Catoctin Mountain Park

Author's Comments

Catoctin does not announce itself. You drive up from Thurmont through farmland that gives no indication of what the ridge is holding, and then the trail climbs through hemlock so dense and dark that the temperature actually drops a few degrees as you walk. These are old trees. The ravines they grow in have the hushed quality of places that have been left alone for a long time, and the light comes through in vertical shafts that shift as the canopy moves. Chimney Rock is the destination, and it earns the climb. The outcrop sits above a wide bowl of forest that turns in mid-October into something I find hard to describe without reaching for words I try not to use. The color is layered and uneven, running from the valley floor up the far ridge in waves, and in late afternoon the light rakes across it at an angle that picks out the texture of the canopy itself. A wide lens works here. A longer lens works too, if you want to pull out the small scenes within the larger one - a single sugar maple going orange against the hemlock green, a rock face catching the last warm light. The crowds never really arrive. Even on a good fall weekend I have had the outcrop almost to myself in the last hour before sunset, which in this park is the hour that matters most. Stay until the valley goes blue. The walk back down through the hemlocks in near-dark is its own quiet reward.

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