After cataloguing the photos from my April 2025 bridge walking in Washington, DC,1 I revisited the photos from my prior trips to the city and was surprised to find this wasn’t the first time I had walked a bridge across the Potomac River.
In May 2012, weeks after I had launched my bridge-walking career in London and days before I launched this blog, I was in Washington, DC, visiting my uncle. Based on my photos, I believe we rode the Metro and got off at the Crystal City stop. From there, we walked the Mount Vernon Trail passing over National Avenue/Smith Blvd by bridge and passing under the Long Bridge, Charles R. Fenwick Bridge, Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge, 14th Street Bridge, and George Mason Memorial Bridge. We finished our bridge exploring by walking across the Potomac River on the George Mason Memorial Bridge.
Knowing that wandering at will and walking as many bridges as possible was no longer a feasible option for me, my brother and I identified two must-see bridges for my weekend in DC: the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge and the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge.
Not to be confused with Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge links Georgetown, DC, to the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, VA.
The Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge is a curvilinear arch bridge carrying a six-lane highway with wide sidewalks on both sides over the Potomac River. It was built in 1917-1924. The width made it easy and comfortable to walk despite a high number of other pedestrians, bikes, and scooters on the sidewalk, and the speed of cars racing across.
We walked along the downriver side, which provides ever changing views of downtown DC, the Kennedy Center, and the Washington Monument, thanks to the forested Theodore Roosevelt Island and nearly 90 degree bend in the river. This gave me plenty of excuses to pause, hydrate, rest, and take a photo.
Georgetown and Rosslyn both sit high above the river, which meant the bridge is also elevated far above the river. It is high enough that an elevated freeway sits comfortably halfway between the bridge and the riverside ground level on the Georgetown side.
The goals of urbantraipsing and pacing for Long COVID were a delicate balance as we walked across the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge. There were several important decision points along the way. Option 1 was to walk only half-way across the bridge. I don’t like doing that for urbantraipsing and there was a coffee shop on the far end that was a good option for refilling my water bottle and taking a short rest. So we walked all the way across.
As we approached the Georgetown side, I was very tempted to climb down to the park near the level of the water. I could tell that this would be a great spot to get an establishing shot for the bridge, but the effort of climbing down and back up from there did not seem worth it . . . until I saw that in doing so, we would walk across a C&O Canal bridge. Adding another bridge to my collection along with the fact that we could sit by the riverside and rest before climbing back up tipped the balance of pros and cons in favor of going down.
Due to the placement of Metro stations, the only choice for getting back to the Metro and on to our next stop was to retrace our steps back across the bridge. By the time we did all that, it was lunchtime and I had nearly reached my daily step count.
urbantraipsing 