Seneca Creek State Park

Author's Comments

What surprises me about Seneca Creek is how quickly the suburbs fall away. You park your car within sight of a Gaithersburg subdivision, walk fifteen minutes down the Great Seneca Trail, and the world goes quiet in a way that does not seem geographically possible. The reservoir unspools beside the path, long and serpentine, and on a still April morning it holds the trees upside down with almost no distortion. April is when I come. The bottomland floods with wildflowers in a way that rewards getting low and close - spring beauties, trout lilies, the occasional bloodroot if you know where to look. The canopy is still mostly bare, which means the light reaches the forest floor in ways it will not again until November, and the understory glows in a soft green that photographs better than it has any right to. I walk slowly here. The reservoir is the obvious subject, and the reflections are genuinely good in the first hour after sunrise when the wind has not picked up. But I find the forest interior more interesting - the bluffs rising from the water, the filtered light, the sense that the park is larger and wilder than a map of Montgomery County would suggest. It is not a dramatic landscape. It rewards attention rather than announcement. Come with a macro lens and a willingness to kneel in damp leaves, and the park will give you something the crowded places cannot.

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