Maryland Heights – Splattered Brains

Charging Through The July 4th Weekend

Out on the trail very early in the morn,
Tearing through the cobwebs that the biking paths adorn,
We are the first riders of the day in these parts it would seem,
Pedaling through the quiet of the cool woods as if in a dream.

We have been biking regularly the last few weeks, including a ride yesterday that will in all likelihood be the last one in a long while. I even took my bike back to the store for some adjustments during this regular spell of exercise, and we also did a complete tuneup of the old bike. A few parts ended up needing replacement on the old bike. It turns out that I had worn out the inside of the back tire of the old bike and did not even know it!

It has been a eventful few weeks recently, about to culminate in a trip to India next week. There have perhaps been plenty of things to write about, but the opportunities for introspection and access to a creative space have been few and fleeting. There are the distractions that do not allow me to stay in a quiet space for too long. The attentive motivation for writing has been lacking, and that is still the case today. So, I am going to keep this sweet and short.

Here is a picture taken during a hike with visiting family to Maryland Heights during the July 4th weekend. The view is of Harpers Ferry, a favorite place for us to visit.The Shenandoah river (on the left side of the picture) meets up with the Potomac at this river junction. It was a good day for recreation on the rivers. Perhaps you can even sight some rafts and tubes in the expanded picture.

At Antietam Aqueduct

It was early Sunday morning. When I asked Teresa which section of the canal she wanted to go to, she left it to me to decide – because it was my birthday. There was no particular time constraint either on how long we could spend on our adventures that morning. I picked a place to go to that took a little longer than usual to get to, a place that she had not ever been to for hiking. We spent the whole morning on the towpath hiking near Shepherdstown, WV, (my biking companions from 2016 will surely remember the place!) and Sharpsburg, MD.

This walk was a little different from usual. We spent more time than usual exploring off-trail, beside the Potomac river itself.

As we drew into the parking lot after the long drive from home, my attention was drawn to the sound of a freight train beginning to make its way across the river from West Virginia, on its way to Hagerstown. Although I had the urgent need to visit the facilities, I changed my mind and quickly grabbed my camera from the back seat after parking the car. This is what we saw. It made me wonder.

Once on the towpath, we decided to head in the direction of Harpers Ferry, towards Washington, DC. It was a nice and cool morning.

The first time we decided to walk down from the towpath to the river was when we heard the sounds of the water rushing over rocks, indicating the presence of some rapids. We do not come across rapids that often during our walks. Usually, the river is very quiet. Additionally, we had noticed many places where people had walked off the marked trail towards the river and created ad-hoc paths through the woods in the process. We took one of the paths that appeared to be more easily navigable. Since the towpath happens to be at an elevated level when compared to the level of the river in this section, we had to be careful coming down the sandy trail to the level of the river.

It was still early in the morning when I took these pictures from beside the river. The rapids, if I could even call them that, were very gentle, with a very small drop in the level of the river at this point.

Back on the towpath, we passed a neighborhood with older houses on the berm side of the canal. This one could have been unoccupied, and perhaps even abandoned.

We arrived at Antietam Aqueduct after passing a huge campground next to the trail.The Antietam Creek Campground is the only one of its kind along the 184.5 mile towpath. It is a very different setup from the regular Hiker and Biker campsites that line the rest of the trail. This campground is much bigger, with many individually marked sites that can be reserved. Unlike the Hiker and Biker campsites, this one is accessible by car. There were many vehicles parked in the vicinity of the campground on the berm side of the canal. The facilities in this campground could be considered slightly less primitive than at the Hiker and Biker sites – but not by much.

When we arrived at the Antietam Aqueduct, my first instinct was to go down creek-side to get a picture of the aqueduct itself. This proved to be a little bit of a project since the closest approach required stepping down a steep slope immediately next to the wall of the aqueduct. The slope was covered with small, loose, gravel. It would have been easy to lose footing while trying to go down, and to end up sliding down to the bottom.

After some exploration, we managed to find a spot further along the towpath that was less intimidating, a spot where other people had attempted to go down to the river in the past. We managed to get down to the river, and then walk back along the riverside, on a rough and uneven path, to the the mouth of the creek, where the creek met the Potomac. The aqueduct was revealed to us in its fullness.

This was a view of the river from the mouth of the creek.

We got back to the towpath taking the shorter route up to the trail, the one next to the aqueduct itself. It helped to hold on to the wall of the aqueduct while climbing. I think going up is easier than coming down, especially if you are dealing with damaged elbows.

The next time we decided to go down to the river was on our way back, when we found a nicely cleared path down to the river in the section of the towpath next to the homes we had seen on out way out to the aqueduct. This foray into the woods resulted in the decision to attempt to keep walking along the riverside, using whatever rough trail we could find, for as long as we could.The risk was of having to walk back along the same rough trail if we found ourselves stuck, with no easy way to get back to the towpath from where we had reached along the river.

We had to pick our way over a narrow and very lightly used, perhaps even disused, pathway, walk over sand and pebbles in some places, and even navigate past fallen trees. If I were a child, I would have enjoyed the experience even more. Eventually, we got to a place where we had to cross a stream that passed under the canal via a culvert. Fortunately the stream was shallow enough for us to walk across.The path along the river seemed to end here. There was a path back up to the towpath on the other side of the culvert. That was the end of this particular escapade. I would be remiss if I did not post a picture of this object that we found in this section of the trail.Some of you might recognize it for what it is. It makes you wonder!

