C&O Camping Trip No. 2: This One Ends in Failure

Over the next year, I'm going to try to camp at as many of the bike-in campgrounds at the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park as I possibly can. I already went once but didn't write about it.



There were plenty of reasons not to go camping today. Good reasons. Like the wind advisory that warned of "REPEATED SURGES OF ARCTIC ORIGIN AIR" or the Capital Weather Gang's forecast of "wind chills in the teens or 20s." Or the fact that I spent yesterday flying home from Scotland, where it was warmer.

But the thing is, I had planned this.

One of my worst attributes at home is one of my best attributes at work: If I plan something long enough, I have to get it done. Not done well, necessarily.

At 8:30 I headed out with about 25 pounds of gear on my bike, all on the rear wheel, because I still haven't managed to commit to a front rack. This is a stupid way to go on long rides under the best of conditions, but it's particularly moronic when there are patches of ice on the ground. Not only do you increase your risk of flat tires, but under the right conditions the back of your bike can fishtail. Whatever. My wife and kids are still overseas, and another chance to do something utterly selfish and stupid might not present itself for many months.

But there were only two patches of ice on the Virginia portion of my ride, which takes me along the Four Mile Run trail, then up the Mount Vernon trail to Memorial Bridge. I just walked along them, ringing my bell so the dozens of Canada geese that have laid claim to the area would scatter.

Far less manageable was the wind. This led me to an epiphany!

Cold is something you can deal with. I was exquisitely layered and even a little warm for the first 10 miles of my trip. There's not a lot you can do about wind though except hope for the best. Since I didn't make a New Year's resolution, I thought that a fine one would be to do a better job discerning which problems I could address and which I had to just try to muddle through.

A few minutes later I realized I'd just pedaled my way into the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer.

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I stopped at Fletcher's Boat House for a snack, then rode off the smooth and lovely Capital Crescent Trail and onto the C&O towpath. The hardpack gravel on the towpath is just one of the signs that this is a park that celebrates anachronism. Originally a trade route linking Cumberland, Md., to Washington, the canal lost what remained of its barge traffic in 1924. Flooding and disuse returned the canal to nature, but in 1938 the federal government bought the canal from B&O Railroad (which acquired the land through the bankruptcy of the C&O Canal Company) and began rehabilitating the area, a project that lost momentum during World War II.

The park's second great anachronism was that it was saved, in a roundabout way, by an editorial in the Washington Post. On Jan. 3, 1954, the paper threw its support to a plan to turn the land into a highway. (I haven't been able to dig up the item yet but will throw it up after I hit the microfiche.)

United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas took exception.

"It is a refuge, a place of retreat, a long stretch of quiet and peace at the Capitol's back door-a wilderness area where we can commune with God and with nature, a place not yet marred by the roar of wheels and the sound of horns," he wrote the paper. Then it got interesting.

"I wish the man who wrote your editorial of January 3, 1954, approving the parkway would take time off and come with me," Douglas wrote. "We would go with packs on our backs and walk the 185 miles to Cumberland."

Two months later, the author of the editorial, whose name I stupidly didn't write down when I saw it on a historical marker, and his editor (ditto) accompanied Douglas, the environmentalist Sigur F. Olson (who'd later help write the Wilderness Act), and 50 others on a trek through the canal grounds. They left Cumberland on March 20 and emerged in Georgetown eight days later.

Douglas was hardly John Muir--of his opinions, a 2003 Post book review that I found on an Arlington Cemetery fan site (don't laugh! Not every city has movie stars!) said "it's often hard to avoid the suspicion that they were scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin." Douglas was a drinking man, but he was also a fabulist and a womanizer who kept secretary-and-flight-attendant-bonking quarters near the court. In another anachronism, it never seemed to occur to him that this behavior might menace his presidential ambitions.

But the hike worked. The Post turned, and in 1971, the strip of land that Douglas called "a refuge, a place of retreat, a long stretch of quiet and peace at the Capitol's back door" in his letter became a national park.

It's just over 30 square miles in total area but 185 miles long, and in almost every part of it I've been in you can see its east and west borders. Certainly in the lower portions at least, Douglas' reverie about a place "not yet marred by the roar of wheels and the sound of horns" is undercut by cars hauling ass on MacArthur Boulevard NW and later the Clara Barton Parkway a few hundred feet away.

It's also heavily used, at least the portions close to the District, where type-As jog in rain storms and, apparently, wind advisories. But not too many of them--until mile 14.3, where people can park and stroll in to see Great Falls.

By that point I was struggling--the trail was a lot icier than I'd expected, and I had to portage over a lot of it. Miles 10-12 were particularly grim. Getting to mile 26, where I wanted to camp at Horsepen Branch, was looking ever more challenging.

At 1  I stopped to eat lunch near the Great Falls Tavern Visitor Center, planting myself on a bench that overlooked a sign warning that there was to be no trespassing on the U.S. government land behind it. On an overlook I saw a dam of some sort behind the sign, but I don't know if that's what was protected. Certainly there are weird little structures in this part of the park, like a concrete box rising like a submarine periscope in one of the parts of the canal that still has water in it, or another that looks suspiciously like a vent for an underground structure closer to D.C.

For the first time,  I thought seriously about turning back. The cough I'd perfected in Scotland wasn't responding to the fresh air the way I'd hoped, and despite the slow pace the trail was forcing on me, I figured I'd get to Horsepen Branch by 3 at the latest, which left what might be an agonizing period of not much to do but lie in my tent reading Don Quixote and hoping the wind didn't blow me into Germantown in the night. Moreover, I'd had an irritating equipment failure--my front derailleur had stopped lifting the chain onto the big ring, so on the rare occasions I encountered a stretch of path I could really wail on, I had to stop and move the chain by hand.

I decided to continue up to Swains Lock, where I'd camped a couple months ago, have a conceptually satisfying cup of coffee, and decide what to do next.

Before I turned into the campground, I peered at the trail ahead, which was covered in ice as far as I could see. I nevertheless went down near the river and set up my camp stove, a tiny Esbit that may not ever cook me a chicken but does a marvelous job heating pans of water and canned chili. When I was waiting for a ride home from Dulles the day before, I'd called REI to see if it was open--I wanted to make sure I had enough fuel for the Esbit. It was, even though it was New Year's Day (USA! USA!), and in a clearance rack I'd found a to-go cup that doubled as a french press. I also bought a sharp orange match case; my strike anywhere matches, I figured, wouldn't need the box, a weight savings of potentially 1 gram.

This was not a smart move. The wind was really picking up by now, and the only non-wet surfaces at Swains Lock were on the iron fire rings, which tended to remove 10-12 match heads for every one it ignited, briefly, only to be gusted out before I could get the Esbit cube going. When I'd blown through all but three of the matches in the orange case, I settled on a new resolution, one I'm more comfortable with as I get older: Plans can change.