Best Time to Visit Chesapeake & Ohio Canal

Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park is a National Historical Park in DC, MD, WV and one of the busier parks in the system, drawing about 4.6 million recreation visits in 2025. Visitation has held fairly steady over the past decade. Crowds concentrate sharply by season: June is the busiest month at about 1.3× the park's average month, while January is the calmest at roughly 0.6× — a 2-to-1 swing between high and low season. Roughly 31% of the year's visitors arrive in the three summer months of June, July and August alone, so timing a trip outside that window is the single biggest lever on how crowded the park feels. If avoiding people matters most, January offers the thinnest crowds of the year, though you'll trade some warmth and daylight for the solitude. Daylight ranges from about 9.3 hours in midwinter to 14.7 hours near the summer solstice, which shapes how much ground you can cover in a day. A standard private-vehicle entrance pass runs about $20, valid for several days, so a shoulder-season trip stretches that fee across quieter, more comfortable days. These crowd figures are drawn from 1979–2025 of National Park Service visitor-use records, and are updated as new monthly data is released.