This day hike occured on Thursday, September 7, 2023. Participants were Charlie Johnson, who led the hike, Chris Isham, Ron Calabrese and myself.
I had to get up at 4:00 AM for this one. Traffic wasn’t bad heading for my destination of Antietam National Battlefield near Sharpsburg, MD. The temperature was 75 degrees when I left the house and 70 when I got to the battlefield. Charlie and Chris were already at the meeting place when I arrived. Ron got there shortly afterwards. The hike started at around 8:00 AM.
The goals today were to do the 1.5 mile Cornfield loop trail and the 1.4 mile West Woods loop trail. 2.9 miles total was not a great distance. But we wanted to get off of the trail before it got too hot.
So we did the Cornfield Trail first. It was where the bloodiest conflict of the battle took place. According to the
over 8,000 men were killed or wounded in the Cornfield on the day of the battle. There were interpretive posts along this trail. Charlie read what happened at this point during or hike. After we returned to our vehicles we took a slight break, then tackled the West Woods Trail.
It was here that the Confederates surprised the Union troops and inflicted over 2,200 casualties with 20 minutes. It made my stomach feel queezy just listening to the terrible loss of life that occured here in 1862. Over 22,720 soldiers were killed, wounded, captured or went missing on this battlefield on September 17, 1862.
Once the hikes were over we proceeded to the brand new visitors center at the park. It was a bit before 10:00 AM and the temperature was in the low to mid 80s at this time. We first listened to a lecture by one of the rangers, checked out the gift shop, saw a short movie about the battle, then viewed some artifacts in a small museum.
During our time in the giftshop I recognized one of the rangers that was in a recent YouTube video giving a tour of the new visitors center. I walked up to him and said “Hey, you’re the guy in the video about the new visitor center. He said that he didn’t enjoy making the video. But we told him that he did a good job and that was one of the things that got us to come here. You can see that video
Here.
At around 11:15 AM we left the park and proceeded to drive north on MD65 about 8 miles to a Waffle House just before the I70 interchange. It was there that we chowed down on a late breakfast. We were done by about 12:15. I then took I70->US15->I66->VA234->Purcell RD back to my house and was home by around 2:00 PM.
Antietam National Battlefield was a great place to spend the day. They have a number of additional trails in this park to hike as well. Charlie did a good job being our guide, it was good to see Ron again and it was great seeing Chris again as I last hiked with her in 2009. We had a nice hike, learned some history and the heat was bearable.
Mike C
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