The final time we explored off-trail was when we got to the general area of the parking lot we had left our car at. We walked beyond the parking lot and up to the bridge for vehicles that went over the Potomac river, the bridge over which my friends and I had biked in order to get to our hotel in Shepherdstown one evening in 2016.Walking back to the parking lot along the riverside allowed us to see the remains of all the old bridges that used to connect the two sides of the river at this point.The railroad bridge that we had seen the freight train activity on earlier on could also be seen from the level of the river.

The off-trail activities that took place throughout the morning ended up making this a longer outing than usual. But that was not the end of the story. We also took the longer route home, taking the country roads, and driving past Harpers Ferry on the Maryland side of the river.

We were sad to see that the National Park Service had shut down the parking spots that used to exist next to the road in the section of the road next to Harpers Ferry. It will make any future attempt to climb Maryland Heights a somewhat longer effort, with much more walking involved. It is also the end of free parking if you were planning to visit Harpers Ferry itself. It is probably a good thing that they closed the parking lots. Their locations were dangerous.

That was about it for the long morning on the towpath. I had my customary PB&J sandwich for lunch, after which I attempted to take my usual Sunday nap that was needed to recover from all the activity. But this was not the usual Sunday.

Early Monday morning, we got some very sad news. It was about a death in the family. Joy Aloysius Thomas was a truly remarkable person. You do not find people like him in this world often. He was incredibly brilliant and knowledgeable. He was also an terrific human being by all measures. He was humble. He had already done so much in his life in the service of humanity, and for his fellow human beings. He would have done much more if he had not lost his life. He died young, unexpectedly. I decided to hold off on this blog until funeral services were complete.

Thanks be to Gravity (9/14/2008)

This is a highly edited version of something I wrote many years ago. These days, I am also more comfortable with adding pictures and links directly to the narrative. Ain’t technology da bomb!

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If you take the exit to Keep Tryst Road from US Route 340, (it comes up close to Harpers Ferry, just before you cross the bridge over the Potomac from Maryland into Virginia), and then follow the road all the way to the the bottom of a hill, it ends up next to tracks for the CSX railroad. At this point the road makes a U-turn and heads back up the hill to rejoin Route 340. This place next to the railroad tracks is where people park their cars to head out on hikes. The place is called Weverton. From this location you can follow the Appalachian trail (or the AT as it is fondly known) up to Weverton Cliffs, or you can cross the tracks and head down to the towpath towards either Brunswick or Harpers Ferry.

Weverton used to be real town many years ago. Very few people live in the area today. Back then an intrepid developer decided that he could harness the power of the waters of the Potomac for energy in order to develop commerce in this area. The concept did not work and one of the reasons for failure was the regular flooding of the river. I have read that you can see the remains of the old town of Weverton if you leave the towpath and head towards the river. I have not been successful in finding these ruins so far. Weverton is also a switching yard for the railroad, and the location from which a spur line used to branch off towards Hagerstown. You can still see the remains of the railroad bridge for this spur line under the bridge for Route 340.

I arrived at Weverton early in the morning before the fog had lifted to do a hike to towards Harpers Ferry and Maryland Heights. My timing for the start of the hike was perfect. As I walked towards the railroad tracks to cross over to the towpath, I sighted the headlights of the freight train through the fog. It was heading in my direction. At the point where the path crosses the railroad the tracks curve away from you and as a result you get a head-on view of the approaching train. I got a lot of pictures of the train in the fog as it switched tracks and approached rapidly. And before I knew it the engineer was blowing the horn to make sure that I did not step on to the tracks,and the train was rushing by shaking the ground under me.It was moving quite fast and even picking up speed as the freight cars thundered by, with the hundreds of metal wheels screeching like a thousand banshees as the rail cars pushed against the rails and struggled to stay on the tracks as they rounded the curve and accelerated at the same time.I stood by just next to the carriages, which seemed to be much bigger and higher than what I imagined them to be when I had seen them from a distance, and felt a rush. I was screaming but nobody could hear me.

The objective for this trip was to climb Maryland Heights on the Maryland side of the Potomac river next to Harpers Ferry. From the lookout point on Maryland Heights one gets a nice view of the town of Harpers Ferry. This hike turned out to be an unexpected mental challenge for me. I began to feel tired even as I started up the steep slope from beside the main road. Perhaps I was really not in good shape. The early part of the climb was quite strenuous and the last time I had done this was when family had visited from India, when we had walked halfway up the hill. I walked up slowly, stopping frequently, and stopping by the meadows along the way to enjoy the sight of the many white butterflies fluttering around.It was a humid morning and pretty soon I was sweating quite profusely. I did not really feel any pain but I was feeling nervous because this was the first time in a while I had pushed myself in this manner since the big event. I almost turned back at one point.

But in the end I persevered. I was going to reach my destination one way or the other, whichever destination it happened to be – the Pearly Gates (being the eternal optimist that I am) or the Scenic Overlook over the river! I made it to the latter destination feeling a sense of achievement. I spent some time taking pictures of the river and the valley below. There was a butterfly sitting in the sun on a rock that did not move even as I approached and took close-up pictures of its eyes! (There are some wonderful experiences waiting out there for you if you are willing to relax and pay attention to what is going on around you.)I ran all the way down the hill on my way back to the towpath. I wanted to sing a song – He’ll be running down the mountain when he comes! It was a nice outing and I got some pictures of some flowers and creatures that I had not seen before. A woodpecker also obliged me by landing on a tree trunk next to the trail and staying put while I took its picture.I also got some nice pictures of the fog.All in all, another excellent outing to the river!