park 19 – leesylvania
With the holidays and work and weather and life and stuff, it’s been four months since I added a new state park to my Trail Quest list. I figured I ought to do something about that, so while the rest of the family (all of them fighting some sort of bug that’s let me alone thus far) slept, I got on the road before the sun and headed about 90 miles north to Leesylvania State Park in Woodbridge.
I arrived shortly before 8am, hitting the Potomac and Lee’s Woods trails, a few extra spurs, and some additional walking to take a photo or two, and find a long stick to retrieve my phone when I tripped and dropped it from a bridge onto a thankfully frozen pond after shooting the photo above. The whole place had about four inches of snow on it, which is a novelty, since we’ve been too far south to get much of anything here in the RVA metro. The hiking was pleasant, and I stopped counting bald eagles after I’d seen more than a dozen of them.
I’d actually tried to check this one off a couple of times over the summer when I visited the other NoVA parks, but during the summer, by virtue of it’s smaller size and proximity to a whole bunch of people in the DC suburbs, it fills up really quickly, to the point that they’re turning folks away by 10m most summer weekends. I can see why folks like it so much in the summer; the water’s quite nice, and it’s ideal for launching boats, though I thought it was perfectly suitable for a sub-zero hike on a January morning.
One more, and I’m halfway to hitting ’em all.
