Haven't posted on the blog in such a long time, and essentially phoning it in: but I wanted to complete the story.  Three years after our last trip, kid and I finally finished the C&O Canal towpath, in one 62-mile trek.  And it was grand.

2019: We planned to go in August, shortly before moving apartments against our will, and only a couple of weeks before kid was due to start college.  But, just a few days beforehand, my stepfather-- who'd been part of my family since I was four years old-- began to die.  He was old, but the timing was still unexpected.  We went home to be with him, then stayed through the funeral.  After the funeral, it was time to pack, to get kid through their driver's license test, to move, to pack again for college.  The hike had to be postponed till 2020.

2020: Kid came home in March, college having closed due to covid.  There ensued a very long period of time in which nobody in the household was working, and kid was also home from school much of the time.  We could easily have gone backpacking, except that the C&O Canal decided that providing water to their pumps along the trail was somehow... not covid-safe?  The entire season, no water.  So the hike was postponed until May 2021, when hopefully they would turn the pumps back on.

May 2021 came around and, at the last moment, they did turn the pumps on.  But, by the time we knew for sure, kid was going back to school soon (atypical summer session added due to covid), having wisdom teeth out, and we were hunting for apartments again (and again against our will).  No time, many tears.  How about September?  

These years have provided, if nothing else, valuable lessons in flexibility.  But I am so glad we were finally able to go.  It felt like unfinished business, between us and the trail, and also between me and kid.  The original timing, prior to college, had been an appropriate coming-of-age, a launch.  Covid delayed and complicated that launch.  Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.  How to live in a series of two-bedroom apartments with your unemployed parents when you long desperately to be with your friends, to engage in activities, to be your adult self in the world.  Even though the delays are externally-imposed, you begin to doubt yourself: do you have what it takes to grow up?  What has happened to your toughness and independence-- is it still in there?

The trail said it was.

I didn't realize that the main topic of this post would be what a proud mother I am.  

I'm proud of myself, also.  I'm 49, will be 50 in less than two months, which is a terrifying prospect.  There is no sense in which I am still young.  I've let my hair go gray.  I've had foot problems over the past few years, sometimes back pain, knee pain, aches and pains.  When I first put my pack back on, I was shocked by how heavy it felt.  I'm going to do what?  Hike 62 miles carrying this thing?  But we put one foot in front of another, and prepared carefully with some nice anti-blister hiking socks, and we did it.  Even cheerfully, the majority of the time.

We spent 3 out of 4 nights tent camping in the small hiker-biker campsites, like this:

And one night sleeping in a converted bus in Paw Paw, WV, like this.

Shout-out to the Liberty station in Paw Paw, which provided hot meals, genuine friendliness, groceries, and the opportunity to meet gregarious thru-cyclists.  Our home away from home.

We enjoyed beautiful late-summer landscapes:

An amazing array of animals, including spiders, bugs, butterflies, moths, praying mantises, dragonflies, caterpillars, slugs, worms, millipedes, daddy-long-legs; tons of toads and a few frogs; many, many turtles, an eastern fence lizard, two black rat snakes, a ribbon snake, and a probable copperhead outside the showers in Paw Paw; green and blue herons, a million assorted ducks, a small hawk or falcon, a kingfisher, pileated woodpeckers, geese, an American redstart, and a bank of jewelweed frequented by many hummingbirds; many deer with fawns, squirrels, a tree gnawed by beaver.

We enjoyed absurdities such as the existence of Lock 64 & 2/3:

And ultimately we made it to Cumberland.  The feeling when the woods opened up to that view of town, the last mile, the jubilance... it was a surprise.  A hard-won joyful success in a time of so few simple victories.  In our hearts, we'd expected something to go wrong to the end.  But it didn't.

The End.

It's been a week and a half since we returned from our latest 3-day backpacking trip on the C&O Canal.  I love the hiking but my desire to write about it has waned over time.  Nevertheless, an instinct for completeness will not let me finish the trail without also finishing this account of it.  Also, it gives me an excuse to take and share photos.

The weather from August 23-25 was perfect: highs around 80 degrees, not terribly humid, breezy, sunny.  We could not have asked for more perfect conditions, except that a few weeks ago it was really rainy, and the subsequent standing water seems to have led to a bumper crop of tiny, hungry mosquitoes.  We had to ration the bug dope.  When my kid got home, they tried to count their bug bites, but lost count or got bored after 150.  Things were okay in the sunshine and breezes, but there were miles-long tree-shaded passages with boggy, shallow, temporary pools in the depression left on one side by the former canal.  I called these "Mosquito Alleys."  We itched and got used to it.

