If you last checked the state of Crozet's trails sometime last winter, you're working from an outdated map. A new trail exists in a neighborhood that didn't have one in January. An old favorite spent part of the summer buried under downed trees. And the whole network gets stitched together for one weekend in October when a volunteer footrace turns Claudius Crozet Park into the place where all of it, briefly, makes sense as a single system.
None of this is run by the county parks department, though the county's original trails planner helped start it. The Crozet Trails Crew formed in the fall of 2009, founded by Albemarle County trails and greenways planner Dan Mahon and Crozet resident Jessica Mauzy, and it has operated ever since as a volunteer outfit that builds, clears, and reroutes trail by trail, workday by workday. That distinction matters more than it sounds. It means the trail network doesn't get maintained on a government cycle. It gets maintained when enough people show up on a Saturday morning with loppers and work gloves, which is why the map changes at a pace that outruns most residents' mental picture of the place.
The Trail That Needed a Second Life This Summer
The Henley Hornets Trail sits in Beaver Creek Park, an out-and-back route that was originally built by students from Henley Middle School. Its entrance is near the dam, off Browns Gap Turnpike, past the small parking lot above the reservoir. It is one of the older segments in the Crozet trail system, and it has a habit of needing what the Trails Crew itself calls an almost annual spring cleaning after winter storms bring down trees and branches.
This year the damage came from summer storms instead, and it was enough that the Crew scheduled a dedicated workday specifically to clear the trees and restore the tread. If you walked Henley Hornets in July and found it rough going or partly blocked, that wasn't neglect. That was a trail waiting for its next volunteer workday, which is a different thing entirely. A trail that gets rebuilt every year by people who live near it isn't a fixed asset. It's closer to a piece of shared infrastructure that requires the same kind of upkeep a driveway or a fence line does, except the labor is donated and the schedule depends on who's free that Saturday.
The Trail That Didn't Exist Six Months Ago
The newer story is Powell's Creek, a trail the Crozet Trails Crew built from scratch in February 2026 through the Pleasant Green neighborhood off Jarman's Gap Road. Volunteers gathered on Saturday, February 21, with directions that pointed people to 1205 Orchard Drive and told them to park near the Stanley Martin sign, since Pleasant Green is new enough that a builder's sign was still the easiest landmark to give. By March, the Crew was back to dedicate two new bridges on the trail, naming them for the winners of that year's CTC 5K races, a small tradition that turns a piece of trail infrastructure into something with actual names attached to it.
What's worth sitting with here is the sequence. A neighborhood gets built, homes go up, and before most of the interior landscaping has filled in, a trail already threads through it along the creek, built in an afternoon by people who don't live there yet either. That's a different growth pattern than waiting for a developer's amenity package or a county capital project to catch up years later. If you're in Pleasant Green or nearby and haven't walked it, it's a short, quiet route through the woods along the stream, tucked into a corner of the neighborhood that a lot of longtime Crozet residents still don't know exists.
Where the Loops Actually Connect
Beyond Henley Hornets and Powell's Creek, the system includes a handful of other segments that see regular upkeep and are worth knowing if you want to actually walk something this fall rather than wait for a formal event:
- The bog trail in Old Trail, a popular stretch made up of a series of boardwalk sections, gets targeted maintenance work most springs while the grass is still short enough to see what needs repair.
- The Lickinghole Basin trail is reached from the bottom of Fairwinds Lane in Western Ridge, and it's one of the segments that regularly needs branches and overgrowth trimmed back to stay walkable.
- Trail maps for both Henley Hornets and the Old Trail network, including the Creekside and Rowcross trails, are posted on the Crozet Trails Crew site, along with an interactive Google map that shows parking, access points, and bridges across the whole system.
None of these are secret. They're just easy to lose track of if your last mental image of Crozet trails is a few years old, or if you moved into a part of town where the nearest segment wasn't built yet.
The One Weekend a Year the Whole Network Shows Up
The clearest evidence that this is a living system rather than a static amenity shows up once a year, on race day. The Crozet Trails Crew's 5K and 10K Trail Run, plus a Family Fun Run, is scheduled for Saturday, October 24, 2026, starting and finishing at Crozet Park's festival grounds. It is the organization's main fundraiser, and the routes themselves are a tour of the pieces described above.
The 5K and 10K
The 10K loops out to Lickinghole Basin and crosses Lickinghole Creek, a crossing wet enough that participants should expect to get their feet wet, and one the Crew is actively raising money to bridge. The 5K uses the rustic trail east of the park, roots, rocks, and ruts included, and returns to the same finish line. Both distances are course-marked and timed, with awards for the top three men and women overall. First-place finishers get a bridge named after them, which is how a stretch of trail near Powell's Creek ended up with two named crossings this spring.
The Family Fun Run
The shorter, untimed Family Fun Run heads out from Crozet Park past the dog park, on a stretch the organizers describe as eventually connecting through to downtown Crozet. Kids under seven can run for free if they're with a registered participant. It's built for people who want to be part of the day without training for a 10K through creek crossings.
After the race, the post-race trails festival takes over the park's pavilion area: a made-from-scratch pancake breakfast sponsored by Great Valu and Yellow Mug Coffee, live music from Susie and the Pistols on the park's new stage, and Starr Hill beer on tap. Packet pickup happens the Thursday before the race at the Starr Hill taproom in Crozet, and again race morning at the park pavilion. Every proceeds dollar goes back to the Trails Crew, which means the same volunteers clearing Henley Hornets in August are the ones the entry fee supports in October.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
The trail network around Crozet isn't a fixed inventory you can look up once and consider settled. It's shaped, season to season, by a small volunteer group that builds new segments faster than most people update their mental map, and that rebuilds old ones on a rhythm dictated by weather rather than budget cycles. If you haven't walked something new in the last six months, there's a decent chance something new exists. Powell's Creek is proof of that this year, and Henley Hornets is proof that even the established trails need the same kind of ongoing attention.
If you want to see it firsthand before the October race turns the whole network into a single event, the Crozet Trails Crew's site has current maps and workday listings, and showing up with gloves is still how most of this gets built.
Whenever the conversation turns from a good walk to what a home near one of these trails might be worth, that's a conversation Sherry Millard has been having with Crozet families for a long time. Reach out when you're ready to talk about it.
