Hiking Laurel Trail at Cacapon State Park

My wife and I hiked the Laurel Trail at Cacapon State Park on an early fall day. Not familiar with Cacapon State Park? Read more about it.

The Laurel Trail (one of many hiking and mountain biking trails at Cacapon State Park) is an easy 2 mile hike that starts at the main park road near the Game Court Parking. Initially, you walk along the road passing by cabins 21 and 25 to get to the actual trailhead — worth knowing if you're there on a weekday morning, since that stretch doubles as the go-to walking loop for park regulars getting their steps in. At this time of year (October 2), most of the leaves were still on the trees and everything was fairly green. As you can hear in the video, there were enough fallen leaves to make the walk “crunchy.”

The start of the trail is at around 900' and the highest point is 1240', with most of the elevation gain within the first third of the hike. You keep gaining elevation after that, until about the mid-point, but the change is more gradual from there. (Our tracker clocked the full loop at 1.83 miles, averaging 2.1 miles per hour.)

The trail winds through mixed forest, Keefer Sandstone outcroppings, and boulders. About ten minutes in, we decided the trail wasn't quite challenging enough on its own, so we climbed one of the rock outcroppings for a bit of added fun — that's where we took the photo above, and you can experience it in this 360º video of our hike. If you have kids with any sense of adventure in them, they'll love this climb. One thing we didn't plan on: climbing straight up cuts off a switchback, so we came out on the trail ahead of where we expected and had to backtrack a little to see the stretch — and one particular hairpin turn — we'd skipped. Lesson learned: the trail markers know something you don't.

Speaking of markers, there were a few points where trails crossed. We hit one junction marked closed, without much indication of which color trail it actually was. (I floated a theory involving a bear attack. It did not hold up to scrutiny, and did not reassure my wife.) We ended up taking the Cabin Loop Trail on the way back for some variety, since the Laurel Trail loops back on itself and would've had us walking the same stretch twice. Small disappointment: the Cabin Loop doesn't really loop — it dead-ends near a cluster of cabins and dumps you back onto the trail you were already on. Still, it beat retracing our steps, and it meant we finally got to see the hairpin turn we'd cut earlier.

The trail was well marked (green, mostly, with the Cabin Loop in white), although there was a moment or two where we questioned the direction we should go in — including pulling out an actual paper trail map at one junction, because the trail app on my phone didn't show the section we were on. We even joked about going the wrong way and what would happen to the footage if we died.

Wildlife was limited to a pair of very territorial red-headed woodpeckers, which led to an extended and entirely unresolved debate about whether a woodpecker or a blue jay would win in a fight. (Official ruling from my wife: woodpecker, on size and general aggression.) We also saw plenty of evidence of wildlife — piles of nuts along the trail — but no actual squirrels, rabbits, deer, or bear.

Somewhere around the halfway point, my wife took over as tour guide and gave me an impromptu history lesson on the park — she's a West Virginia Golden Horseshoe winner (a statewide 8th-grade history honor, awarded to the top two scorers per county; she earned hers in 1988). Cacapon State Park is over 6,000 acres and officially opened July 1, 1937, built largely by the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of FDR's New Deal. Most of the original cabins went up through the 1940s, the golf course was added in the 1950s, and the lodge opened in the 1970s — most recently renovated in 2022, which is why it's often billed as the newest lodge in the state park system despite the park itself being nearly 90 years old.

Beyond the trail itself, Cacapon packs a lot in: horseback riding, clay shooting, a lake beach open in summer, disc golf (we walked right past a basket without noticing), a basketball court, playgrounds, and mountain biking, on top of the lodge, restaurant, and cabins. If you're extending the trip, Berkeley Springs — with its spa treatments and Roman baths — is about 10 miles north on Route 522. We have a video on that too.

According to the trail map, flowering shrubs and wildflowers can be viewed during their growing season, but everything was gone by fall, as you'd expect.

Overall, it was a pretty gentle climb that I would recommend for families, couples, or anyone looking to get out in the woods without venturing too far off the beaten path — as long as you can resist the urge to freelance your own route up the rocks.

---

---

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

---

---