Last week I talked with my friend Joe, whos an avid hiker, and he asked if I had ever hiked the Potomac Heritage trail. Nope, hadn’t even heard of it. So he invited me for a Saturday morning hike along the Potomac overlooking Georgetown in DC.
The hike began at the parking lot of Roosevelt Island, right off the George Washington Parkway. This place was SWAMPED on a Saturday morning, but it seemed that every few minutes someone was pulling out and someone else was pulling in. Frankly I think we got lucky in finding a spot, but we did.
The trail runs along the Potomac river allowing some wonderful views of Georgetown. It is 10 miles in length, but me and Joe were meeting friends later in the day so we made it an in and back route of about 6 miles total.
At the start of this trail it is smack dab between the Potomac river and the Parkway, this causes for a bit of a sound overload from all the cars. But within a short distance the Parkway curves away and you loose the sound of the passing cars. This is shortly after the Key Bridge and a great place to get a view of Georgetown.
The trail remains fairly flat during our hike, but there are several streams that you have to traverse and some rocky areas that require some minor scrambling. I think one of the things that caught me off guard the most was simply the lack of people. After seeing that packed parking lot I had expected the trail to have a bunch of people, but me and Joe had it pretty much to ourselves the entire trip. There were about 3 runners and the rest were dogs and their owners, all told about 10 people over a 3 hour hike. In fact we probably saw as many people on Kayaks and Canoes in the water as we did hikers on the trail.
During our short time on the trail we passed by 2.5 waterfalls. Yeah, it would have been 3, but with so little water to power it, it was more a wailing wall. Still all were nice and definately at any of these you would look west and see the waterfall and to the east you have the river and forested shore. At this point there was no way to tell that you were so close to civilization, much less the seat of power for Western Civilization.
If you travel much on the east coast, specifically southward, you will see the ever encroaching menace of Kudzu. This alien vine is slowly taking over and engulfing all our natural plants, growing at a rate that outpaces pretty much everything else. I had not seen its presence along any of the other trails, but this one was ripe with it. Hopefully someone will find a way to fight it soon before we start loosing our regional plants.
It was a good hike and certainly the type of hidden gem that you can find in DC. In fact, the start of the trail is not very far from a Metro stop. Will have to check for more like this in the near future.