Rusty5329

I just recently started training for a ride from DC to Asheville, NC along the Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway and as part of my training I am doing at least one overnight ride each month.

I left to ride up the C&O Canal on Sunday. I could tell that the water level was high, but I did not realize how high until I got about 30 miles up and saw this campsite:





Another ten miles or so and I came across this campsite:



I rode just north of Calico Rocks and found the campsite there completely flooded. I remembered one a few miles back that seemed fine, so I backtracked to it. You had to ride through a couple inches of water to get to the campsite (that should have been a warning sign for me).

As I was setting up camp, another rider, Peter, showed up and we got to work building a fire then chatted over some food.

At 2:30am something woke me up. I heard something that sounded like bubbling, so I peeked outside of my tent. To my surprise, there was water on the ground. Not just a little water, two inches of it. I was in the river. I quickly hopped out of my tent with a flashlight to evaluate the scene.

Not good. My bike was in worse condition over by the picnic table in about one or two feet of water. After some cursing and muttering (enough that I was fairly sure I had awoken Peter) I said something like "Dude, we're getting flooded."

We looked around and saw some some dry land right near us, but we were worried that the water was still rising (you could actually see it flowing in towards shore). To get back to the canal towpath, we would have to wade through waste-high water. We started unstaking our tents. That's when I noticed that tons of spiders had seemingly fled the waters to the safety of my tent. There I am, in the middle of the night, with spiders all over me, trying to hold my tent (with sleeping bag and mat still inside it) above my head, with a flashlight in my mouth, waste-deep in water. It was both hilarious and terrible at the same time. A few more trips and I would have almost all my gear there. Both of us had left a thing or two behind.

The towpath wasn't exactly comfortable to sleep on, but it was three or four feet above the water level, so we felt safe. By 7:00am, when I woke up, the water had risen another two or three feet. I marked the level of the water with a rock so I could monitor it as I made some hot coco and scouted the area. North and south of us, the water had crested the towpath.

Here are some pictures of the crime scene. My tent had originally been on the other side of this picnic table:



The path north of us:


The path south of us (the water is actually cresting from the canal to the river which was strange looking):


Saw this guy swimming through our former campsite. Was glad not to have seen one of these at 2:30am while wading through the water!


You can see in this picture how far away the normal water line is (no, trees don't normally grow in the river in Maryalnd)


Peter took this picture of me. I marked where the picnic table is so you can see how flooded our campsite was. Remember, our tents were on the other side of that picnic table.


With only one mile to go to get to Point of Rocks, we figured that would be our best option. As we were packing, a ranger drove by heading north and confirmed that. Maybe ten miles south, the path was entirely impassable. The ranger informed us that some boy scouts had needed rescuing, a story we learned more about in the news when we made it home (link).
You'd think some boyscouts could put a raft together! That's something I actually considered trying to do when I realized I had left my hammock hanging at the campsite. I decided it was worth the 10 or 15 bucks to get a new one not to have to go to the trouble of getting this one back. My gift to you Calico Rocks campsite.

Before leaving, the ranger came back. The road to Point of Rocks was too flooded for his jeep. He told us there was a small bridge under construction we could take to get to the city and off the path. The construction workers were kind enough to help us lift our bikes over the fence.

At Point of Rocks, Peter called his wife who drove over an hour to come pick us up. While waiting, we got some delicious breakfast food at Kerrigans Corner Deli.

Here they are loading my bike on their car.



It is always tough to drive away from a bike tour, but hey, a bike tour you can drive away from is better than one where they have to send a helicopter out for you! And Peter added me to his email group with other bikers in the area, so I might have gotten some new touring partners out of it.

badger_biker 

Thanks for sharing your experience and all the photos - glad you got out OK. I've never been that far up the C&O but have been around Great Falls after hurricane remnamt rainfall and know the Potomac can really swell.

FunkyStickman

That is nuts! Glad you made it out okay...

