2025-06-29 39 -77

Location

Just within Patuxent River State Park.

Participants

Plans

27 June 2025: planning on grabbing this one Sunday. Will check off ~~Howard~~ Montgomery County for the graticule. I'll probably park up at the lot off Route 94, walk along the creek, go up the hill, cross the field, and pop into the treeline.

Expedition

The day was boiling hot, but the roads were clear (enough) and the bike was running well (enough). The trip up the state park was uneventful, apart from a stop for critical electrolyte restoration vittles (a bag of potato chips).

After pulling into the parking lot off MD-94 - half a mile from the hash - I checked the map again. This hash was in the wrong direction (by a mile or two) to be reached via the "official" trails of the state park, but OpenStreetMap handily outlined two unofficial (what the Maryland Department of Natural Resources calls "social") trails that went about half-way to the hash. I was banking on these marked trails leading to clearings or openings that I could use to get to the grassy hill on which the hash was perched - or, at the very least, get me to a walkable bank of the Patuxent River I could follow to the southeast.

Unfortunately, that was not to be the case.

I went down all the way to the river on the mostly-present southern social trail... and hit a dead end. I poked around in some clearings to the river, and got a little further along the river before the impenetrable high summer undergrowth convinced me to throw in the towel down here. I could have maybe done it with a machete - but that seems contrary to the purpose of a state park. This is where I got as close to the hash as I ever did: 0.29 miles.

I headed back up the trail about half way. The plant growth here was a little smaller, but only to the degree that I could see a little better how hopeless my predicament was. Way off in the distance I could see the open field... beyond about a third of a mile of solid undergrowth taller than me.

Walking back up the trail, I saw some neat ruins I hadn't noticed on the way down - a chimney sitting near a collapsed basement and some cinderblock foundation walls. In a last-ditch attempt, I tried to go up north along the trail (which followed a clearing cut for some electrical wires) and find a long way round. This had some cruel promise early on - I went through a pine tree farm area and hooked pretty far around to the northwest of the hash, all the way down into a small gully, before the trail petered out again into solid undergrowth. I finally gave up and returned to the bike coated in sweat, cut up in a couple places, and quite possibly with a tick on me.