The Gerry Connolly Cross County Trail is a 40.5-mile hiking trail in

Fairfax County, Virginia Fairfax County, officially the County of Fairfax, is a county in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is part of Northern Virginia and borders both the city of Alexandria and Arlington County and forms part of the suburban ring of Washington, D.C. ...

that traverses the entire length of the county in an arc that begins and ends at different points near the

Potomac River The Potomac River () drains the Mid-Atlantic United States, flowing from the Potomac Highlands into Chesapeake Bay. It is long,U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map. Retrieved Augus ...

. The northern portion of the trail follows Difficult Run, while the southern half largely follows

Accotink Creek Accotink Creek is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map, accessed August 15, 2011 tributary stream of the Potomac River in Fairfax County, Virginia, in the United States. At Springfiel ...

and

Pohick Creek Pohick Creek is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed August 15, 2011 tributary stream of the Potomac River in Fairfax County in the U.S. state of Virginia. It takes its nam ...

. The concept for the trail was spearheaded in the late 1990s by hiking enthusiast Bill Niedringhaus, who noticed a nearly continuous stretch of publicly owned land across the county.

Gerry Connolly Gerald Edward Connolly (born March 30, 1950) is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for Virginia's 11th congressional district, first elected in 2008. The district is anchored in Fairfax County, an affluent suburban count ...

, then Chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, supported the effort and introduced a resolution to create the trail in 1998. The construction of the trail in the early 2000s was the largest construction project in the Fairfax County Park Authority's history. In 2014, it was named after Connolly.

References

{{Trail-stub Hiking trails in Virginia Fairfax County, Virginia