BGuthrie Photos: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park

VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] GFALVA_031110_003_STITCH.JPG

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[2] GFALVA_031110_005.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] GFALVA_031110_017.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[4] GFALVA_031110_024.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[5] GFALVA_031110_031.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[6] GFALVA_031110_073.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[7] GFALVA_031110_080.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[8] GFALVA_031110_089.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[9] GFALVA_031110_098.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[10] GFALVA_031110_104.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[11] GFALVA_031110_108.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[12] GFALVA_031110_116.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[13] GFALVA_031110_124.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[14] GFALVA_031110_133.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[15] GFALVA_031110_142.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[16] GFALVA_031110_147.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[17] GFALVA_031110_163.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[18] GFALVA_031110_166.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[19] GFALVA_031110_176.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[20] GFALVA_031110_222.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[21] GFALVA_031110_223.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[22] GFALVA_031110_243.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[23] GFALVA_031110_249.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[24] GFALVA_031110_251.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. GFALVA_031110_005.JPG: Mill Site. The stonework here is all that remains of a mill erected in the 1790's by Samuel Briggs. It was unusual in that its millrace was fed from the canal rather than directly from the river.
2. GFALVA_031110_017.JPG: This area floods a fair amount. This marker shows flood levels for the 1900's only. The ranger showed various pictures from the 1936 flood, which wiped out the amusement park which had been here, as well as from the more recent 1996 flood.
3. GFALVA_031110_024.JPG: Look for little people on the far left shore
4. GFALVA_031110_031.JPG: The Patowmack Canal 1785-1828 This canal, skirting the 76-foot drop of the Great Falls of the Potomac, was the most demanding and complex of the five canals built by the Patowmack Company. The company was founded by George Washington on May 17, 1785 to improve the Potomac River for access and trade with the western frontier. The agreement that was developed between Maryland and Virginia to share the river for their common purpose led to further meetings -- Annapolis (1786) and Philadelphia (1787) and to [the] drafting of the U.S. Constitution.
5. GFALVA_031110_073.JPG: Holding Basin Since entering the woods, you have been walking through what was the holding basin of the Patowmack Canal. Water held here by wooden gates was used to fill the locks for boats locking through.
6. GFALVA_031110_080.JPG: Lock No 1. Largest in the canal system, this lock is 14 feet wide and 100 feet long, and is faced with Seneca stone. The lock could raise or lower boats 10 feet. This was the first of 5 locks on the Great Falls portion of the Patowmack Canal. Used from 1802 to 1828, they lifted or lowered riverboats the 75 feet that the river drops in going over the falls. [There were five locks. This, the first one, dropped 10 feet. The second dropped 16 feet. At the very end, there are three locks back-to-back which drop 14, 18, and 18 feet.]
7. GFALVA_031110_098.JPG: There were three locks in this section of the canal. The cut in the rock is man-made, with the rock being blasted away by black powder, an engineering achievement of its time.
8. GFALVA_031110_104.JPG: This is Mather Gorge. This section of the river was named for the first superintendent of the National Park System.
9. GFALVA_031110_116.JPG: Locks 2 and 3 looking up at them. All of this had to be dug by hand and explosives through solid rock.
10. GFALVA_031110_142.JPG: A rock climber prepares for his descent
11. GFALVA_031110_163.JPG: The horizontal line at the top of the water is a redirector which takes water from the Potomac and sends it through underground chambers to water treatment facilities and then onto Washington DC. From http://www.potomacriver.org/info_center/Reporter_Archive/reporterv544.htm -- the Potomac Basin Reporter comes the information on the history of the aqueduct: The construction of the Washington Aqueduct started in 1852 under the supervision of Lieutenant Montgomery C. Meigs of the Corps of Engineers to furnish water to the District of Columbia. With funding from Congress, the aqueduct was completed and went into operation in 1859. The process starts with a dam that stretches across the Potomac at Great Falls, north of Washington. At that intake point, water flows by gravity through nine miles of original brick conduits to the Dalecarlia Water Treatment Plant where mud and other sediments in the water are allowed to settle for 1� days. Once the mud has settled, the water is filtered, chemically treated, purified and for use by consumers. The sludge is returned to the river at times of high flow. The Dalecarlia Plant supplies water to the District of Columbia, Falls Church, Va., and Arlington, Va. On a darker side, a Wall Street Journal editorial from September 4, 2002 contained this interesting information: We're talking about the Washington Aqueduct, a treatment facility that provides drinking water to about a million residents. In purifying that water, the Aqueduct creates thousands of tons of chemically treated sludge a year. What happens to that goo? Well, the Army Corps of Engineers dumps it into the storied Potomac River, in the dead of night, including via the C&O Canal National Park. The Wilderness Institute has now filed suits saying this violates both the Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts. Let's be clear: No other city on the East Coast is permitted to dump toxic sludge in its waterways. Other than a few special-circumstance facilities in the Midwest, no city in the nation is allowed this practice. The Corps gets away with it only because Mother Nature's guardians at the Environmental Protection Agency keep issuing special discharge permits; the EPA has just closed the comment period for a new one. What will that new permit mean? In reports filed to the EPA, the Corps has admitted dumping as much as 241,500 milligrams of suspended solids per liter into the river. The maximum allowed limit for most states is around 30. ... The big picture here is that the nation's powerful are only too happy to insist that everyone else obey burdensome environmental rules while they ignore them. There was talk of revoking the special D.C. permit in 1995. But residents of Northern Virginia refused to pay $60 million for an upgraded water-treatment facility. And homeowners in the Palisades district near Georgetown, home to denizens of Capitol Hill, went into lobby overdrive to stop trucks from hauling the sludge through their upscale neighborhood.
12. GFALVA_031110_222.JPG: Guard Gate This gate controlled the flow of river water into the canal. When closed, it sent water back to the river via a bypass stream. Opposite is one wall of the canal. Its top was the towpath, used by boat crews (not animals) to pull the boats along.
13. GFALVA_031110_223.JPG: Head of Canal. Here, river water entered the Great Falls portion of the Patowmack Canal. ... [In the river itself, there is] a rock wall (wing dam) built out into the river to funnel as much water as possible into the canal during low water. From here, a trail parallels the canal most of the way to where it rejoins the river 3/4 mile downstream.
14. GFALVA_031110_243.JPG: Various buzzards love this place
15. GFALVA_031110_249.JPG: That's a heron down there
16. GFALVA_031110_251.JPG: The wood up there was left during Hurricane Isabel in 2003 when water levels rose quite a bit.
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AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Great Falls Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Great Falls Park is a small National Park Service (NPS) site in Virginia, United States. Situated on 900 acres (3.65 km�) along the banks of the Potomac River, the park is a disconnected but integral part of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The Great Falls of the Potomac River are near the northern boundary of the park, as are the remains of the Patowmack Canal, the first canal in the United States that used locks to raise and lower boats.

