Buzzard Rock

Posted on December 4, 2014 by John M

Had a great time yesterday reconnoitering a hike on Buzzard Rock, just southwest of Front Royal in the Shenandoah Valley. It’s an easy to moderate 4-mile hike with a 650-foot elevation gain, and offers a nice climb and spectacular views in exchange for an hour’s drive from the Vienna Metro Station in northern Virginia.

To get there is simple: you drive west on I-66 for almost 56 miles, take exit 6 to US-340/US-522, drive south about a mile, then turn right onto VA-55 W/ W Strasburg Road and drive about 5 miles. At a historical marker for the “State Fish Hatchery” you turn left onto State Route 678/Fort Valley Road, follow it for a bit over a mile, and turn left again onto State Route 619/Mountain Road, at a sign for the “Virginia Fish Cultural Station.” (Seems like another way to say fish hatchery, but whatever.) After driving just over a mile you’ll see the trailhead sign on your right. The approximate address is 3134 Mountain Road, Front Royal, VA 22630, GPS = 38.937690, -78.288351. Here’s a Google map of the drive: http://tinyurl.com/p3arh9b  

The trailhead is on the south side of the parking area, which is big enough for a dozen cars or so. The first mile and a half of hiking is pretty easy going: follow the white trail blazes as the trail winds around through the woods and over a couple of sparse rivulets, until you reach the rather abrupt final ascent to the north ridge overlook. The overlook features wonderful views to the west, north and east, so a short break is in order to catch your breath and enjoy the view.

From there you just face about and continue south and up along the ridgeline, continuing to follow the white trail blazes, for another about another half mile to the top of Buzzard Rock North, enjoying views from the cliffs on either side along the way. This portion is very rocky and narrow, with sheer cliffs on both sides, so if you have difficulties with depth perception, this stretch is probably best avoided.

The white-blazed trail continues down into a saddle and on a couple more miles to Shawl Gap, but for this hike, it’s time to turn around and retrace your steps to the parking area. Here’s a Google map of the hike: http://tinyurl.com/k9xxh3l 

H/T to Hiking Upward for their overview of the hike.

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Down to zero

Posted on November 24, 2014 by John M

The past three weekends have been filled with hikes, as Mother Nature put on her Autumnal show of colors before finally turning the temperatures down to zero. Here’s a few highlights:

Brookside Gardens

Brookside Gardens, in Wheaton-Glenmont, MD, with its manicured, terraced gardens, is the sort of place you’d normally think of visiting in Spring, right? Maybe so, but it’s beautiful during Fall as well, and the adjacent Wheaton Park provides lots of room to stretch your legs and get in a pleasant hike. The hike varied a bit from what was planned, but still wound up being almost 5 miles as plotted; a little more if you were wandering around.

Rock Creek Park

Rock Creek Park is a must-do every Fall; the water rushing through the rocky stream bed and over waterfalls against the backdrop of the colorful leaves is a sight not to be missed. A lot of Beach Drive, which runs through the center of the park, is closed to auto traffic during the weekends, so there’s plenty of room for a large group of folks to get together and enjoy the hike. The Cleveland Park Metro Station is a convenient place to start and finish. If you use the Melvin Hazen Trail to get down into the creek bed and hike north to the Park Police headquarters and return, it’s a tidy 6-mile hike, with the familiar landmarks of Boulder Bridge and Peirce Mill along the way, and plenty of nice places along Connecticut Ave NW for a bite to eat afterwards.

Fort Ethan Allen

Actually, Fort Ethan Allen Park was merely our point of departure, since the Madison Community Center, with its amenities and parking, was too convenient to pass up. What we were really up to was a hike that used Glebe Road and Potomac Overlook Regional Parks, along with a few side streets, to connect Donaldson Run, Gulf Branch, and a slice of the Potomac Heritage Trail. The stretch of the Potomac Heritage Trail from Donaldson Run upstream to Gulf Branch is fairly rugged, and the initial ascent up Gulf Branch can be a little challenging. An interesting spot to visit along the way is the Robert Walker Log House and adjacent forge used by the Blacksmiths’ Guild of the Potomac. The hike route was only about 4.5 miles, but because of the rugged terrain and rock scrambles, it took around 3 hours to get all 50 of us through to the end.

