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Travel alert
Twenty dollars a vehicle, valid three consecutive days, payable by card only. Visitors arrive with notes every week and there is nothing on site that will take them.
UnsplashHarpers Ferry National Historical Park does not accept cash. Not at the entrance station beside the visitor center, not at Bolivar Heights, not at Maryland Heights, not at the train station and not at the river access lot. Card only, or a pass bought online before you arrive.
This catches people out constantly, and there is no fallback: no cash lane, no note machine, no honesty box.
At the time of writing the published rates are $20 for a private vehicle, $15 for a motorcycle, and $10 per person aged 16 and over arriving on foot or by bicycle. Under-16s are free. Each pass is valid for three consecutive days from the date of purchase. A Harpers Ferry annual pass is $35, and America the Beautiful interagency passes are accepted.
The three-day validity is the detail worth acting on. It is unusual, and it quietly changes what a second visit is worth. One $20 vehicle pass covers a Friday, a Saturday and a Sunday, so a weekend based in Shepherdstown or Charles Town costs the same in entrance fees as a single afternoon. It also covers the heights: walk Maryland Heights one day and Bolivar Heights the next on the same ticket.
For a family arriving by car it is among the cheapest days out in the region. The $20 covers everyone in the vehicle, the shuttle bus, every exhibit building in the lower town, the trails, the footbridge and the towpath.
For two adults arriving on foot from the train, the maths runs the other way: $10 each, and the fee is payable at the Harpers Ferry train station itself. A rail ticket does not include park admission and arriving without a car does not exempt you.
Buying online before you travel is the sensible move on any busy weekend, because the entrance station queue on an October Saturday is the slowest part of the morning.
Fee schedules are revised periodically. Check current rates with the National Park Service before you travel, and bring the physical pass and photo identification if you already hold an interagency pass.
SourcingEntrance fee schedule, three-day validity and cashless payment policy as published by the National Park Service for Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Rates are subject to revision.
Plan around it
The pages that carry the practical detail behind this story — hours, costs, access and where it sits on Harpers Ferry.
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What is free in Harpers Ferry: everything one $10 park fee already covers, the sites outside the boundary that cost nothing, and the…
Guide
One Day in Harpers Ferry, Hour by Hour
The lower town read in geographical order tells the story backwards. Here is the day arranged chronologically instead, from the armoury…
Newsroom
Travel alert
People decide on this hill over lunch. The published numbers are 4.5 to 6.5 miles and up to 1,788 feet of gain, with nothing to drink anywhere on the route.
Travel alert
The commuter railway carries people into Washington in the morning and home at night, which is the reverse of what a day-tripper needs. And it does not run at all on Saturdays.
Who reported this
Senior Editor
Prudence has edited mid-Atlantic travel coverage for twelve years and owns the practical pages here: the Cavalier Heights lot, the shuttle timetable either side of the clock change, fees that are card-only, and which navigation apps send drivers down a hill with nowhere to stop. She quotes park figures with the date she checked them.
Our newsroom is machine-assisted and human-edited: stories are drafted from verified public sources and checked before they publish. How that works is set out in our editorial standards.