A new year here in the Mid-Atlantic. It is unseasonably warm, and Jane and I start 2017 off right with a morning run in Patterson Park. Things go downhill from there, as we spend the better part of the lunch hour grilling AYCE Korean BBQ in Rockville. After lunch, we drive through the woodland community of Potomac, admiring its million-dollar homes, its multi-ethnic bent (a synagogue next to a Buddhist temple), and its picturesque golf courses just across the river from the Capital. In the late afternoon, we visit Great Falls Park, where we haven't been in over two years - not since breaking in our boots along the Billy Goat Trail and nearly dehydrating ourselves in the run-up to Shenandoah in the fall of 2014. To pacify our stomachs (our cargo containers of beef brisket), we take a casual stroll along the C&O Canal, and walk to the end of the boardwalk on Olmstead Island. In our rush to complete our hiking circuit two years ago, we somehow missed this viewpoint of the Great Falls, a series of whitewater drops formed by the Potomac River as it finishes its descent from the Piedmont plateau to the tidal Chesapeake floodplain. On the wooden viewing platform, with the sun setting to our west in Virginia, I take a series of long-exposures and wide-angle shots. A first bit of photography to ring in the year.
