Mason Neck State Park
Virginia State Park, Adjoining The Elizabeth Hartwell Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge The First National Wildlife Refuge Established For The Bald Eagle, 1969 · Lorton, Virginia
A peninsula pushing out into the Potomac twenty-five miles below Washington, and the place American bald eagle protection effectively started. By the 1960s the birds were nearly gone from the mid-Atlantic and a nesting pair here was among the last; the fight to stop the peninsula being subdivided produced, in 1969, the first national wildlife refuge in the country created specifically for the bald eagle, and the state park sits alongside it on 1,825 acres of hardwood forest, shoreline and the Great Marsh. The eagles came back. There are usually several active nests on the peninsula now, and on a winter morning you can stand on the Bay View Trail boardwalk over the marsh and watch them work the open water. The park is quiet in a way that Northern Virginia parks are generally not - three miles of woodland trail, a picnic area under the oaks, kayaks for rent on Belmont Bay, a small visitor centre with a live raptor programme, and a mile and a half of Potomac shoreline with no development on it at all. It shares a boundary with Gunston Hall, George Mason's house, which is a short drive up the same road.
7301 High Point Road, Lorton, Virginia, 22079, United States
Park open daily, generally 8 AM to dusk with seasonal variation. Visitor centre hours are shorter and reduced in winter - check before travelling. Parking fee applies per vehicle. No camping. Kayak rental is seasonal. Parts of the adjacent national wildlife refuge close for bald eagle nesting roughly December to June.
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