Like many District residents, DCist writers and visitors, I made an extra-early trek down to the National Mall this morning for the swearing-in of President Barack Obama. Arriving in darkness, the U.S. Capitol cut a stark contrast against the dark sky as thousands of people populated the Mall in anticipation of the morning’s events.

With all the blogging, Twittering and Flickr’ing, there isn’t much that I can add to the thousands of different stories and experiences from the day. But as the holder of DCist’s only official media pass to the event, I was treated to something that I won’t soon forget.

A large media center was set up on the northern side of the Mall just beyond 7th Street. From there, hundreds of broadcast and print journalists filed reports, fanned out to gain a sense of the crowd and — if they were big enough — occasionally retire to their heated trailers for a brief respite from the elements. Not having much beyond a camera phone and a pen, I did my best to walk around, talk to fellow attendees and find the words to describe the magnitude and excitement of the event. But as one person, there’s only so much you can ever really experience — sure, it seemed crowded, but I couldn’t easily get a sense of just how crowded it really was.

Until they broke out the cherry-picker. Invited by some of the media center’s support staff, I joined a number of other journalists and photographers on a mechanical lift that raised us 40-50 feet off the ground. As we rose above the crowd, we caught a glimpse of just how far the crowd extended and how densely it was packed in on the otherwise barren expanse of the National Mall. As we marveled at the scene below us, a mention of President Obama on the loudspeakers provoked the hundreds of thousands of people we could see — this doesn’t even include those who surely watched from beyond the Washington Monument — into a frenzy of flag-waving and cheering. I dare say that even the more seasoned journalists up there with me were caught with dropped jaws.

Initial reports on attendance at the swearing-in have pegged it at 1.4 million, others are saying 2 million — either way, the largest in history. It’s usually extremely hard to imagine what that many people look like, but having had the chance to see a large portion of that isn’t something I’ll soon forget.