Monday, June 4, 2018

Gratitude Monday: a walk in the park


It’s been a while since I got out in Nature, which is actually kind of odd, when you consider how much Nature there is in Northern Virginia. Mostly of the sort that crawls and bites or sucks blood.

However, on Saturday I went to Great Falls National Park, right on the Potomac River, and spent a couple of hours walking around.

(The last time I was at the park, it was for a photo class. When people had cameras that used film.)

It’s been raining a lot in the area, so the trails were soupy.


(Also—although I sprayed myself liberally with repellant, I still ended up with mosquito bites.)

But this made for some spectacular viewing of the falls. I mean—we’re not talking Multnomah, but still:



Further down the trail, here’s a little feeder fall:


There were quite a lot of people out—dog walkers, runners (a couple of them scared me, going at a good clip even on the slippery trail and even-even on the trails where I had to pick my way through protruding rocks), family groups, even…I guess, rock climbers.



I have to say that signage is kind of sparse and ambiguous in the park. I did wonder what happened here:


Also—not manmade, but I also wondered about the story behind this:


The park also has a few remnants of canal locks, from the pre-railroad days when the Potomac was a highway between Washington and the West, and shippers needed a way to get their goods around the falls. If you didn’t know what to look for, you might not even notice these:



By the time I left, I felt better able to deal with the world, and I’m grateful for the treasure that national parks are, and for having one so close. I’m also grateful that I went on Saturday, because it pretty much rained the whole live-long day Sunday. I’m expecting to see a large boat with a lot of pairs of animals aboard floating up the Dulles Access Road any day now.



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