Seneca Creek Park – Close to Home

This time, I took a hiking trip very close to home. Seneca Creek State Park is very close to where I live. It is in Gaithersburg, Maryland, not far from where I used to work at my very first job in the early 1990s. Strangely enough, I had never been to this place before!

I went there with my friend Peter Philip, with whom I had gone to the Chesapeake Bay just the day before. The weather was beautiful again, and the place was almost empty because it was a weekday. This park, however, is in suburbia, in Gaithersburg, very close to all the hustle and bustle.

There are many trails in the park, but we went on one of the more interesting ones called the Lakeshore Trail, which winds around Clopper Lake for 3.7 miles. Clopper Lake was created artificially in 1976 (remember that there are no natural lakes in Maryland whatsoever). The trail hugs the edge of the lake, but meanders through the forest surrounding it, too. Since it is October, you could already see the first hints of fall colors…

Some branches of the trail, including one that we took, leads to an open field…

We thought that the lake was much more interesting, though, so we went back into the forest right by the lake…

I took a moment to meet a local resident of the lake…

After an hour or so, we wound our way around the entire lake and back to the parking lot. My parting shot is of a grove of evergreens right by the parking lot. I find trees like this to be beautiful in their simplicity and very elegant. These trees are also different from the others that surround the lake, if you compare them to the types you see in the other photos. This park was a welcome break for me.

Although we only saw Clopper Lake this time, the park was formed around Seneca Creek (surprise!) , which runs from Gaithersburg until it flows into the Potomac River. They say that Native Americans lived in this area 10,000 years ago, and that the earliest Native American dwelling is within the park boundaries. Later on, European colonists grew crops here. Maybe next time I visit, I can search for these historical structures. I enjoy history, but I prefer to explore small parts of parks, instead of taking on too much at one time.