We went up to Catoctin Mountain Park (near Thurmont, MD just off of RT 15) today to hike some of the trails. Here's a link to the website: Catoctin Mountain park
Pam has been up here a lot and likes hiking in the park. We left the rangers station and headed up the mountain to Wolf Rock. What a trail!!! The first .4/mile was pretty much straight up! Not rock climbing straight up, but the trail is pretty steep. Whew, I knew I was out of shape, but damn!!!! We took a break at the first intersection of trails and then after I had caught my breath, headed on. The next section was still steep, but not as bad as the first section. At the next intersection, we rested again and only had about .5mile left to go. The trail actually leveled off and even went downhill for a bit. Then we came to it: Wolf Rock!
From the trail Wolf Rock is just a solid rock wall that is about 30-40 feet high. Follow the rock to the right for just a bit and you come to a section where you can climb up to the top of the rock. This is really cool! The rock is an exposed ridge of quartzite rock. You can see where slabs of the rock are braking off and separating. The rock is about 200 million years old!!!! We walked around on the top of the ridge for a while and got a couple of pictures (note to self....take the camera next time...the iPhone just doesn't cut it!)
Anyway, after our time on Wolf Rock we started back to the ranger station. Along the way we missed a left turn and ended up walking a loooooonnnnggggg circle around to the station. We did get to see the Thurmont Vista and it's view of the town of Thurmont, MD. Pretty cool. Also, the walk was a bit easier than the other trail would have been. The down side (I made a funny!!) was that this added an extra 1.5 miles to our total walk. If we had gone up and back on the same trail we would have walked about 3 miles total. With the extended walk, we actually did a little over 4.5 miles! Whew!!!
Anyway, it was way fun and a good workout. Came home and had some lunch and then a nap!! If you live near Catoctin Mountain, you need to head on up, walk the trails and see the sights!! Next time we are going to Cunningham Falls. Oh, and as a side bar, part of the park was closed off today due to......the fact that President Obama was at Camp David!! That's right, Camp David sits right in the middle of the park!
If you don't know where Catoctin Mountain is....well you can Google it or just to give you a general idea, it is right off RT 15 at Thurmont, MD. That is about 1/2 way between Frederick, MD and Gettysburg, PA.
Well, that's it for this adventure......see you soon with a new story to tell!!
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