Several thousand people come to Great Falls Park every week. Photo by Reena Singh.
Great Falls Park, located 15 miles away from the nation’s capital, can get flocked with tens of thousands of tourists looking for a reprieve from the concrete and marble every week.
With cars lined up for sometimes an hour to get into the park, locals do not come often - but when they do, they make a day of it.
Hendrika Vande Kemp, Annandale, is one local who does not come often. However, on Sunday, she happily exclaimed she got her $10 Interagency Senior Pass.
Vehicle passes are $5 and are good for three consecutive days. Individual passes - if someone comes to the park on foot, by bike or on horseback - are $3 and are also good for three days.
“I bring visitors here,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite places to bring out-of-town visitors.”
Her family, by the way of Ontario, Canada, came last year as well. She said they enjoyed the trails and scrambling up the rocks that lead to the view of the falls.
They were getting ready to do the same again on Sunday, but first laid out a spread of sandwiches and drinks to fill up at a picnic table under a shady tree.
“We brought a picnic,” she said. “Just some cold cuts.”
At a nearby table, surrounded by picnickers from as close as Arlington and as far away as Pennsylvania, were locals Mike Lu and Di Shao. The pair moved to McLean a year ago. They love the park so much that they bought an annual pass and come often to hike on the trail and see the thunderous waterfall. They were setting up a barbecue bash for Lu’s fraternity. Burger buns, hotdog buns, plastic cups and piles of disposable plates covered a table as they waited for their friends to show up.
Lu, who attends Carnegie Mellon University, said it is the first time the fraternity had a summer barbecue at Great Falls Park.
“It’s a nice park,” he said. “There will probably be about 20 people who show up. It was a Facebook invite, so it’s hard to tell.”
The park, located at 9200 Old Dominion Drive, is open every day except federal holidays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.