This is Great Falls Park in Virginia. The Potomac is impassable at this point unless (a) you have a kayak or (b) you build a canal to get around it, as George Washington did. Today, the canal is gone but the kayakers remain.
The top photo shows Great Falls in lovely, velvety splendor thanks to a 10-second exposure time. The bottom photo is for those of you who prefer a mundane representation of reality.
If you mean the channel GW built on the Virginia side, yes it's gone but the C&O canal was saved due to conservation efforts that included Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1960s. Currently water levels are very, very low so lots of rocks visible. They are world class rapids where Olympic athletes have used the rapids to train.
I hope you brought appropriate winter gear for the visit. It was 19 degrees at my house this morning and colder still in Great Falls and other western burbs this morning.
Dunno about Warren, but I listened to a really interesting podcast the other day with Erwin Chemerinsky interviewing the author of a new book on William O Douglas' environmental activism, including trying to preserve the canal.You might be interested.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-just/id1601318587?i=1000585010664
Yes got my justices mixed up! It's a sick day, we were helping my mom through a health crisis, then realized gee you sound like you have a cold mom and one by one we all tested positive.
Yikes! Hope all feel better soon!
Thank you! My mom's getting top notch care and paxlovid luckily I have a stable job with sick leave so I crashed on the couch today. I'm hoping I wake up tomorrow feeling less bad.
The top photo is more "Kari Lake."
It is a super cool area, and the level of floods there is breathtaking! The photos and markers hardly begin to do it justice.
And LOL re: Kari Lake. 🙂
A really interesting time of the year to visit Great Falls is the rare times where it gets cold long enough to freeze the river and falls. Unfortunately that is happening less and less in winter.
Oddly, I am not sure which images I like best, (is best artistically and representative of the scene being shot). I often have strong opinions on such questions...but I like them both, both speak and that is all you can get I suppose.
My cousin could truly receive money in their spare time on their laptop. their best friend had been doing this 4 only about 12 months and by now cleared the debt. in their mini mansion and bought a great Car.
That is what we do.. https://earningblue.blogspot.com/
This spammer has been hitting other comment sections. Can nothing be done to remove it?
This is just one water fall on the Fall Line which stretches from New Jersey to Alabama. Major cities all down the east coast are right below the falls that make the rivers unnavigable along this line where the hard metamorphic rock of the continent changes to the sandy sedimentary rock of the coast. This fact and that the first falls going up river on the Mississippi are at Minneapolis have likely had a more profound effect on how the United States developed than just about anything else.
That geological change, surprisingly, also involves political change. If you look at the geological maps of the US, UK and France, you'll see the soil in which more liberal and more conservative politics grow.
(I'm not making this up. The North / South division in England is also known as the Jurassic Highway, and it's been known since Roman days.)
The photograph of 'reality' is more pleasing.
The canal as a transportation channel may be gone, but the tow path is still there and has been restored for recreational use. You can walk all the way to Georgetown, and there are still parts of the canal proper around.