Blood & Biohazard Cleanup Near Vale Difficult Run, VA

Difficult Run is a census-designated place in Fairfax County, Virginia — an unincorporated residential community that first appeared as a census-designated place in the 2020 census.

Difficult Run had a population of 10,600 at the 2020 census, spread over 8.38 square miles of land at a density of about 1,265 people per square mile.

The 2020 census counted 3,451 households in Difficult Run, of which an unusually high 81.5% were married-couple households and 41.5% had children under the age of 18 living in them.

Difficult Run's residents skew older and affluent, with a median age of 46.0 years in 2020, and American Community Survey data put the CDP's median household income at $250,000, with about 82.5% of residents holding a bachelor's degree or higher and only about 0.8% of the population below the poverty line.

The community takes its name from Difficult Run, a 15.9-mile-long tributary stream of the Potomac River that drains a 57.7-square-mile watershed across north-central Fairfax County.

The stream was named not for its own rapids but by long-boatmen in the days of the Patowmack Company, who found the two sharp bends of the Potomac River near the stream's mouth treacherous to navigate.

Near its mouth, Difficult Run picks up speed through a steep gorge with waterfalls inside Great Falls Park — a stretch described as a miniature Mather Gorge and Great Falls — before dropping to the level of the Potomac.

A roughly 12-mile hiking and biking trail follows Difficult Run from Reston to Great Falls Park and connects with the Fairfax County Cross County Trail, passing historic mill sites including Tolston's Mill and the Colvin Run Mill in Colvin Run Mill Park.