History:

Native American petroglyphs have been discovered within the park on cliffs overlooking Difficult Run.

The Patowmack Canal, which George Washington partially funded, was a one-mile (1.6 km) bypass canal that began operating in 1785 to give small barges the opportunity to skirt around the falls and to distribute manufactured goods upstream and raw materials downsteam. The park visitor center has the bottom portions of two wooden canal lock gates excavated in the 1980s from the canal. The gates survived from at least the 1830s and were found during restoration projects on stonework which were erected for the canal locks. Stone mason marks found on the stones are unique to each artisan and are identical to some found in foundation stones of the White House and the U.S. Capitol.

During the construction of the canal, blasting powder, which at the time was essentially gunpowder, was used to blast through solid rocks. This is one of the first known examples of blasting powder being used for engineering purposes anywhere in the world. The canal was never a profitable enterprise. With the completion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal on the opposite side of the river, and the oncoming age of railroads, the project was abandoned in 1830. The canal is a Civil Engineering Landmark as well as a Virginia Historic Landmark. Along the trails, the ruins of the small town of Matildaville can also be found.

Between 1906 and 1932, the Great Falls and Old Dominion R ...More...
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Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2018_VA_Great_FallsVA: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park (75 photos from 2018)
- 2012_VA_Great_FallsVA: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park (88 photos from 2012)
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Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Natural Beauty] [Park (National Park Service)]
2003 photos: Trips this year: Three-week trip this year out west, mostly in Utah. Equipment this year: I decided my Epson digital camera wasn't quite enough for what I wanted. Since I already had Compact Flash chips for it, I had to find another camera which used CF chips. That brought me to buy the Fujifilm S602 Zoom in March 2003. A great digital camera, I used it exclusively for an entire year. Number of photos taken this year: 68,000.
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