How high must an American president get to escape the sweltering heat of the Washington summer? About 1,700 feet.
That's how high Camp David, the official presidential retreat, sits in the relatively cool Catoctin Mountains, 62 miles from the White House. Maybe -- more on that later.
How many times has President Barack Obama retreated there? 38. His mountain stays there have spanned all or part of 91 days -- including his overnight stay Saturday with some old high school and college friends in town to celebrate the president's 54th birthday this coming week.
Obama and high school buddies from Hawaii played golf at Joint Base Andrews down in the staggeringly humid Beltway realm of a summer weekend in Washington Saturday before heading up to "camp'' with some college and Chicago friends.
The president and retinue came down from the mountain today.
Obama's a virtual stranger, though, in comparison with his predecessor. George W. Bush paid 126 visits to Camp David at a similar point in his presidency, spanning all or part of almost 400 days there. By the end of his eight years in office, he'd made 150 trips up the mountain, on all or part of 491 days.
The undisputed, sole authority on presidential days away from the Oval Office is Mark Knoller, a CBS News White House correspondent who keeps a tally.
He offers some numbers that beg the question of how many days the ex-commander-in-chief actually spent in Washington -- wait until we walk through the Crawford, Texas, ranch count. Or for that matter, Obama's coming summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard this month and annual winter holidays in Hawaii.
More on that later as well.
It doesn't take a world leader to find the cool respite the Maryland mountains offer -- while many have since the first foreign visitor, Winston Churchill, helped Franklin Roosevelt plan the Allied invasion of Normandy there. It's summertime, and escaping's easy -- a good 10 degrees cooler in the Catoctins little more than an hour from Washington. Camp David may be off-limits to the public, but miles of trails with panoramic views and geological treasures are free for all.
All it takes is a pair of light hiking boots to climb the first ascent to Hog Rock, an overlook 1,600 feet above sea level today that once rested at the bottom of an ancient ocean. Making one's way to the sheer wall of a 500-million year-old outcropping of volcanic quartzite that is Wolf Rock, hidden within the hardwood forest, the exposed rock of another era holds a hiker in awe of its dark crevices.
Roosevelt was the first to stake a claim to a presidential retreat here, in the eastern-most region of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The camp itself was born of the New Deal. The Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps opened a recreational area in the Catoctin Mountains. One part, Camp Hi-Catoctin, was finished in the winter of 1938-39 as a family camp for federal employees. Roosevelt, in search of a resort close to the capital at the onset of World War II, visited Hi-Catoctin on April 22, 1942. He commissioned a main lodge on the 125-acre site resembling his winter vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia.
He named it USS Shangri-La -- as the presidential yacht, USS Potomac, was mothballed due to the security concerns of a nation at war.
The camp was kept going after the war, as Harry Truman carved a national park out of the surrounding mountains. Truman spent little time there, however -- his wife, Bess, was said to find the place sort of dull.
Dwight Eisenhower renamed it Camp David, after his grandson, sparing generations of presidents to follow the embarrassment of spending as much time as Bush, for instance, spent at a place named for the fictional mountain kingdom in James Hilton's 1933 novel, "Lost Horizon."
Eisenhower, a former Supreme Allied Commander of European forces, made an oil painting of a cottage at the camp.
John Kennedy and family shot skeet there and rode horseback. Lyndon Johnson consulted with advisers about the war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon had several more buildings erected and conducted Cabinet meetings and family gatherings. Gerald Ford even found use for it in the wintertime: snowmobiling.
Margaret Thatcher slept there during Ronald Reagan's time. And Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, pitched horseshoes and hosted Prince Charles.
If military actions have been plotted here, so has peace.
In 1978, Jimmy Carter kept Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at the compound with a swimming pool, putting greens and skeet-shooting range for nearly two weeks. They emerged with the framework for a Middle East peace accord, albeit transitory. Bill Clinton made another run at Camp David peace talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. They ended without a deal.
Obama may have logged 38 visits during six-plus years as president, by Knoller's count. But his recent reception for leaders of six Gulf states -- Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, in May -- marked only the second time he has hosted world leaders there. The previous time was May 2012, an overnight stay for leaders of the world's top industrialized nations, known as the Group of Eight. (See the photo).
Not only was Bush a far frequent camper: During 19 of his 150 trips to Camp David, he hosted foreign leaders, Knoller notes. British Prime Minister Tony Blair made the trip three times. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan went, as did President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Bush had leaders down to his Crawford ranch in Texas, too -- 19 times. During his eight years in office, he made 77 ranch visits (spanning all or part of 490 days), by Knoller's expert count.
But Bush dropped another recreational relief -- golf -- as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were escalating. He played just 24 rounds of golf as president, Knoller has noted -- his last round on Columbus Day, Oct. 13, 2003. He explained that it was unseemly for a president to play that way when Americans were at war.
The wars have wound down since then, and Obama has taken to the greens in earnest, playing more than 230 rounds of golf as president. These outings are largely reserved for friends and aides, though, notably free of any other political leaders.
If Bush had his own remote Texas ranch for longer retreats, Obama has rented vacation homes on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for winter and summer breaks. By Knoller's count, Obama has spent all or part of 73 days during seven trips to his birthplace of Hawaii on annual Christmas holidays with his family and all or part of 42 days during six summer trips to Martha's Vineyard.
Still none of these places are open to the public the way much of Catoctin Mountain Park is. The ridge rising upwards of 1,800 feet owes its origins to a fault that broke about 200 millions ago, during the Triassic Period. As the land rose to the west of what is now U.S. Route 15, it slid to form the Frederick Valley. The glaciers of the Ice Age never reached this place, the National Park Service notes, but prolonged freezes and thaws fractured the rocks there.
All this activity left a treasure trove of quartzite in the southeastern corner of the park -- that hardest of all rocks in all he formations there holding the highest grounds and vista-points. The most dramatic of views opens to a hiker at the ledge known as Chimney Rock for its precarious pile of Weverton quartzite.
At 1,419 feet in elevation, Chimney Rock is not the highest. Hog Rock, much closer to Camp David, reveals another valley panorama at 1,600 feet.
Yet, without any view beyond the surrounding woods, Wolf Rock offers the most dramatic resting point. It's a 500-million year old ridge of greenstone riven with deep crevices carved by freezing water that seeped through metamorphosed basalt lava flows. The surface of this 2,000-foot thick pile of quartzite and feldspar sparkles purple, green and pink in the late afternoon sunlight.
As for Camp David itself, various accounts put its perch at 1,700 or 1,800 feet. The Catoctin Mountain Park office says no official elevation is available publicly.
As any dignitary who has landed at Camp David aboard the first chopper, Marine One, or any average hiker who has made his way around the rocks, knows, it's hard to convey the effect any mountaintop view has on one's psyche. Sitting atop a high, prehistoric rock with nothing else in mind erases all other thoughts, focusing the eye on one transfixing image. Which, after all, is the point of getting away from it all.
"We have reason. It is the entire meaning and purpose of Shangri-La.''
-- James Hilton, "Lost Horizon"
(Photo of President Obama at Camp David hosting 2012 G8 Summit by Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images)