Down to zero: Carderock

I’m pretty sure this past weekend was the first hike in which when we started, around 10 am, it was still below freezing. We started in Carderock Recreation Area, which is in Great Falls National Park. It’s very convenient to Washington DC and the perfect access point to Billy Goat Trail, in between sections B and C. From the parking lot you can do one, then the other, for a nice 6-mile hike.

We’ve been doing two hikes a week all year, regardless of the weather, and the goal for the winter is to continue at that pace. The next big event on the calendar is our annual “Christmas in the City” hike, a walk around the National Mall in Washington DC to visit the National Christmas Tree, the US Capitol Christmas Tree, and the US Botanic Garden, to enjoy its annual “Season’s Greenings” display. Should be wintry fun!

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To the colors

Posted on October 29, 2014 by John M

With the arrival of Fall colors, the past couple of weekends have been taken up with trips to see them! The color changes in Virginia usually start in the mountains and over a few weeks, progress to the Piedmont and then finally to the areas around the coast. Accordingly, on October 18th we headed out for a hike on Stony Man and Little Stony Man in Shenandoah National Park (SNP). Stony Man is the second-highest peak in the park, and from there we could get a good view to the west. It turned out to be a little early for peak colors, but it’s better to be too early than too late.

The next day we went to the Billy Goat Trail, along the Potomac Gorge starting from Great Falls Tavern in the C&O Canal National Historical Park. This was still a little ahead of the Fall foliage schedule predicted by the Virginia Department of Forestry, but two long trips to SNP on the same weekend seemed like a lot to bite off. (Mundane weekend chores can get in the way, and besides, the Billy Goat Trail is always lots of fun!)

The next Saturday it was off to Sugarloaf Mountain, a monadnock northwest of Rockville in Maryland. (“Monadnock” is one of those words, like “emulsion,” that just never seem to be on the tip of my tongue when I need it.) From the Westview parking area, following the Blue Trail all the way around the mountain, with a brief departure onto the Red Trail to the top, yields a pleasant 5-mile hike. It’s somewhat strenuous here and there and time consuming due to rocky trail surfaces, but you get two great overlooks for the price of one hike!

Sunday seemed like a good time to get back down off the mountains and check on the waterfront, so we took a trip to Leesylvania State Park. Starting from the park visitor center, roughly in the center of the park along the shoreline, it’s easy to do two 2.5-mile hikes with a break in the middle. The trains that pass every 30 minutes or so make for a great photo op!

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll take a few more trips to distant locations to check out the Fall colors, but in the meantime, there’s nothing like a visit to a local lake in Kingstowne.

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3 x 3 + 1

Posted on October 9, 2014 by John M

Seems like I’m always falling behind — too busy hiking to plan the next hike or too busy planning the next hike to blog about the last hike. During group hikes, I’m usually too busy navigating (avoiding getting lost) to take photos. So often, the best photos come from just snooping around. Here’s three photos each from three outings, two of which were informal snoops. For good measure, one of those unexpected treats you run across sometimes…

Smithsonian Gardens Butterfly Habitat

The Saturday before last I was up in Washington DC with a friend, checking out the routes and points of interest for a future urban hike around Chinatown. It should be a good area for the colder months, because there are several museums in the area (e.g., Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, National Building Museum) that have no entry fees and make ideal break spots along the way for an opportunity to both warm up and exercise your brains as well as your legs. But the best part of the outing was unexpected, while passing through the Smithsonian Gardens Butterfly Habitat on the way back.

Smithsonian National Zoological Park

Yeah, the zoo. We’ve already visited twice this year, but someone suggested another group visit and I don’t take a lot of convincing.  I drove up, to make sure I wasn’t late, and saw something I hadn’t seen before! I’m not sure how long Marilyn Monroe has been overlooking the corner of Calvert and Connecticut Streets, but she’s hard to miss…

Merchant Marine Memorial

Yesterday evening I was out reconnoitering an urban hike from Crystal City to the Merchant Marine Memorial and back, and had the good fortune to arrive at the memorial during “golden hour.” The sculpture is “Waves and Gulls,” by Ernesto Begni del Piatta.

Finally, I was driving home the other evening, got out of the car, looked up and found the  unexpected treat I mentioned. Sometimes what you’re out looking for is already at home.

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Candid camera?

Posted on September 25, 2014 by John M

“Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” Sounds really nice, right?