We started out from McMahon's Mill on a Thursday morning.  It was immediately clear how high the water was everywhere.  The little creek that runs through McMahon's Mill was rushing fast and hard.  The towpath was muddy and, in some cases, water was streaming down the rock face on our right and crossing the trail on its way to the river.  Where the trail verged on the Potomac, water was cresting over the edge.

We grabbed a quick lunch early on at the Opequon Junction campsite, then continued hiking until we reached an unexpected row of vacation (or perhaps even permanent) cabins and mobile homes, as the trail briefly opened out to become a gravel road.

My kid pointed out the tree in the picture above.  This is not an actual human house, but a child's drawing somehow drafted into reality.

​There were dragonflies, and lovely greenery:

And hikers striking poses.

By the end of the day we had arrived at our destination: the town of Williamsport.  The Conococheague Aqueduct, which the trail crosses near the town, was closed for restoration, and the consequent detour through Williamsport would lengthen our hike by a couple of miles.  We'd decided to stay at the Red Roof Inn, about half a mile off the trail detour, which was owned by a very nice South Asian couple and was cheap and comfortable.  We did have to hike a little way along the shoulder of the highway, though, and a woman carrying too many bags asked us, fellow vagabonds, if we were "heading north."  It was a funny town: lots of historic buildings, a few fixed up fancy, and a lot of obvious poverty too.  Several people seemed to be scraping by holding permanent flea markets on their lawns.  

​Exhausted after 12 miles even in nice summer weather, especially the final mile by the roadside, we ate dinner at the Waffle House in front of the Red Roof Inn.  It was the saddest Waffle House we'd ever seen: almost no customers, the staff draped in various attitudes of hostility and/or despair, monosyllabic except for a lonely, ostracized fry cook.

We made some phone calls.  We slept hard.  We took grateful hot showers in the morning as though this weren't the first night of our "camping" trip.  Then we hiked back into town to the only available cafe besides the Waffle House, Desert Rose.

Desert Rose, we realized as we approached, was an oasis of rainbows (including the gigantic mug we have at home that reads "NOBODY KNOWS I'M GAY"), featuring a large effusive male employee with a braying laugh and obvious Heart of Gold, Rose herself (quiet and unassuming, but friendly), and a surprising number (considering my experience of the town so far) of gay and/or politically liberal customers.  They had interesting local candies.  They had hiker supplies.  They had really awesome coffee.  My kid felt welcomed, which is not always the case in western Maryland.  Highly recommended, not that you have a lot of options when you are in Williamsport.

After breakfast we hopped back on the trail detour, which went all over including through some brickyards before reconnecting with the towpath.

It was another lovely morning, a bit more humid.  We hiked close to the river.  Note how muddy the water is, compared to other years.

When it came time for lunch, we sought a spot in full sun in order to deter mosquitoes.  I found a small sandy beach on the river shore with space to set up my beloved tiny camp stove.  I lighted it and made some rather putrid instant coffee.  The stove heated up the sand and rocks around it to a surprising degree, so that it was painful to stand near it in bare feet, and I dropped my first pot of boiling water in the sand in surprise when I tried to pick it up using a rag as I usually do.  Hands-on science.  Another surprise: the mysterious creatures milling around in manic clusters on the surface of the shallows.

I was not 100% sure whether they were insects or crustaceans, not that there's that much difference.   We got very hot during lunch, but we put our feet in the river, and it was worth it to be away from the mosquitoes for a little while.

During the afternoon, we got some relief from mosquito-alley sameness by passing a big dam and then a series of picturesque locks and old mills in quick succession.  The trail does lack variety sometimes, but this was a good bit.

Occasionally we met new friends:

Tired and footsore, we arrived at Fort Frederick State Park around 5:30 pm.  We'd reserved a campsite, but it was necessary to hike a little way into the park to fill up our water containers and check in with the park ranger.  Fort Frederick seemed oddly teeming with people.  Most them, even more oddly, were men with complex facial hair wearing drab-colored clothing of an antique style.  They gazed curiously at me as if I were the one out-of-place in my hiking clothes and sneakers.  They were doing things like pumping water, chopping wood, examining one another's firearms, and setting up similarly undyed tents to sell homemade crafts.  This was confusing.  Was Fort Frederick a sort of living-history museum?

