Hey all - thanks for all the advice! The advice I took to heart was:
1) keep the rig as small as possible
2) avoid wireless
3) don't bring anything that can be construed as a weapon .... sometimes this is hard to do for audio rigs
I was only covering the March on Saturday, just to clarify...
So my rig was super simple. Small Zoom H6 that I borrowed from someone. I brought 2 Sanken COS-11d's with a TA5 to XLR converter and hard-lined into the H6. I wanted so bad to bring my boom mic but I didn't feel comfortable risking a pistol-grip. I recorded the ambient protest sounds on the H6 mics and interviews with the hard-lined Sanken. As the day went on, people were getting tired and a little bit hesitant to be interviewed. I ended up using an RE50, hard-lined into the H6 for the second half the day.
Overall, we got great footage, great interviews, a cool guy playing fiddle as the protest marched behind him. The RE50 was great at picking up interviewees in a loud environment. Obviously the Sanken's sounded just fine. The H6 has a bit of self-noise but its nothing I can't get rid of in post.
I'll tell you though - there was NO SECURITY. I saw several cameramen rocking their camera rig with a G3 on top. I know at least one cameraman who was down there with a G3 and they didn't get clearance. I saw at least 2 audio people with their full rig, 442/744 and a boom pole. I know none of this would have flown for the inauguration but they made it seem that the same rules would have applied for the march. Overall, I'm happy with the ninja rig I put together. Next time, I'd just get a better handheld recorder and maybe bring some kind of handheld grip (other than a pistol grip) for a boom mic...
Anyway, thanks a lot everyone. I took a lot of advice to heart from here when putting my rig together.
Oh and for the record - as someone asked - the crowd was HUGE. So big that the entire march path was filled up so a second march peeled off the main one to alleviation congestion. This allowed to seperate marches to take place and meet later on. It was a massive amount of people, all very peaceful and respectful. I think the metro counted 1.1 million riders. When we were leaving the downtown area in the evening, the metro so packed you could barley get to the ticket area. Once in, they were letting people down the stairs onto the platform, 5 at a time every 3 minutes.
Whatever your political position is, it felt pretty historic to be apart of something so massive and yet so peaceful.