Some local police departments in Northern Virginia are still randomly scanning license plate data — including the date, time and exact location where that license plate was located — and storing that data for years. That despite former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli telling state police last year in a strongly worded opinion that it was illegal to do so apart from a specific criminal investigation.

Why does that matter?

“The more information they get, the more they can tell about who you are, what you do, what doctor you see, what psychologist you see, where your car is parked,” said Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is fighting to eliminate the random collection and storage practice. …

“The police will say this is wonderful because it helps us get the bad guys,” Gastañaga said. “My response is you could [also] walk down my street and search every house on my street.”

– Kathryn Watson, “ACLU to Virginians: How much does your police department know about you?”, April 1, 2014, Watchdog.org.

As if tracking and storing the movement of law abiding citizens using their auto license plates wasn’t enough, there’s the FBI’s new Next Generation Identification (NGI) system that just went operational this month:

[The NGI system combines criminal mug shots] “…with non-criminal facial images taken from employment records and background check databases … [s]o someone with no criminal history could be suspected of a crime if his or her face happens to be in the database.

– Nick Canedo,“FBI facial recognition system now fully operational in 18,000 bureaus across the country,” Syracuse.com, September 16, 2014.

“Non-criminal facial images? Say, if you have a driver’s license, they already have one of those for you on file, all set to add to the database! Great, eh?

This sort of thing makes me stop and think about those reluctant to be included in group photos taken while at social events. While many enjoy group photos as a reminder of a wonderful outing with their friends, others may prefer not to be in them; it’s kind of like not wanting to be in a school class photo or something. And that’s fine.

But then there are those who extend that preference a step further and confront those around them, demanding the deletion of any photo in which they may appear, citing concerns about identity theft and/or privacy.

The former concern may seem legitimate until you consider that the potential identity thief doesn’t want his or her target’s photo, because he/she will substitute their own likeness anyway, if a photo ID is involved.

The latter concern is simply misplaced, because people in public simply cannot expect total privacy, because they are publicly visible to anyone who might pass by. When in public spaces where [a person is] lawfully present, [he/she has] the right to photograph anything that is in plain view. Like it or not, while you are in public your photo is taken countless times every day, by passersby and by fixed cameras on streets, at traffic lights, and in stores, banks, etc.

Finally, as the above articles noted, the local police, in Virginia anyway, is illegally tracking and storing your movements in their database, and your photo is already mixed in with 8 million criminal mug shots in the FBI’s new database. If you’re worried about a photo compromising your privacy, our government’s increasingly police state mentality let that horse out of the barn long ago.

With all this going on, getting upset at a friend for taking your photo at an explicitly social event is acting like one of the Corleone family in this scene from the Godfather:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lduR25rDWQU?version=3&start=6&end=17&version=3

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Rainy day

Posted on September 14, 2014 by John M

It was only overcast at first, but before noon it was a rainy day in Old Town Alexandria.

There’s always something nice about a rainy day on the waterfront.

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A visit to River Farm

Posted on September 12, 2014 by John M

This morning’s treat was a visit to River Farm. I briefly visited back in June with the hiking group, but because we were just passing through I didn’t have much time to enjoy the sights.

Once the northernmost of George Washington’s farms, River Farm narrowly avoided becoming a retreat for the Soviet Embassy in 1971, believe it or not, before Enid Haupt sold the property to the American Horticultural Society, which relocated its headquarters to the property in 1973. You can read all about the farm’s history here.

One of the more notable things about the property is a large Osage Orange tree, “…believed to have been a gift from Thomas Jefferson to the Washington family. It is known that Jefferson received seedlings of the Osage orange from the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-06.” Last winter I was hiking around Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, south of River Farm, and discovered some Osage Oranges, complete with their unique fruit, so apparently some of the seeds made their way downstream from the River Farm. I was accustomed to seeing Osage Oranges in Oklahoma when I was growing up, but it was certainly surprising to find them here in Virginia.

River Farm is a wonderful place for an easy stroll or simply to sit and enjoy the sights and sounds.

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Long weekend, lost wonder

Posted on September 6, 2014 by John M

Whenever a Federal holiday comes around, yielding a three-day weekend, I usually feel compelled to fill up with hikes. Maybe this compulsion comes from something I was discussing with a friend not so very long ago, about the lost wonder of childhood.

