Great Falls National Park

I'm home. Poker playing and blogging will resume soon.

In the meantime, let me show you a bit of Great Falls National Park, where Cardgrrl took me Monday. It's a beautiful place. Unfortunately, my photographs don't do it justice. None is even good enough to feature here as an especially good one or a favorite, as I have been doing with my vacation photos in recent months. But you can see what the place looks like in the photos here.

Maybe the most impressive thing I saw--though it looks completely pedestrian in the picture--is the marker showing the flood levels over the last hundred years. It's impressive because that marker stands at least 50 yards laterally away from the current river, and at least 50 feet above it. It's truly hard to imagine the volume of water it would take to overflow that gorge and spill out into the park. And when it does, there is no other natural barrier to contain it for a few hundred yards out--that is, in order for the water to be that high, it's also going to be amazingly wide. I wouldn't want to be there during such a flood.

In the park you can also see remnants of the lock system built by a company that George Washington founded, in an attempt to get shipping around the falls. Pretty impressive engineering for 200+ years ago.

I took a short video of the main part of the falls, embedded below:





Oh, those gorgeous orange and purple flowers in the next-to-last picture in the album are not in the park, but in front of Two Amys Neapolitan Pizzeria, where we went for dinner after our walk. Yummy stuff.