Our trip to the C&O Canal last weekend took us further north than usual. I was trying to find some newer places to visit. I was also hoping to avoid crowds. There are more people on the towpath these days. This could be for a number of reasons. Perhaps folks are tired of being forced to stay indoors (on account of COVID-19) and need an outlet. Also, the parking lots along the canal that are closer to Washington, DC, have been closed because they are getting crowded. The crowds there are not practicing proper physical distancing. Perhaps people have been forced further north as a result. I also believe that the park has, in general, been getting more popular in recent years.
We had to drive north on Interstate-270, through Frederick, to get to the starting point for our walk, which was the parking lot at Lander Lock. I had been making that drive on I-270 quite frequently during the weekends in the years gone by, but less so in recent times. Family outings create their own time constraints, and this parking area was a little further away than usual. There were more cars than I expected when we arrived there. There were also more people on the trail than we expected, including a lot of bicyclists. It was not exactly what we had hoped for.
This is the lock house for Lander Lock. Lander Lock is lock 29 on the canal.
The first major water crossing of the walk was at the aqueduct across Catoctin Creek. You can see the Potomac river in the distance in the picture below (taken from the aqueduct itself). I did not take pictures of the aqueduct itself this time because I have taken so many of them in the past (including this one). In fact, I have traveled along this section of the trail in the times even before the reconstruction of the aqueduct. Perhaps you can also make out the kayak on the shore of the creek, closer to the river, in the picture.
This section of the trail runs next to the railroad tracks. The next parking area up north is at Brunswick, which is a big switching yard for CSX freight trains. This morning was relatively quiet as far as railroad traffic was concerned. We saw just one freight train go by. There was more activity at the switching yard itself.
Further north, we had to go down to the level of the Little Catoctin Creek to proceed further along the trail. The old bridge that previously carried the trail over the creek had been at the level of the trail itself. It was completely destroyed in a flooding episode in May 2018. (The original culvert for the creek, letting it flow under the canal itself, had been destroyed even earlier on and replaced by the bridge. The old bridge had been meant as a temporary solution, but had lasted many years.) The park service has now built a new bridge at the creek level that serves as a temporary crossing of the creek. This bridge can only be used when the water level is low. I do not know the schedule for a more permanent solution.
You can see the remains of one of the walls of the original culvert in the picture below.
There seemed to be many people in the campground next to the trail at Brunswick. This must have been on account of it being the Memorial Day weekend. The lock down situation because of the coronavirus has been eased in most parts of Maryland. We, unfortunately, live in a county where the cases of COVID-19 have not come down significantly, and we have to follow stricter rules closer to home.
Further north, the trail runs beside the freight yard. This canal section, between the trail and the freight yard, happens to have water in it. We saw this parent duck swimming away from us with its ducklings when it heard us coming, trying to take the little ones away from us to safety. I suspect that the parent is a breeding female long-tailed duck, but I cannot be sure.
The trail was getting even more crowded by the time we started making our way back. There were families heading out to picnic. This particular family had picked a spot beside the Catoctin creek.
The crowd on the trail made it a less pleasant experience than usual. The notion of getting away from the crowd by driving away from the city did not seem to work. We also ran across more people, mainly bikers, who did not seem to understand common courtesy on the trail. Perhaps an earlier start in the day is called for from now on.
In other news, the platform that I use to write these blogs on is changing its editing tools. The newer tools have a greater level of sophistication, but there is a learning curve involved, and it is also not clear yet how much of the look of the blog I will be forced to change over time. This is an unexpected challenge, and a distraction that I wish I did not need to navigate past at this point. In fact, I am having challenges even editing this blog. I think the tools themselves are still being debugged. We’ll see how it goes over the long run.
Splattered Brains 