At some point, we all seem to lose the wonder of childhood; that is to say, the excitement of seeing everything for he first time. While I’m no expert on anatomy, I think it’s just a  fact of life, based on the physical limitations of our eyesight. Of the two types of photoreceptors in our eyes, cones and rods, we get our detailed, central and color information from the cone types, and the night and peripheral information from the rod types.* There are only so many photoreceptors in our eyes, leaving blank spots, and our brains helpfully fill in the blank spots with what we expect to see, based upon previous information. But as children, our brains often have no information with which to fill in the blanks; hence the wonder, which we simply cannot recapture, as much as we would like.

But I digress. Let’s return to the subject at hand, last week’s hikes.

Saturday we went to a location I’ve been wanting to do for some time, Conway Robinson State Forest. It’s an easy, pleasant hike through a mix of old oak and new pine forest, about 3 miles long on the Blue Trail, and only takes about an hour.

While lots of fun by itself, Conway Robinson Forest is a bit of a drive for most folks in the DC area, so it needs a linked hike nearby to provide a little extra distance and variety, and the lacking amenities like drinking fountains and restrooms. Nearby Brawner Farm on the Manassas National Battlefield provides the extra mile or two, plus the added fun of a ranger-led tour describing the intense fighting around the Brawner Farmhouse on September 29, 1862, during the American Civil War. Because Saturday was part of the 152nd anniversary of the Battle of Second Manassas, reenactors were on hand to provide artillery and infantry living history demonstrations. How fun is that?!

All told, the hike yielded about 4.5 to 5 miles of smiles, and the nearby Winery at Bull Run provided refreshment for those inclined.

Sunday was an opportunity to pump it up a notch with a hike on the Billy Goat Trail, Section A, near Great Falls Tavern Visitor Center in Potomac MD. The hike is not quite 4 miles long, and half of it is just easy walking along the canal towpath. The other half, though, is where it gets its name: the trail surface is very rocky with large boulders and a scramble up a seam in a 40-foot cliff face about halfway along. The views of the Potomac River gorge along the way are your spectacular reward!

The Billy Goat Trail is a tough act to follow, but Monday’s hike at Scott’s Run was a worthy candidate. It’s just off the I-495 Capital Beltway and features the nearest waterfall to Washington DC, a slice of the Potomac Heritage Trail, and a beautiful view of the Potomac from a point of rocks high over the river. It’s a small park, so any more than about 2.5 miles of hiking requires a lot of doubling back and repetition. Unfortunately, it’s all too well-known and parking is limited, so it helps to arrive early with your fingers crossed.

All told, only about 12 to 13 miles of hiking over the weekend, but maybe enough to at least whet, if not satisfy, the thirst for some of the lost wonder we’re are all in search of.

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Summer on the Potomac

Posted on August 27, 2014 by John M

A couple of hikes over the past two weeks shared something in common, the Potomac River, but yielded two very different feels.

The Palisades District of Washington DC, demonstrably the younger of the two neighborhoods we hiked through, still has much of its timeless, turn-of-the-century character. The Old Conduit Schoolhouse still sits along MacArthur Boulevard, looking much as it did in 1874. Small boats drift along the Potomac River past preening cormorants and sunflowers, and the two-span Baltimore & Ohio railway bridge straddles Arizona Avenue and the C&O Canal, much as it has since its relocation here from Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, in 1909.

Just downstream, a hike across the Potomac from Rosslyn to Georgetown and back had a much different feel. Rosslyn’s mirrored modern buildings are the tallest in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Georgetown has the charm of its older blocks of townhouses, M Street, and landmarks like the Old Stone House and the C&O Canal, leading to the more modern designs of Washington Harbor, the Watergate Hotel, and the Kennedy Center, adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Bridge at the western end of the National Mall. Altogether, an area with a more varied and faster tempo than its upstream cousin.

Often late summer brings with it unbearable heat and humidity to the Washington area, but this one has been among the mildest and most pleasant I can recall in the almost 20 years I have lived in the area. It won’t be long before summer comes to an end, and I am already relishing the thought of hiking through Rock Creek Park when the crisp air and vibrant colors of autumn finally arrive.

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2014 Summertime Challenge – Met!

Posted on August 15, 2014 by John M

August 15 was the last day of the Cat’s Cradle’s 2014 Summertime Challenge. During the Summertime Challenge, all donations were matched 100%. On August 18th Cat’s Cradle announced that they made their goal and will receive the $100,000!!  Thanks to everyone for the generous support!

Click the photo to go to their website and send them your tax-deductible donation!

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