Henson Creek Trail

I rode the Hensen Creek Trail for the first time despite living nearby for 6 years. The trail runs from Oxon Hill Rd for 5.7 miles to Temple Hill Rd in Prince Georges County, Maryland.

I began by riding 8.75 miles to the trail. After crossing the Wilson Bridge, I rode up a sidepath adjacent to the MGM Casino. Having ridden up the wicked steep Oxon Hill on my non-electric bike and with a tandem partner, riding up via e-bike was a lot of fun. Riding south along Oxon Hill Rd is a contrast of experiences, from a sidepath along four-lane stroad, bike lanes along a two-lane road, a 550’ long southbound only protected bike lane, and underused parking lanes with shared travel lanes. There is a short dashed green bike lane near the trail entrance. 

The trail itself is well-shaded and generally in decent physical shape with just one large root bump. In several places, Henson Creek has eaten away parts of the trail but fortunately, all of those sections had been repaired relatively recently although one repair looked it would be undermined during the next heavy rain storm. 

However at the Tucker Road Community Center, the trail dumps riders into a parking lot with no wayfinding signs to the next section. After consulting Google Maps, I rode along Tucker Rd’s wide bike lanes, turned right into the Tucker Road Athletic Complex and eventually picked up the trail again along a maintenance road. This was a frustrating and easily fixable problem. Tucker Rd was the only grade crossing for the entire 5.8 miles! Other parts of the trail
have Dutch-style mushroom wayfinding markers.

Despite being a warm fall day, I saw only about a dozen people using the trail including just three other cyclists, a sharp contrast to how busy many other trails are in the region. Part of this is due to lack of connectivity. Getting from the Wilson Bridge to the trailhead is 5.3 miles in less than family-friendly conditions. I could have saved 2 miles by going via bike lane-less Kerby Hill Rd and Livingston Rd but those routes seems less than safe. At the northern end, the nearest trails are more than four miles away in Washington, DC. Connecting trails at both ends expands the pool of potential users. 

The other reason I suspect there were few users is because there are just four trail spurs to nearby homes, only one of which was multi-family neighborhood. There are nine multi-family apartment and condo complexes and three single-family home neighborhoods with no direct, convenient connections to the trail. Abutting neighbors are often the most frequent trail users yet Prince Georges County has no plans to connect any of these complexes to the Henson Creek Trail.

Author at the north trailhead 

Fortunately, there are plans to build a 2-mile trail connection between Oxon Hill and the mid-point of Henson Creek Trail near Tucker Road Community Center. The same plan calls for an extension to Branch Ave Metro which has a burgeoning multi-family neighborhood. Hopefully, those plans will make Henson Creek Trail a more accessible option.