The Three Notch Trail Gap Near Wildewood Finally Closes This Summer

Walk north from Chancellor's Run Road on the Three Notch Trail and the pavement just stops. No sign says so. You're funneled into the Walmart parking lot, across a couple of access roads that see more traffic than a trail crossing should, and the asphalt picks back up somewhere near the McDonald's with no marker telling you where to go. Anyone who has tried to run this stretch, walk a dog on it, or ride a bike from a Wildewood neighborhood to South Plaza has hit this same dead zone. It has been there for so long that most people who live near it have simply built it into their route without thinking about why it exists.

There's a reason, and it's about to stop mattering.

The trail has had a hole in it for sixteen years

The Three Notch Trail wasn't built as one continuous project. In the California, MD stretch, private developers built pieces of it as they built the shopping centers and neighborhoods around them. The middle section near South Plaza went in around 2005 as part of that shopping center's own construction. A separate piece near Sturbridge Homes went in around 2010. Another chunk, running north from Chancellor's Run Road, was also built around 2010. Each piece served the property it was attached to. None of them were built to connect to each other, which is exactly why a trail user hits a parking lot instead of a trail marker in the middle of the route. One review on the trail-mapping site TrailLink summed up the experience after the pavement vanished near Walmart: the paved ground disappeared "with no warning to trail users on how to connect to the other end."

That gap was never a construction delay in the ordinary sense. It was a missing county-built connector between a set of private, disconnected fragments, and it has sat unfinished since roughly 2010.

The 1.8 miles that stitch it together

That's what Phase IV-B is for. It's a 1.8-mile link running between Chancellor's Run Road and Pegg Road, and unlike the older fragments, the county is building it as one piece, alongside the FDR Boulevard road project. As of the most recent construction update from St. Mary's County, the segment was about 30 percent complete and on track to open by late summer 2026.

That's this summer.

"On track to open in late summer 2026."

The timing depends on FDR Boulevard itself. As of last summer's county construction update, that road project was aimed at wrapping up this past spring, with the trail's connecting work slated to begin in November 2025 once weather allowed. If you've been watching construction near FDR Boulevard for the better part of a year and wondering when it would amount to something you could actually use, this is what it's been building toward. County Recreation and Parks project manager Christina Bishop's office is the point of contact if you want a firsthand status check before you plan a route around it, and the county posts capital project updates at its Recreate/RPCIP page.

What actually changes once it's finished

This isn't an abstract infrastructure milestone. It changes specific things about how people already move through this corner of California, MD.

• A dog walker in a Wildewood neighborhood can get to South Plaza on trail the entire way, instead of cutting through the Walmart lot on foot.
• A bike commuter heading to the office parks near Wildewood Parkway no longer has to merge with cars at the Three Notch Road access points near the Chancellor's Run end.
• A runner training for distance can string together a longer uninterrupted stretch without breaking stride at a curb cut that wasn't designed for foot traffic.
• Families biking to a Saturday event at the Laurel Glen Shopping Center get a way in that doesn't involve crossing the same lanes cars use to enter the lot.

None of these are dramatic changes on their own. Together, they add up to a stretch of California, MD that finally behaves like the rest of the trail instead of like a shortcut through commercial property that happens to have some pavement on it.

The Saturday that already happens at this corner

Even with the gap still open, this stretch of Three Notch Road has built its own rhythm. Every other weekend morning, the parking lot at Laurel Glen Shopping Center, 23415 Three Notch Rd, fills with 50 to 70 cars for SOMD Cars & Coffee. The event started in 2017, founded by D.J. Chainay and Pro Gloss Auto Solutions, and has grown every season since. Some listings call it a Saturday tradition, others log it as Sunday morning, so it's worth checking the group's Facebook page for the current schedule before you head over. Either way, it's become enough of a fixture that the organizers have used it to run community drives, including a 2024 "Stuff the Bus" edition held in partnership with The Green Turtle in California to collect school supplies for St. Mary's County students.

Wildewood Pastry Shop sits at the same address, which makes the corner a natural stop whether you're there for the cars or just walking the trail before the lot fills up. Once IV-B closes the gap, that same stretch stops being a place you drive to and becomes a place you can walk or ride to from a wider radius of neighborhoods, without threading through the same parking lot the car show uses for overflow.

Where the trail goes after this

IV-B isn't the last piece. The next expansion on the books is Phase VII, a 3.3-mile stretch running from Wildewood to a new trailhead near MD 245 in Hollywood. St. Mary's County secured $4.1 million in combined state and federal grants for that segment, and Governor Wes Moore announced an additional $1.2 million for it through the Kim Lamphier Bikeways Network Program. The county gathered public feedback on Phase VII in spring 2025, including an April 3 public meeting on access points and safety features, and Recreation and Parks staff are working with the National Park Service to explore folding the whole route into the Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail system. None of that changes anything about your Saturday yet, but it means the corridor that's about to finally connect near Wildewood is also the one the county keeps choosing to extend.

The gap, plainly

For sixteen years, the broken middle of the Three Notch Trail near Wildewood has been treated as a permanent quirk, the kind of thing you just route around without asking why. It wasn't permanent. It was a specific unbuilt connector between pieces that private developers finished on their own schedules, and the county is now closing it on a schedule of its own, one that lands this summer. Once it does, the walk to the Cars & Coffee lot, the ride to South Plaza, and the loop past Wildewood Pastry Shop stop being three separate errands routed around a gap and start being one continuous stretch of trail.

If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood by the small things that finally get fixed, this is one worth watching this season. And if a summer like this one has you thinking about what else is changing nearby, or you know someone weighing a move into this corner of St. Mary's County, Hammer & Heels Realtor keeps close tabs on exactly this kind of local detail. Reach out to Laura Bernth when you're ready for a conversation grounded in the neighborhood as it actually is, not just the listing photos.