On a typical Saturday morning at the Hawkins Road trailhead, the gravel lot used to fill with the same dozen or so vehicles, most belonging to riders who know Bacon Ridge well enough to pick their loop without checking a map. This September the lot still fills by nine, but more of the plates are from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and states that don't border Maryland at all. Some mornings the overflow spills onto the shoulder.
The reason traces back to a single date. On April 2, 2026, the City of Annapolis announced it had been named a 2026 IMBA Trail Town, a new designation from the International Mountain Bicycling Association that recognizes a small group of U.S. communities for how they build, fund, and maintain trail systems. Annapolis made the inaugural class, one of 28 communities nationwide. The trail network behind that recognition sits almost entirely in Crownsville: Bacon Ridge Natural Area, more than 20 miles of singletrack across 1,100-plus acres of county parkland, linked loosely with the city's 40-acre Waterworks Park to form a combined 39-mile system.
For anyone living along Generals Highway or Bacon Ridge Road, a national label is showing up less as a headline and more as a parking and traffic pattern. Understanding what changed, and what hasn't yet, makes the next few weekends easier to plan around.
What the Designation Actually Recognizes
IMBA doesn't award Trail Town status for acreage alone. The criteria cover trail infrastructure, a reliable funding stream, an active local trail organization, ongoing community engagement, and a documented stewardship plan. Crownsville checks those boxes because of one volunteer group: Mid-Atlantic Off-Road Enthusiasts, known locally as MORE, which built and maintains every mile of Bacon Ridge singletrack in phases over the past several years, along with the skills areas and jump lines at Waterworks. Region-wide, MORE volunteers put in more than 17,000 hours a year stewarding roughly 975 miles of trail across 65 parks between Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Bacon Ridge's 20-plus miles is a small slice of that total, but it's the piece that got singled out for a national list.
Waterworks, by contrast, is a compact 40-acre city park built around a solar array and a set of fishing ponds, with just over 10 miles of trail and a purpose-built jump line called the Helios Advanced Jump Line for riders who want air. It's Bacon Ridge's scale, not Waterworks', that made the combined system large enough to compete nationally.
The Mile and a Half That Decides Where Everyone Parks
The two systems don't actually connect on the ground yet. Bacon Ridge's southern trailhead sits on Hawkins Road. Waterworks' northern trailhead sits on Honeysuckle Lane, about a mile and a half away by road. Riders who want to combine both into one longer outing have to leave the singletrack, ride the connecting road, and pick the trail back up on the other side.
Bacon Ridge and Waterworks together form 39 miles of connected trail. The two trailheads closest to each other are still a mile and a half apart by pavement.
That gap is also where the parking confusion concentrates, because a few access points look like reasonable places to leave a car and aren't.
| Trailhead or access point | Serves | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Hawkins Road | Bacon Ridge, south end | The main lot, fills first on weekend mornings |
| Bacon Ridge Road / Severn Chapel–Forney Road | Bacon Ridge Bike Park, north end | Separate lot for the downhill skills zone, built by Greenstone Trailcraft with funds raised through MORE |
| Housley Road, near 100 Housley Rd | Waterworks, south end | Main public lot on the Waterworks side |
| Generals Highway Corridor Park | Waterworks, north end | Park here and ride in rather than parking on the closer residential roads |
| Honeysuckle Lane | No parking | Too narrow for cars, no shoulder room |
| Gomoljak Lane, off Honeysuckle Lane | No parking | Private road, cars are towed at the owner's expense |
| Defense Highway dam lot | Reserved | Set aside for permit holders using the fenced portion of Waterworks Park |
Riders who've used these trails for years already carry this list in their heads. The ones showing up because of the national write-up mostly don't, which is the part actually changing this fall.
The Same Stretch of Road Is Already Busy for a Different Reason
Trail traffic isn't landing on an empty road. The Anne Arundel County Fair ran at the fairgrounds on Generals Highway from September 18 through 26 this year, with a rodeo, livestock shows, and two new free family shows added for 2026. It wrapped the day before this was written. A short drive up the same road, the Maryland Renaissance Festival runs weekends at Revel Grove from August 29 through October 25, which leaves a full month left on this year's calendar.
Both events sit within a couple of miles of the Bacon Ridge trailheads on the same two-lane corridor. For years, that overlap meant a predictable stretch of festival traffic that residents planned errands around. This fall it's stacking a second, separate wave of weekend visitors onto the same road, arriving for a different reason, parking in different lots, but sharing the same route to get there.
What's Being Built to Close the Gap
The road connection between Hawkins Road and Honeysuckle Lane isn't a permanent arrangement. A new county park, Crownsville Hospital Memorial Park, is in development on the land sitting between the two existing trail systems, and it's intended to eventually link Bacon Ridge and Waterworks into one continuous network rather than two systems joined by a stretch of pavement. No completion timeline has been attached to that connection yet, which means this fall's shoulder-riding and overflow parking is a transition problem rather than a solved one.
For residents who ride regularly, the practical upside of the designation isn't the label itself. It's the funding attention and stewardship focus that tend to follow a national recognition like this one, the kind that eventually turns an awkward road gap into an actual trail. MORE maintains a running update on conditions and access through its Friends of Bacon Ridge & Waterworks group, which is a more reliable source than word of mouth if you're figuring out where to park on an October Saturday with both a festival crowd and a mountain biking crowd converging on the same two miles of Generals Highway.
If Crownsville's trail system is part of what makes this a place worth staying in, Liz Dooner tracks changes like this one as closely as she tracks the market and is glad to talk through what a property near Bacon Ridge or Waterworks is worth this season with a complimentary home valuation.
