Hiking

Last Saturday, I took J. to the BWI airport for a morning flight. We were there by 6:15 a.m., for a 7:30 departure, i.e. we had to get out of bed around 4:00 that morning. The logical thing for me to do, once I dropped her off, would have been to drive back home and climb back into bed, but figuring that my sleep was already destroyed, I headed West out of Baltimore to Frederick, stopped for some breakfast, then headed North to the Catoctin Mountain Park for my first hike of the year.

Catoctin has the bad fortune of being next door to Camp David, so whenever POTUS is anywhere in the vicinity, Park Service closes a large section of the park so that the Marine detail assigned to guard Camp David can sweep through the woods continuously until the Chief Executive is safely back on his helicopter and headed home to the White House. Normally, these closures are announced on the NPS web site, but as luck would have it, for one reason or another they didn't this time, so I showed up to find at least 80% of the park off limits. Enough was still open, however. I was not able to hike to Hog Rock (my original plan), but I managed to stay in the woods for about three hours, cover about six or seven miles and see two beautiful overlooks.

The terrain was surprisingly barren and wintry. Down here, everything is pretty much green already, but up there, a scant 65 miles North, there was only the barest sign of new leaves peeking tentatively out of their buds on one or two species of tree. As seen from the trail, the rolling hills of Frederick County were a uniform brown, like some gargantuan, cosmic groundhogs sprawled upon the earth. At the same time, however, the bugs were rampant, especially at higher elevations. I did not expect so many until sometime in May, but here they were. Nevertheless, it was nice to wander through the woods for a few hours, and the early morning hour made for mercifully few other hikers – I met only two.