Hike

Located in southeastern Ohio, Hocking Hills State Park has received national and international acclaim as a top park to visit. Stunning in every season, the park features towering cliffs, waterfalls, and deep, hemlock-shaded gorges for hikers and nature lovers to enjoy.

We had not been to Hocking Hills State Park In many years, and decided it would make a great getaway location while we are still social distancing. Most of this past year, we have been exploring many northeast Ohio parks and thought that it was time to go to southeastern Ohio.

We remembered the park's unique rock formations from past visits, but we discovered that they were even more incredible than we remembered. We were surprised to learn from informational signage in the park that glaciers never reached this part of Ohio, since we are used to northeast Ohio terrain that has been shaped by the ice age.

2020 has been different, with many of the venues we would normally visit closed due to the coronavirus crisis.

We were very pleased when the Cleveland Metroparks announced in May 2020 that they would be offering their fourth annual Trail Challenge, which included 25 trails. In August 2020, we learned that the park updated the list to include 35 trails!

The increase in the number of trails did not change the requirements for receiving the 2020 Challenge prizes . . .

• Complete 10 trails to  earn a 2020 Trail Challenge sticker

• Complete 20 trails to earn a 2020 Trail Challenge mug

. . . but we enjoy a challenge (and enjoy hiking/biking trails), and decided to do more than the minimum. This blog post shares our journey on all but one of the remaining land-based trails. See Stuart's 2020 Trail Challenge tracker sheet with notes on the 33 trails.

My plan was to slowly complete, by hiking and biking, all the sections of the Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" over several years. With the onset of the March 2020 COVID-19 crisis, my plans radically changed, and I decided to complete the "Little Loop" this year. Below is the blog post about the Burton Section, which is the fifth of five Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" blog posts.

This blog post covers my experiences on the Buckeye Trail Burton Section from Friday, August 21, 2020,  through finishing the "Little Loop" on Thursday, November 10, 2020.

I completed the Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" -- approximately 254.3 Miles -- at its Northern Terminus!!

My plan was to slowly complete, by hiking and biking, all the sections of the Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" over several years. With the onset of the March 2020 COVID-19 crisis, my plans radically changed, and I decided to complete the "Little Loop" this year. Below is the blog post about the northern part of Massillon Section and the Mogadore Section, which is the fourth of five Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" blog posts.

This blog post covers my experiences on the northern part of the Buckeye Trail Massillon Section and the Buckeye Trail Mogadore Section from Friday, June 26 2020, through Friday, August 21, 2020.

My plan was to slowly complete, by hiking and biking, all the sections of the Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" over several years. With the onset of the March 2020 COVID-19 crisis, my plans radically changed, and I decided to complete the "Little Loop" this year. Below is the blog post about the Akron Section, which is the third of five Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" blog posts.

This blog post covers my experiences on the Buckeye Trail Akron Section from Thursday, May 7, 2020, through Friday, June 26, 2020.

My plan was to slowly complete, by hiking and biking, all the sections of the Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" over several years. With the onset of the March 2020 COVID-19 crisis, my plans radically changed, and I decided to complete the "Little Loop" this year. Below is the blog post about the Bedford Section, which is the second of five Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" blog posts.

This blog post covers my experiences on the Buckeye Trail Bedford Section from Sunday, November 4, 2018, through Tuesday, April 21, 2020.

The Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" is the over-250-mile part of the Buckeye Trail in Northeast Ohio that goes through the following counties: Lake, Cuyahoga, Summit, Stark, Portage, and Geauga. On Tuesday, November 10, 2020, at the northern terminus of the Buckeye Trail at Headlands Dunes State Nature Preserve, I completed the loop which I had begun on Sunday, November 4, 2018.

I want to start this blog post by thanking the Buckeye Trail Association, and in particular, the volunteers of their Crooked River Chapter, for making the "Little Loop" section of the trail a reality for me to enjoy!

This Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" blog post actually consists of five separate blog posts. First, this post includes information and resources about the Buckeye Trail that were shared at events I attended about the trail.

The other four posts are about each of the four sections of the "Little Loop." Here are links to the blog posts, along with a list of the counties and some of the parks that are part of each section.

When we wrote about completing the first level of the Cleveland Metroparks 2020 Trail Challenge presented by Cigna to earn our 2020 Trail Challenge stickers, we were already working on the next ten trails for the final challenge. We are creating our Trail Challenge blog posts for these three reasons:

• To capture our memories for us to re-read in the future.

• To encourage others to take the Trail Challenge this year and in future years.

• And as we wrote in our last trail challenge blog post:

  We want to thank the Cleveland Metroparks for planning this annual Trail Challenge, and Cigna for sponsoring it again this year! Particularly this year, with everyone in the world facing the health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, it has been important for both physical and mental health to have our local parks to visit.

With COVID-19 closing venues we normally frequent, and having to cancel the backpacking trips that Stuart had planned on the Continental Divide Trail and Appalachian Trail, we have been exploring many parks in Northeast Ohio and along the route of the Buckeye Trail. We are happy to share with you our experiences on the second level of the trail challenge to earn our 2020 Trail Challenge mug.

Take the challenge!

In 2017, we wrote our blog post: Cleveland Metroparks Inaugural Trail Challenge!

. . . so when we saw the Cleveland Metroparks tweet to "Take the challenge!" in 2020, with 25 trails to choose from, we decided to accept.

With COVID-19 closing venues we normally frequent, and having to cancel the backpacking trips that Stuart had planned on the Continental Divide Trail and Appalachian Trail, we have been exploring many parks in Northeast Ohio and along the route of the Buckeye Trail. We have written about many of our park visits in the Social Distancing Blog Posts that we have been writing during the pandemic.

There were originally 25 trails to choose from for the challenge. During the time we were writing this blog post, we learned that the park updated the list to now include 35 trails!

What follows is information about the first ten challenge trails we have completed.

After writing three social distancing blog posts about visiting our local parks during the coronavirus crisis, we really did not plan to write anymore blog posts on this subject. However, we have been having such a great time exploring parks that we had not visited before, and revisiting old favorites, that we decided to gather tweets from park visits in June 2020, to create this blog post.

This blog post accomplishes two things that are important to us.

• First, writing this post is our way to refresh our memory of the time we spent together. Time together in the peaceful environment of a park is a healthy way to be grounded, both as a couple and for each of us individually, during these stressful times in our country.

• Secondly, it is our way to thank the park systems for their service to our Northeast Ohio community. Visiting parks (if you also practice social distancing and sanitizing your hands) is one of the very few safe activities you can do during this COVID-19 pandemic.

Please note that we have attended many more parks in June 2020 than those included in this blog post. Beyond what we include here, Stuart has been doing section hikes on the Buckeye Trail "Little Loop" (the Buckeye Trail Little Loop is over 250 miles long in Northeast Ohio), and we have done eleven additional hikes as part of the Cleveland Metroparks Trail Challenge 2020. We plan to write blog posts about these trail activities when we complete them.