, I sometimes receive a small commission. Please patronize our advertisers. This roughly 3.3 mile hike occurred on Friday, April 5, 2024. Participants were Tim Schmitt and me.
I showed up at the parking area at the end of Reservoir RD around 9:05 AM. This parking area is around the 9:00 position on this reservoir. Be advised that if you stage a vehicle here, half of this road between Evergreen Mills RD and Beaverdam Reservoir is paved, the other half is a narrow gravel/dirt RD with many twists, turns and downed branches. Use caution. The GPS coordinates for this place is:
39.015191, -77.542544
I had time to look around for awhile and just chill. The ground was very muddy. This would be the theme for this trip. Tim showed up a bit before 10:00 AM. We shuttled his vehicle over to the Mt. Hope RD parking area. It was at the 3:00 position on this reservoir. The GPS coordinates for this parking area are:
39.010732, -77.533576
We then started a counterclockwise hike back to my vehicle. The weather was cool and breezy, temps in the high 40’s when we started and would climb to the low 60’s when we finished. There was a lot of mud on this trail. I have to wonder if it ever dries up. The trail was fairly level at this point so we made decent time. There were numerous streams that fed into the north side of this reservoir.
During the hike Tim and I talked about all sorts of things. Mostly about our days of hiking and doing trail work along the Mason-Dixon Trail. Certain parts of this trail reminded us of the M-DT. Around the 12:00 position on this reservoir we noticed that he trail started to ascend. This was probably around the 2 mile mark. We could see the dam off in the distance. We then came to what looked like the perimeter road around the reservoir, we then turned left.
Camp in Comfort with LITO: Luxury in the OutdoorsHere’s where it started getting complicated. We turned left onto the perimeter road/trail and followed it for about .2 miles. Then we came to an intersection. We were now on the discharge side of the dam. There were no blazes at this intersection. What do we do? The Hiking Upward trail description said to turn left and ascend a grassy hill when the service road turned right.
This is what we started to do. However, when we got even with the dam itself (which looked pretty cool) we saw a blue blazed trail going off to the right. We took it and walked about 300 feet and then I said that something wasn’t right. So I looked at the Alltrails map and it showed that we were off the trail and walking along Goose Creek.
So we retraced our steps, ascended the grassy hill like we originally intended and then got back on the perimeter road/trail. I checked Alltrails again and the blue dot was right on the green line. If you do this hike, please ignore the blue blazed trail to the right when you are directly across from the dam discharge side.
Once we got to the top of the grassy hill we took a short break, then hiked the final .2 miles back to my vehicle. We got done around 12:30 PM. I then shuttled Tim around to his vehicle. We said our goodbyes, then I went home.
The reason that we only did the northern half of this trail was because an area of the southern portion of this trail between the 6:00 and 8:00 position is closed becuse of the construction of the new Reservoir Park by NOVA Parks. It should be open sometime this summer. We’ll return then to do the southern portion of this loop trail. It was great to get outside and hike after being cooped up in the house the last few weeks due to rain.
Mike C
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