As it turned out, the ranger said they were "having a muster" that weekend.  Apparently there are French-and-Indian War re-enactors.  Lots of them.  One (white, I think) guy was even dressed as an Indian, with paint and feathers.  Hmm.  I pretty much just ignored everybody as I passed among their tents and returned to my child, waiting by the water pumps, and our campsite by the beaver pond, rich with mosquitoes.  

I didn't take many photographs that night, nor did we indeed do much of anything, except cook dinner as quickly as possible while running about slapping ourselves and having an ongoing meltdown, then eat and hang out inside our tent.  I did take some photos from inside the tent.

In the morning, our neighbors from across the campground driveway, a couple of middle-aged women, came over to inquire what we were up to.  They'd come for the muster, out of boredom and not any special interest, they seemed to suggest.  Not too much to do around here.  But one of the women was clearly envious of our adventure, the way we were breaking down our whole camp in a few minutes and neatly stuffing it into our packs (something that never fails to amaze me either!).  Where were we going?  How long had we been doing it?  Maybe she might try something like that too, when her health was better.  Why does backpacking so ignite the imaginations of onlookers?  I have read so many books about other people's hikes; answered so many questions about my own very modest ones.  

This third and last day was more humid still, and blisters were had by all.  We were back in the world of startling green, though, and I love that.

There was also a surprising amount of corn in these parts.  Blisters were tended to in a nearby cornfield: 

And we met even more friends.

Overall we saw our usual variety of wild animals this trip: a doe and her fawn, green and blue herons, pileated woodpeckers, many wild ducks, many turtles, a snake, a few frogs/toads, fish, zillions of butterflies, some caterpillars but not as many as last year, spiders, mystery water bugs, and a really excessive number of mosquitoes.   We heard owls but did not see them this time.

By the latter half of the day, kid was limping and having trouble envisioning the last few miles with their painful blisters.  Various minor surgeries ensued.  Lunch was a purely functional affair eaten plunked down by the edge of the path in a sunny patch.  There was still cool stuff, like this culvert, but we were ready to hike to the finish line.

Unfortunately, there was none of that.  The building was locked.  There were some porta-potties down by the road.  Nowhere really to sit except in the grass, which kid did with a blanket wrapped around their whole body to reduce access to their bare skin.  The spot itself was very, very pretty:

But we were miserable nevertheless.  Eventually I flagged down a young, bearded guy who seemed to be headed down to the river from his truck, carrying a bucket.  Did he know how far it was to town and services?  We didn't have it in us to walk very far.

Oh, there's a truck stop just down the road, he said.  Restaurant, gas and store and everything.  How far?  About 1000 feet.

It might have been closer.  I've rarely been so thrilled to enter a dark, dingy, and barely occupied dining room.  Kid ordered a basket of fried shrimp and french fries; I ordered eggs and toast and coffee.  We arranged for my husband to pick us up at the restaurant.  There were restrooms.  We are wimps, but for a few days every year, we get to feel like badasses.

I

Greenbelt Park is encircled by a 5.3-mile Perimeter Trail, a little longer than I want to stay out there by myself on your average afternoon, so I'm dividing it into four parts.  The first section is accessed from the park entrance road, just before you reach the Park Headquarters building.  It skirts around the edge of the park on the outside of the loop road (which means, at times, the trail is divided from a largish highway only by a chainlink fence and a few trees; other times, you are well inside the wooded area).  Eventually the trail takes a sharp jog south to parallel the Park Central Road, at which point I headed straight instead, towards the road and the Dogwood Trail parking area, then back around the loop by road until I reached my car where I'd left it at the Sweetgum picnic area.  Probably I covered just under 1 mile of the actual Perimeter Trail.

It was a 40-ish degree early spring day, and there were people in the park on this occasion, driving cars or walking on the roads.  However, as usual, I did not encounter any other person on the actual trail.  

The light, as you can see from the shadows in the previous photos, was really striking.  We'd had days of rain and now the sun was breaking through, but low (it was about 3:30 pm).

Because of the rain, the trail was a bit muddy; and there was a spot on the connecting trail back to the Dogwood parking area where the creek had escaped its banks, created something of a swamp, and begun to wash across the path.

In other places, the creek was still inside its heavily-eroded banks.