Rusty5329

@badger_biker You should really try to make further up some point, it's very nice everywhere I've been (this trip was the furthest I've riden on it). I really want to do the full 184 miles to cumberland soon. Hopefully spring or early summer if I can afford the time.

Tansy

I don't envy you for having to get up in the middle of the night and ferry your gear across deep water, but damn - great story, cool pictures.

n3vqh

Wow ... I was just over at a buddy's house planning our late summer ride... but we are hotel/moteling it so hopefully we won't run into that with a hurricane. Great story and glad it had a happy ending all around.

Glad to see your camera didn't get wet...

What tires are those on the bike?

Mike

Yan 

I've woken up in the morning to find my tent in a few centimetres of water, but never anything like this. Don't forget to repack your bearings if they were underwater.

iforgotmename

If you go to Cumberland do yourself a favor and climb up to the divide, there are some great sights up there. PLus the ride down is fun.

Glad you guys are ok...great story to have though.

naisme

Great story!
Looking forward to this on my trip. Been watching the weather, wondering what May will be bring, it snowed here this morning, fun riding in it, cause it wasn't sticking to the trail. Going to have to camping in this stuff.

eofelis 

That was crazy!
Thanks for posting the great pictures though.

Neil_B

Thank God you and your friend were OK! What a close call.

Philly Tandem

Interesting pics and story, and I'm glad you are ok! Not to be mean, but I gotta say: what were you thinking? You rode past several flooded campsites, had to ride through "a couple inches of water" to get to the campsite, etc., but still camped right next to an obviously flooding river. It could have turned out much worse, or caused other people to have to take risks to come rescue you.

Rusty5329

That wasn't mean at all, just true. I don't know what I was thinking. Part of me, I guess, thought the water couldn't get any higher than it already was (incredibly stupid), and part me thought the storms recently had been light (they hadn't been light an hour or so away and upriver). Part of me didn't know where to go, the camps north and south of me were even closer to the water level, you aren't allowed to camp outside of the campsites, and I wouldn't have the faintest clue of where I could legally stealth-camp outside of the park. None of those are good excuses for what could have been a more dangerous situation (and was for several others). At the least, we should have been closely monitoring the water level to see if it was rising or lowering before going to sleep. I'm sure that if we had done that we would have seen that the water was rising and moved to higher ground before hitting the sack.

Neil_B

Reminds me of the flood stories in one of my favorite 'outdoors' books, Death in Grand Canyon. The authors ran some stats on every known and presumed accidental or violent death in the Canyon and came to the conclusion that the bulk of them could have been prevented had men employed common sense.

Neil_B

How was riding on the towpath itself? It gets pretty bad even when the river isn't at flood stage.

Rusty5329

The towpath wasn't bad at all. The thing was, it hadn't rained all that much near DC, so the towpath wasn't flooded until water came up from the river (unlike how it normally ends up a swamp after a hard rain). Passing the White's Ferry area the water had been up near towpath, which means it was several feet under water by the next morning.

Neil_B

Potomac flooding isn't that uncommon:



Harpers Ferry in 1889. And in 1996:

Philly Tandem

Wow, that 1996 pic of Harpers Ferry is amazing! (And scary.)

Rusty5329

On the Virginia side of Great Falls, they have a marker for all the floods they've had. '96 was real high.

Mardmakarm

What an experience!Glad that you guys made it back safety.

meutley

Wow. I rode the path three years ago in heavy rain, and we had no flooding of any kind. Glad you made it out.

alan s 

Whites Ferry has high water marks high up the building. The river floods on occasion. Great Falls is quite a sight when it becomes one giant rapids, rather than falls.

Bezalel

You forgot to mention that these markings are on the second floor.

Bezalel

This pic was taken the day after Hurricane Irene, lots of downed trees (no pics from the towpath) but no flooding.

at_hiker59

Nice write up. It was a good wake up call to know where we are camping and to keep on checking the weather.