Hiking in Harpers Ferry: Three Heights and Two Rivers

Harpers Ferry sits in a water gap. The Potomac and the Shenandoah meet here and cut through the Blue Ridge together, and the ridges they left standing are the reason there is a town, an armory, a battle, and a hiking guide.

That gives you a very particular kind of walking. The town is at about 509 feet. Maryland Heights, directly across the Potomac, rises to roughly 1,448 feet. There is no gentle approach to any of it: you are at river level or you are climbing, and the climbing starts within a few hundred yards of the trailhead on every one of the heights.

It also means the views are earned in a specific way. From the bottom you see two rivers and a wall of trees. From the top you see the whole geometry — the spit of land the lower town sits on, the confluence, the bridges, the Shenandoah Valley opening away to the south-west. That transformation is the point of hiking here, and it is why a two-hour climb feels different from a two-hour climb elsewhere.

The last consequence is military and it is written into the trail names. Whoever held the heights held the town, which is why there are earthworks on Bolivar Heights, a stone fort on Maryland Heights and rifle pits on Loudoun Heights. You are walking on the terrain that decided a garrison of roughly 12,500 Union soldiers would surrender in September 1862. The trails are, in a real sense, the battlefield.

If there is one under-used trail in this park it is Bolivar Heights, and the reason is that it looks too easy to bother with. The park's figures: 0.3 to 2.4 miles round trip, 4 to 263 feet of elevation gain, easy to moderate, ten minutes to an hour and a half depending on how far you go. The main loop is a third of a mile.

For that you get views the park itself rates among its best — the Blue Ridge, the Potomac water gap, the Shenandoah Valley — from an open ridge with cannon, earthworks and wayside exhibits strung along it. It has its own trailhead parking at the end of Whitman Avenue in Bolivar, so it does not depend on the shuttle at all, and there are portable restrooms there. There is no drinking water.

Two reasons to go beyond the view. The first is that this is where the ground makes the history legible: standing on the ridge with the heights visible on three sides, the September 1862 surrender of roughly 12,500 Union troops stops being a statistic and becomes obvious. The second is practical. On a peak October Saturday when the Maryland Heights overlook is queueing and the visitor centre lot is full, Bolivar Heights is quiet.

From the same area, trails run on toward Schoolhouse Ridge for a longer and flatter walk over open ground. It is the right answer for a group with mixed legs, and the right answer when the steps and switchbacks are simply not an option.

Across the Shenandoah, Loudoun Heights is the third of the three ridges and the one almost nobody walks. The park's figures are up to 7.5 miles round trip and 1,377 feet of climbing, moderately strenuous, four to five and a half hours. There are three ways onto it, all of them converging at the highway bridge over the Shenandoah, which means the first part of your day involves walking a bridge footway beside traffic. Accept that and the rest is a ridge to yourself.

What it gives you that the others do not is the view east, into Pleasant Valley and beyond — the only one in the park that looks that way. You also pick up the Appalachian Trail itself along the ridge, which is the same tread the thru-hikers are on.

Murphy-Chambers Farm, up on the Virginia-facing side of Camp Hill, is the gentle alternative: an overlook walk on open farm ground with a view down the Shenandoah, much less climbing, and a good deal less company than anything in the lower town.

Neither has water or a restroom. Both close at sunset. And both are far enough from the shuttle that you should think about the last bus before you commit — seven in the evening on daylight saving time, half past five on standard time, from the lower town.

Not every walk here is a climb, and the two flat ones are among the most interesting.

Virginius and Hall's Islands is up to two miles round trip with all of 45 feet of elevation gain, rated easy, fifteen minutes to an hour. It starts from the lower town shuttle stop, goes under the railroad trestle and turns along the Shenandoah, then crosses a wooden footbridge onto the island. What you walk through is the skeleton of a water-powered industrial town: mill ruins, turbine housings, waterworks, and the site of John Hall's Rifle Works, all of it slowly being taken back by forest. The 1936 flood ended habitation here and a 1996 flood closed the island to visitors until 2003, which is the plainest illustration in the park of what the rivers actually do.

One hard rule on that walk. The Winchester & Potomac tracks running through it are active every day. They are not a footpath and the park says so in writing.

The C&O Canal towpath is across the Potomac on the Maryland bank: 184.5 miles of level crushed stone from Georgetown to Cumberland, with Harpers Ferry at roughly mile 61. Turn either way and walk as far as you like, with the river on one side and the old canal prism on the other. It is the most accessible long trail in the region and the flattest hour you will spend here.