If you ride or walk the W&OD through Potomac Falls, you probably noticed the new fork near Sterling Boulevard sometime in August. A stretch of pavement that used to carry you straight across the road at grade now peels off onto a connector path before it lets you back onto the original trail. No one posted a farewell notice for the old crossing. It just quietly stopped being the route.
That detour, which took effect on August 10, 2026, is not a temporary inconvenience that clears up once a work crew finishes a punch list. It is the opening move in a project that started with a groundbreaking ceremony on April 20, 2026, and will not wrap until spring 2028. Understanding why the county is spending nearly two years and $13.3 million to fix one crossing tells you more about how Potomac Falls actually uses this trail than any trail map does.
Why One Intersection Gets a $13.3 Million Fix
The Sterling Boulevard crossing carries about 2,000 trail users a day, according to Loudoun County's own project materials. That is not a rounding error. It is a four-lane road bisecting one of the busiest segments of a 45-mile trail that runs from Shirlington to Purcellville, the kind of volume that turns a simple road crossing into the single most dangerous few seconds of an otherwise car-free ride.
The fix is a dedicated pedestrian and bicycle bridge that will let trail traffic pass over Sterling Boulevard instead of through it, eliminating the at-grade crossing entirely. The Board of Supervisors approved the project back in October 2022. It took roughly three and a half years to move from approval to shovels in the ground, a timeline worth knowing if you have ever wondered why a funded, popular project can still feel like it is taking forever. Design coordination between NOVA Parks, VDOT, and multiple utility owners is its own kind of traffic jam, one that happens well before anyone sees a bulldozer.
The money comes from a mix of general obligation bonds, local tax funding, and cash proffers from developers, which means the households and businesses that have grown up around Cascades and Potomac Falls over the past two decades are, in a real sense, paying for the fix that their own trail volume made necessary.
Here is how the timeline actually breaks down:
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Board of Supervisors approves the overpass | October 2022 |
| Construction groundbreaking | April 20, 2026 |
| New connector trail diverts traffic around Sterling Blvd | August 10, 2026 |
| Construction completion (planned) | Spring 2028 |
The practical takeaway is that this detour is not a two-week nuisance. It is closer to an eighteen-month feature of your commute, ride, or evening walk. The trail stays open and accessible the entire time, per NOVA Parks and county notices, but expect lane shifts, flagging, and more construction traffic on Sterling Boulevard itself as the bridge goes up around you.
The Other End of the Trip Is Also Mid-Rebuild
If your usual loop ends at Algonkian Regional Park, the timing gets more interesting. The same month the trail detour went live, NOVA Parks announced that Volcano Island Waterpark, the water feature inside Algonkian that has cooled off Potomac Falls summers for years, begins its own construction this September.
The current park includes a 230-foot open slide, a 170-foot slide that runs in total darkness, a main pool with a tree stump slide feature, and an eighteen-hole mini golf course next door. What is coming next is a full replacement of the park's centerpiece water-play attraction: more than fifteen interactive features including water cannons and spray stations, built around a tiki and Easter Island theme, with the play pool redesigned to a shallower ten-inch depth aimed at younger kids. NOVA Parks has set an opening date of summer 2027 for the new feature.
That means Potomac Falls residents are looking at two of their most-used recreational fixtures under construction on overlapping but distinct timelines. The trail crossing clears in spring 2028. The waterpark's new centerpiece opens a full year earlier, in summer 2027. If you are the kind of household that treats an Algonkian afternoon as one continuous trip, bike over on the trail, spend the day at the water park, bike home, this fall and next are the one stretch where both halves of that routine are actively being rebuilt at the same time.
One practical note for anyone with small kids already circling next summer on the calendar: NOVA Parks is currently selling 2027 annual waterpark passes with the remainder of the 2026 season included at no extra cost, a detail worth knowing if you were planning to buy a pass anyway.
What Isn't Changing
None of this touches most of what makes Algonkian and the W&OD what they are. Worth keeping in mind while the construction signs are up:
- The W&OD Trail remains open along its full 45-mile route, five a.m. to nine p.m., every day of the year.
- Algonkian's 18-hole golf course along the Potomac keeps operating on its normal schedule.
- The park's boat launch, riverfront cottages, and the Ira Gabrielson horse trail are untouched by either project.
- The Woodlands event facility continues booking weddings and gatherings as it always has.
The park is not being rebuilt. Two specific, aging pieces of infrastructure inside and adjacent to it are, and both happen to be reaching completion within about twelve months of each other.
What This Means for the Next Two Falls
If you are mapping out fall runs, winter dog walks, or next year's pool season, the honest read is this: the Sterling Boulevard detour is now simply the route until spring 2028, not a placeholder for something faster. The waterpark closes for its usual offseason as always, but when it reopens for the 2027 season, the centerpiece feature your kids remember will be gone, replaced by something built for a younger crowd with a much shallower pool.
Neither change is dramatic on its own. Together, they are a reminder that even a neighborhood that feels finished, with its trail and its park long since part of daily life, is still being maintained and rebuilt piece by piece, on schedules set years before most residents notice the first orange sign.
If you want the specifics as they are posted, both the Loudoun County project page for the Sterling Boulevard overpass and NOVA Parks' page for Volcano Island Waterpark post construction updates directly, and Northern Virginia Magazine's coverage of the groundbreaking lays out the funding and cost detail in full.
We write these because we live here too. Great Falls Great Homes has spent years tracking the small civic and infrastructure decisions that shape daily life across Great Falls, McLean, and the wider Northern Virginia suburbs, not because every reader is buying or selling, but because knowing your own neighborhood well enough to explain it is part of the job. If a longer conversation about the area, real estate or otherwise, would be useful, our door is open.
