Rock Creek Park's Hidden Valley Trail

The Forest That Swallowed the Capital: Rock Creek Park

Rock Creek Park is the most improbable thing in Washington, D.C. - 1,754 acres of forest running through the center of a city that was designed by committee and built on compromise. Pierre Charles L'Enfant did not plan for it. Congress established it in 1890, preserving a valley so deep and wooded that, standing at the bottom, you cannot see a single building, hear a single car, or remember that you are four miles from the White House.

I entered from the Boundary Bridge trailhead on the park's northern end, where Western Avenue marks the D.C.-Maryland line. The Valley Trail follows the creek south through a deciduous forest that, in October, erupts in the kind of color display that New England gets all the credit for. The tulip poplars went butter-yellow. The red maples did exactly what their name promises. And the beeches held their leaves in a pale gold that caught the filtered light and seemed to generate its own illumination.

The trail is wide and mostly flat along the creek, making it accessible in a way that the park's hillside trails are not. Rock Creek itself is a modest waterway - you could wade across it in most spots - but it works hard, tumbling over small ledges and pooling in gravel-bottomed shallows where I watched a pair of wood ducks float with the composed dignity of ambassadors at a reception.

At about the two-mile mark, I detoured east to Pulpit Rock, a large boulder perched on the hillside above the creek. The name is apt - it juts out over the valley like a preacher leaning into a sermon. From the top, the forest canopy stretches unbroken in every direction, and the only sound is the creek and a pileated woodpecker hammering at a dead snag with the enthusiasm of a drummer who has finally been given a solo.

The Valley Trail continues south past the Nature Center (worth a stop - the rangers are excellent and the bird feeders outside the windows attract a rotating cast of cardinals and tufted titmice) and on through the most densely wooded section of the park, where the trees close overhead and the trail narrows to a single track.

The full north-south walk is roughly nine miles, but the beauty of Rock Creek is its access points - you can enter and exit at dozens of cross streets, making it possible to walk as much or as little as you like. The park is open during daylight hours, and on weekends portions of Beach Drive are closed to cars, turning the road into a pedestrian boulevard.

Come in October for the color. Come in May for the wildflowers - Virginia bluebells carpet the floodplain in sheets of periwinkle. Come any day you need to be reminded that even in a city devoted to the business of power, the forest goes about its older, quieter work, indifferent to elections and entirely unconcerned with your agenda.