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The Piedmont segment is the first sixty miles of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath, running northwest from the tidewater locks in Georgetown to Harpers Ferry. It is the busiest and most urban stretch of the canal, with paved approaches near Washington giving way to hard-packed dirt beyond Great Falls. The towpath is rail-grade flat the whole way, climbing barely two hundred feet in sixty miles as it follows the Potomac past locks, lockhouses and eleven-arch aqueducts. Great Falls Tavern, the Monocacy Aqueduct and the trail towns of Point of Rocks and Brunswick break up the ride. Beyond Harpers Ferry the Antietam segment continues toward Hancock.
C & O Canal Towpath: Piedmont
Your comfort. Prognosticated.
-Cory
In a typical year the C & O Canal Towpath: Piedmont has about 115 to 159 days of excellent weather for popular activities such as hiking, dog walking, e-biking, birding, running, biking, and walking, with April, October, and November the best months.
Hourly comfort scores for the next 15 days of weather, tuned to your activity and your own thresholds.
Plan your visit to this trail. Get the best windows for a comfortable outing.
Enjoy the C & O Canal Towpath: Piedmont!
In half of past years, color along the C & O Canal Towpath: Piedmont peaks October 29 to November 7, typically around November 2. The trail has 34% deciduous coverage, with the majority being yellow-poplar, red maple, white oak, chestnut oak, and black oak.
George Washington founded the Potowmack Company in 1785 to make the Potomac navigable. It built five skirting canals around the worst falls, good for floating down but not for hauling up. Its holdings passed to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company in 1824. President John Quincy Adams turned the first spadeful on July 4, 1828. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad broke ground the same day, and the two fought in court over the narrow riverbank between Point of Rocks and Harpers Ferry before agreeing to share it. The canal reached Cumberland on October 10, 1850, and five boats brought down 491 tons of coal that first day. The railroad had beaten it there by eight years, so the canal stopped at Cumberland and never crossed the Alleghenies. Mules towed the boats, often driven by children, and seventy-four lift locks raised them 605 feet above tidewater. An 1889 flood forced the company into receivership, and the railroad came to control it through its bonds. The March 1924 flood ended navigation. The United States acquired the canal in 1938. Justice William O. Douglas walked the whole towpath in March 1954 to stop a proposed parkway, and Congress made it a National Historical Park on January 8, 1971. This segment carries the canal's first sixty miles, from the Georgetown tidewater locks past the Great Falls of the Potomac to Harpers Ferry. Steel bands held the Monocacy Aqueduct together from Hurricane Agnes in 1972 until masons restored it in 2005.
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