For the vast majority of posts on this blog, I’ve avoided
posts about work. Sure they work their
way in from time to time, as they did when I traveled more often – see the "road
trips" label, where I wrote about my Japan trip or my last Yosemite trip, for
example; but still it’s an infrequent occasion.
And I would never have expected to do something blog-worthy at my current
position, as a program manager on a construction site…
We have started working in earnest on some storm water
management concerns, and for two or three months we’ve known that we were going
to have to follow our watershed channels down to the C&O Canal and the
Potomac. That day finally came a few
weeks ago on a Friday – we’d planned ahead so we could dress appropriately for
a hike into the woods and potentially into some muddy areas.
Our plan was to walk the canal towpath to see if
we could
find any locations where our streams might have crossed under the canal. Some historical resources say that when they
designed the canal, their plan was to cross over streams rather than
incorporating them into the waterway. We
walked for a kilometer or so and didn’t find any features of that sort.
From Google Earth we had seen that the natural route of our
channel entered the Potomac just downstream of the Little Falls Dam and pumping station, in
the little waterway that is set up as a kayak course. After we had explored the towpath, we walked
down into those areas, but we literally came up dry in our search for an
outfall.
Our next stop was to drive up to Glen Echo Park to see if we
might hike back into the canal area with more success of finding our
objectives, but the whole property there is fenced in, so we had no
success. We did enjoy a brief walk through
there, and I took a photo or two of the carousel. By coincidence, we met some of the NPS
employees that we have been working with on this project and had a good chat
with them about the project and its potential impacts.
We went back downstream and parked near Lock 7, again
walking a short way down the towpath to get a sense of whether our outfalls
passed under the canal – we didn’t find any evidence of this, but it was
interesting to check out the old lock houses as we walked by them. Apparently, if you are a brave soul, you can
stay in these facilities overnight.
Eventually we found what we were looking for, but we had to
bushwhack a parking place and then go into some brush. Our outfall runs down a steep hillside in the
Palisades, and runs into a culvert, through a tunnel, and then exits after
passing under Canal Road. The culvert
dumps onto a paved streambed, and then goes into a plunge pool to take its
velocity down; then it finally makes its way into the canal.
Our mission was accomplished at last, after a total of about 2 miles of walking with negligible altitude changes. We had found the route of our stormwater and
the location where it enters the canal, although we didn’t expect to find
exactly that scenario. We were able to
take a look at the condition of our stream and make some judgments on the work
we need to do upstream in order to manage our runoff. That is going to be a fun part of the project
coming up.
By the way, there is a NPS link here with the official
information about the C&O Canal National Historic Park: http://www.nps.gov/choh/index.htm
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