II

April now; I parked my car in the Dogwood parking area and took the connector trail back to where I'd left the Perimeter Trail.  The water was lower in the swampy area and I had multiple sightings of a pileated woodpecker in that spot.  From the calls, there were more of them.  As usual, I was unable to get a good woodpecker photo despite the size of the bird.

There was a pleasant, almost cedar-y smell in the forest, the worst olfactory offenses of early spring being already past.  While most things were still brown and bare, there were notable spots of green.

Climbing a ridge, there was a rushing sound that could have been either traffic or a raging waterfall.  It was traffic.  Much of this stretch of the Perimeter Trail ran alongside the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.

I passed through a dense stand of bushy material and could hear a zillion little creatures hopping around in there.  Just sparrows, squirrels, from what I could see, and began to walk past.  Then a half-reluctant double-take.  "Bird every bird," I thought to myself, a reminder from ornithology class that rears its head every so often.  I turned to look at the rustling on my immediate right.  It was a bird I didn't know; upon identification, a rufous-sided towhee.

I could still hear pileateds in the treetops, too.  But at this point the trail intersected with the road near the campground, and I walked back along the road to my car.  Only one person in the woods today: a male jogger who looked winded enough that I was pretty sure he was focused on exercise alone.

III

A week, maybe two, has passed, and everything is different.  The temperature is in the 60s, it's sunny, my husband is with me, and the trees are just starting to leaf out, unfurling very pale green buds.  The green "skunk cabbage" (or whatever it is) is much bigger and covers more of the forest floor.

There are rills of bright clear water running here and there between high mud banks.

IV

Final and longest stretch of the Perimeter Trail.  I parked at the campground and walked back down the Blueberry Trail to the Perimeter, then all the way around the rest of the Perimeter Trail to the entrance road near the police station, returning to the car via the paved road.  It was a 90-ish, humid, bright Saturday, and there were more trail runners and other fellow travelers than usual.   I felt safe.  On the other hand, having now thoroughly explored Greenbelt Park, I still feel there is something deeply unremarkable about it.

There are a lot of downed trees, often having pulled up all kinds of interesting roots and leaving massive holes in the ground.

Things were a lot greener than before.

The "skunk cabbage" has filled in quite a lot.  I saw a pair of pileated woodpeckers, but they didn't wish to have their photos taken.

I saw this interesting personage hiding beneath the edge of the bathroom stall.  Don't know who he was.

But then.  Before hitting publish, I used an archaic tool called a "field guide" to check into this guy, who I guessed was a moth, though I couldn't see much of his body.  I believe he is a "virgin tiger moth."  I also note, only as I am posting this, that there is another mystery object or personage in the top left of this photo.  If it is what it kinda looks like (the edge of a large spider entering the frame), then a) it may be the reason the moth is hiding under the stall next to his deceased buddy, and b) I'm glad I didn't see it when I was actually there taking the picture.

​Here ends my wildlife notes for Greenbelt Park.

I've given up on Rock Creek Park for now-- too much construction, too much isolation, too much uncertainty.  Instead I drove to Greenbelt Park on a frosty, sunny Saturday morning, thinking it was a nice day for a walk and hordes of people would probably be out with their dogs.  

Nope.  There were several cars in the parking lot for the Dogwood Trail, but I saw not one human soul in the woods.  Only these deer souls.

These guys (well, gals) were there to silently greet me almost immediately.  We were all pretty unfazed about it.

It was a pretty day, with the light snow outlining everything that would otherwise have been just different shades of brown.  I thought it was so nice that I left my scarf and gloves in the car, so that I wouldn't be too hot.  That was silly.  I was cold.  Also, I was just wearing sneakers with thin little purple footie socks.  Apparently I have forgotten how to go outside in the winter.

Here's the truly dumbass thing: I got lost.  In Greenbelt Park.  In my defense, I encountered two different signs like this:

So I recommend NOT leaving your trail map in your purse in the car, even if you think you don't need it: not only are there signs like this, but there are places where extra stray trails veer off in some other direction, without obvious signage.  And, while there are dutiful markers every 0.2 miles, I suspect they are not placed correctly, as I covered the last 0.6 miles with amazing speed. 

No matter, I figured it out, and there are at least tree blazes here and there.  It's not a long or intimidating trail by any means, only confusing.  

And just when you think you're in the middle of nowhere, completely alone, you round a bend and see this view:

Towards the end of the trail, there are a series of little (snow-covered today) boardwalks traversing damp bits.  I am partial to boardwalks.