Walk out your door in Palisades Park and you have a choice, whether you've thought about it that way or not. Head south and the Custis Trail carries you down toward Rosslyn, the Metro, and the restaurants and bars along the corridor. Head north and you're inside Fort Bennett Park within a couple of minutes, standing on an unpaved trail that most of Arlington has never heard of, let alone visited.
Almost everyone in this townhome community, tucked onto its cul-de-sacs between Lee Highway and the George Washington Parkway since the mid-1990s, defaults south. That's not a guess. It's geography and gravity: the Metro is south, the jazz festival is south, the restaurants that fill up on a Friday night are south. But the community's own HOA describes itself as bounded on three sides by parkland, and the north side gets a fraction of the foot traffic the south side does. That's the actual story here. The quiet half of the neighborhood is sitting right there, and most people default past it without ever walking in.
The boundary nobody put on a map
Fort Bennett Park is the kind of place you'd miss if you weren't looking for it. There's no visitor center, no parking lot, no branded trailhead sign the way Potomac Overlook or the big regional parks have. Arlington County's own park page describes it in a single, almost offhand sentence: it invites you to come enjoy
the nature trail situated in 11 acres of open space with an historic covered spring house
That's it. Eleven acres, an unpaved brick-and-dirt trail, and a spring house that predates most of the housing around it. Dogs are welcome on leash, the shade is heavy, and the county's own trail description lists walking, hiking, running, and dog walking as the expected uses, nothing more elaborate than that. It's a genuinely small park, easy to underestimate, which is probably exactly why it stays quiet. A trail with no marked entrance and no name recognition doesn't show up on most people's mental map of the neighborhood, even when it's the closest green space they have.
For a townhome community where Palisades Park's own overview literally describes the land bounded to the north by "Fort Bennett Park and the Potomac river," that undersells how close this is. It isn't a destination you drive to. It's a park you're already living against.
The other boundary, and where it actually pulls you
The Custis Trail runs the opposite direction, and it's a completely different kind of infrastructure. Built by the Virginia Department of Transportation between 1977 and 1982 as part of the I-66 corridor project, at a cost of roughly $2.5 million, it's a paved, 4.5-mile shared-use path that climbs from Rosslyn up through Ballston, reaching its highest point at 299 feet in elevation before descending toward the W&OD Trail at Bon Air Park. It's popular, it's hilly, and unlike Fort Bennett Park, everyone knows exactly where it is, because it's the route that gets you to Rosslyn's Metro station, its restaurant rows, and its public gathering spaces.
That pull is real this week specifically. The Rosslyn Jazz Fest returns to Gateway Park this Saturday, September 12, for its 34th year, with headliner Plena Libre and a lineup drawing what organizers describe as registration running 10 percent ahead of the same point last year. It's Arlington's largest free outdoor music festival, and if you live in Palisades Park, it's an easy walk down the Custis Trail corridor toward Rosslyn. That's the version of "outside" this neighborhood defaults to on a weekend: crowds, music, food trucks, a destination with a name everyone recognizes.
None of that is wrong. It's just one direction. The mistake is treating it as the only one.
Two very different half-mile radiuses
| Fort Bennett Park / Palisades Trail | Custis Trail | |
|---|---|---|
| Surface | Unpaved, brick and dirt | Paved asphalt |
| Distance from Palisades Park | Borders the community directly | Borders the community directly |
| Typical use | Dog walking, quiet loop, birdwatching | Commuting, road biking, running |
| Signature feature | Historic covered spring house | Connects Rosslyn to the W&OD Trail |
| Crowd level | Low, largely unmarked | High, especially near Rosslyn |
The two trails sit on opposite edges of the same small community, and they serve almost opposite purposes. One is built for volume and connection. The other is built for nothing in particular, which turns out to be its whole appeal.
Two nature centers worth the bike ride, if you want more than a loop
If eleven acres isn't enough some weekend, there are two real destinations within easy biking distance, both a step up in scale from Fort Bennett Park and both underused by people who assume North Arlington's nature options start and end at the Custis Trail.
Potomac Overlook Regional Park, run by NOVA Parks off North Marcey Road, covers roughly 70 acres of woodland, trails, and demonstration gardens, centered on the James I. Mayer Center for Environmental Education. The park runs a real calendar of programming, not just static trails: naturalist-led wildlife walks and evening night hikes where visitors log species sightings using the iNaturalist app before the program wraps around a campfire. It's the kind of thing you'd plan a Saturday morning around rather than stumble into.
Gulf Branch Nature Center, a short ride north on Military Road, has the better backstory. The center itself operates out of a 1920s fieldstone-and-quartz bungalow, established in 1966 as the first facility in Arlington County dedicated specifically to conservation. The grounds include a restored 19th-century log cabin, a working blacksmith forge, a pollinator garden, and a vernal pond, and the site carries documented history as a Native American fishing camp, making it the only site in urban Northern Virginia included on the statewide Virginia Indian Heritage Trail. It's a small park with more layered history than its size would suggest, and it's routinely described by visitors as a place they had no idea existed until they stumbled onto it by accident.
Neither of these requires a car, exactly, though both are easier by bike than on foot from Palisades Park. What they offer that Fort Bennett Park doesn't is programming and scale. What Fort Bennett Park offers that they don't is proximity measured in minutes, not miles.
What this actually changes about how you use the neighborhood
None of this is an argument against Rosslyn, the Jazz Fest, or the Custis Trail. That side of the neighborhood earns its popularity honestly. The point is narrower: if your mental map of "what's outside my door" only includes the direction that leads toward Metro and restaurants, you're missing half of what Palisades Park actually backs up against. The quieter half doesn't advertise itself. It doesn't have a festival, a nature center building, or a name most people recognize. It has eleven acres, a spring house, and a trail surface that hasn't been paved over to make it easier to find.
If you've lived here a while and have never walked north instead of south, that's worth testing on an ordinary Tuesday, not a festival weekend. The neighborhood you think you know might have a second half you've been walking past.
If you're weighing what it's actually like to live day to day in this pocket of North Arlington, Rick Shewell knows this stretch of Palisades Park and Rosslyn block by block, from the trail behind Fort Bennett Park to the townhome layouts that back up to it. Reach out anytime you want a resident's read on the neighborhood, no matter what stage of the process you're at.
