Off the Beaten Path: Clopper Lake
I had been meaning to get up to Seneca Creek State Park for a while, and a Tuesday morning with nothing on the calendar finally settled it. Forty minutes up 270, a small day-use fee at the gate, and I was parked near the boat center with the lot almost entirely to myself.
If you have spent any time on the Mount Vernon Trail on a weekend morning, threading between cyclists and stroller brigades and tourists stopped dead in the middle of the path, you will be able to take a breath and relax at Seneca Creek State Park.
The Lake Shore Trail is the starting point. It runs 3.7 miles of dirt and gravel around the 90-acre lake, staying close enough to the water that you rarely lose sight of it. The elevation is minimal, which makes it an easy sell for a recovery day, but the roots and small wooden footbridges ensure that you don’t zone out for too long. I ran it counterclockwise and spent the better part of the first mile watching a great blue heron work the shallows without any concern for my workout. The woods are dense enough that the trail feels remote, and then the path opens onto a field, the light changes, and the whole character of the run shifts for a few hundred yards before the trees close back in.
Where it gets interesting is when you start adding on to the base trail.
The Great Seneca Trail branches off near the park office and follows Great Seneca Creek for 1.2 miles through open fields and back into the trees, marked with orange blazes that are easy to spot even when the foliage is thick. The creek stays audible through most of it, and the footing is rougher than the lake loop, more exposed root and rock, the kind of surface that asks something of you in a way that a groomed gravel path does not. The Long Draught Trail adds another mile of yellow-blazed path along Long Draught Creek, and if you slow down along the water you will see the beaver activity that has clearly been going on there for some time. The wetland at the end is worth the detour even if you are not someone who typically stops to look at things.
Do not skip the Old Pond Trail, which is only a quarter mile but loops through wooded marsh and across a small creek in terrain that feels nothing like the rest of the park.
I finished that day with just under seven miles, but there are plenty of miles of trail to make it an even longer effort. The Seneca Ridge Trail runs 5.8 miles along the south bank of Seneca Creek, connecting to the Schaeffer Farm trail system through woodland that opens up occasionally into long views down the creek valley, and routes past ten miles on natural surface are easy to construct from here without touching pavement. The Seneca Creek Greenway Trail is the serious option, a 16.5-mile corridor that follows the creek floodplains from the Potomac River all the way north to MD-355, and the shade along the floodplain makes it a workable summer long run in a way that most exposed options in the region simply are not. Keep that in mind when August arrives and your usual routes start to feel like punishment.
Fall is the obvious time to be here, when the canopy along the lake loop turns and the parking lot has not yet filled with weekend crowds, and the woods hold the color well into November. Spring brings mud in the low sections near the creeks, concentrated around the Long Draught and Old Pond trails. Summer works well because of the tree cover, and the water access at the main trailheads means you can push the mileage without rationing what is in your bottles.
The park is at 11950 Clopper Road in Gaithersburg, about two miles east of the I-270 interchange. Parking is plentiful near the boat center and the picnic areas, restrooms and water are at the main trailheads, and the day-use fee is small.
Get there on a weekday morning and you will have the trails to yourself. On a weekend you will have more company, though nothing approaching the chaos of the more popular in-town options.
