By 6:45 on a Wednesday evening in late spring, the gravel lot at the Community Recreation and Environmental Center starts filling in a particular order. First the dog walkers, cutting across toward the flat paved stretch near the entrance. Then the strollers, headed the same direction. Then, closer to seven, a different crowd pulls in: trail shoes, bibs, a folding table with a cash box. They don't turn toward the flat path at all. They head for the hills.
Most people who live near Haverford Reserve think of it as one park with one trail system. It isn't. It's several different parks stitched together under a single name, and the group that shows up on Wednesday nights has been quietly using the hardest version of it for years.
One Name, Several Different Trail Systems
Andy Lewis Community Park at Haverford Reserve is Haverford Township's newest and largest piece of open space, built around more than five miles of trails, a dog park, sports fields, and the CREC building. But "five miles of trails" undersells how differently those miles behave depending on where you start.
Southbrook, one of the trails inside the Reserve itself, is paved and level for part of its length, which makes it the only fully accessible stretch in the core park. Everything else in that core, the Meadow Trail, the Athertyn Trail, the PECO Trail, the Northbrook and Veterans Trails, is earthen, wooded, and graded for hikers and joggers rather than wheels. The Meadow Trail in particular drops fairly steeply from the Parkview Drive roundabout down to a footbridge over North Brook, while the Athertyn and PECO Trails ease down the same hillside on a gentler line.
Separately, and this is the part most residents miss, there's a whole other trail called Darby Creek that isn't physically connected to the Reserve at all. It runs in three roughly mile-long segments elsewhere in the township, and as of now those three segments don't link up with each other. One piece, the Center Segment between Merry Place on Glendale Road and Hilltop Road, is hard-surfaced and fully accessible, good for strollers, which makes it the second paved trail in the township with the word "accessible" attached to it and zero relationship to the first.
Then there's the Pennsy Trail, built on a former Pennsylvania Railroad corridor, which connects the Skatium and nearby neighborhoods to the Haverford Area YMCA and a signaled crosswalk at Eagle Road. It's a fourth distinct trail experience, and it doesn't touch the Reserve or Darby Creek either.
| Trail | Surface | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Southbrook (Reserve) | Paved in part | Level, accessible, stroller-friendly |
| Meadow / Athertyn / PECO (Reserve) | Earthen | Wooded hillside, steeper on Meadow |
| Darby Creek, Center Segment | Hard-surfaced | Level, accessible, separate system |
| Pennsy Trail | Former rail corridor | Flat, connects Skatium to the YMCA |
Four trails, four different textures, all inside Haverford Township, none of them the same walk.
The Race That's Been Quietly Running for Years
Against that backdrop, the Haverford Reserve Trail Running Series is easy to overlook if you're not already looking for it. It's organized through Haverford Township's Parks and Recreation department, with Eileen Mottola as the contact, and it's been showing up on township and local running calendars for years without much fanfare beyond a folding table and a sign-up sheet.
The format has stayed consistent season to season:
- Wednesday evenings, 7 to 8 p.m.
- A short lineup spread across about a month: a 5K in May, a 5K in June, and a closing one-mile trail walk
- $15 per race, $40 for the full series, $20 for day-of registration if it hasn't sold out
- Registration opens through haverfordtwp.org, typically in late April
- Race proceeds go directly toward maintaining the trails in Haverford Township
That last point is worth sitting with. This isn't a race that happens at the Reserve. It's a race that pays for the Reserve. The same trails the CREC crowd walks their dogs on during the day get a chunk of their maintenance budget from the entry fees of people willing to run them on a Wednesday night.
Why the Loop Skips the Easy Trail
Here's the detail that separates this from a generic "there's a race series at the park" post: the series doesn't route runners onto Southbrook, the one paved and accessible trail in the Reserve. The official description of the course is a "loop and a few hills," and anyone who's walked both halves of the park knows exactly which half that points to. It's the wooded network, not the flat one.
That tracks with the terrain data. Among the Reserve's trails, Woods Trail carries the most elevation gain in the park, at 133 feet, which isn't a mountain by any measure but is enough to notice on a warm evening in May. The series isn't picking the hardest possible route out of some competitive instinct. It's picking the route that actually represents what most of Haverford Reserve is: an earthen, sloped, tree-covered network that happens to have one flat, paved shortcut most people default to because it's the easiest thing to find from the parking lot.
The Wednesday crowd, in other words, is the group actually using the park the way it was mostly built.
What Wednesday Night Actually Looks Like Right Now
Trail conditions shift with the season, and this one is worth checking before you lace up rather than assuming. As of this summer, the Reserve's overall trail status was listed as a minor issue on Trailforks, with three individual trails flagged for more significant problems. That's not a reason to skip the park. It's a reason to glance at current conditions the same way you'd check weather before a run, since a "minor issue" trail this month can be a "no issue" trail the next time you're out there.
After the Loop: Haverford Square
Runners finishing at eight aren't far from dinner. Haverford Square sits on Lancaster Avenue, easy to spot by its cupola towering over the storefronts, directly across from Haverford College and a short walk from the Haverford SEPTA Regional Rail station. It's an old-fashioned mixed retail block, and its anchor restaurant, White Dog Café, is built around three distinct rooms: the wood-paneled Den, the farmhouse-style Kitchen, and the Living Room, with its carved dog busts flanking the walls. The kitchen there changes its menu monthly to track what's actually in season, which means the version of dinner waiting for you in June won't be the one waiting in September.
It's a fitting way to close a Wednesday that started with a choice between the flat trail and the hard one. The people who chose the hills get to end the night exactly where the people who chose the flat path probably ended up anyway.
The Park You Thought You Knew
If you've lived near Haverford Reserve for a while, there's a decent chance you've only ever walked the Southbrook stretch, or only ever driven past the trailhead on your way to the dog park. That's not a knock. It's just a smaller slice of a park that's actually four or five different parks depending on which trailhead you use. The Wednesday night series has been quietly running on the bigger, harder slice for years, funding the very ground it runs on, one $15 entry at a time.
That's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a map. It shows up when you've spent enough time in a place to notice which paths the regulars actually take.
If you're weighing a move to Haverford, or you already call it home and you're curious what else the neighborhood has to teach you, the Houder Nunez-Strid Team spends its days in these same trails, streets, and storefronts. Reach out to schedule a confidential market consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what your next move on the Main Line could look like.
