Great Seal State Park in Spring #2

On April 20th Joan and I visited Great Seal State Park again, two weeks after our first springtime visit. We parked at a small lot on the west side, across from the Grouse Rock trail.

P for Parking near the red trail.

We scooted across the road and took a short, steep connector to Grouse Rock and headed uphill towards intersection I. Early on we passed through a power-line cut.

Almost immediately we started seeing jack-in-the-pulpit, some vegetative (just leaves) and some blooming.

This one is bashful and facing away.

And bloodroot leaves.

Here's a ridgetop view taken about 50 minutes in.

Phlox comes in many shades.

A closeup.

Joan and I hiked north on the Shawnee Ridge trail, then at intersection H took the Sand Hill trail to G, the top of the hill, where we found gorgeous rock formations.

And unusual ones.

In this photo Joan leads the way on a sharp downhill from G to F and D.

It was altitude loss enough for us to encounter blooming redbuds,

and the sunny day had warmed enough for us to shed our jackets. Birds sang, but we were many times frustrated in trying to spot them. Another fifty minutes along, after turning right at intersection C, we were on the ridgetop trail to Bald Hill, heading south again.

A wood sorrel that has not yet faded.

A few minutes later, a trillium.

Nature, in her exuberance, throws off lots of oddities, such as this tree with a branch sprouting out of a burl.

When Joan and I reached intersection I, we turned south, to repeat the Rock Garden and Annie's Trail loops, but in the opposite direction to the previous visit. We began with the Rock Garden loop.

The squirrel corn, only a green carpet before, had erupted in blooms.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Solo rocks appeared on the loop. Often the path would split, so bicyclists could hurl themselves over lithic obstacles while hikers trod on.

A butterfly on garlic mustard along the way.

The tip of the loop sports the largest feature. There are jumps here with several feet of drop; flinging yourself off the far edge is a doozy.

Back at the intersection, we began Annie's Trail.

A few minutes on Joan spotted a firepink. It was well off-trail so I used the camera zoom.

Annie's took us to intersection S, where we headed west towards J. Along the way we encountered this dwarf larkspur specimen.

From J, close to the road, we continued on the Grouse Rock trail, to reach our parking area. And we soon encountered a highlight of the trip, a cooperatively posing hermit thrush.

This most melodious of birds nests only in few scattered pockets of Ohio; most continue north in their migration. Just passing through, our friend here did not sing, but we adored his features, from the eye-ring to the speckled breast and the cinnamon tail. 

We continued on towards the parking connector trail, dipping in and out of ravines. In one such the conditions were ripe for a few celandine poppies.

Joan and I added up the mileages on today's route and arrived at 7½ miles, an accomplishment for our stop-and-inspect hiking style.

Great Seal State Park in Spring #1

On April 5th Joan and I revisited parts of Great Seal State Park, which we explored for the first time the previous autumn. We parked in the southern section, near trail intersection V.

We set out towards M, beginning with a bridge crossing.

Soon there were clusters of blooming white trout lilies.

And a bloodroot beginning to unfold.

Joan and I turned left at intersection M, crossed the road, and hiked deeper into the woods.

What's that noise? A yellow-bellied sapsucker!

We gained altitude hiking clockwise around the green loop (Rocky Knob trail) at the right of the map. After fifty more minutes we came across an old stone foundation, a remnant of early settlement.

This mayapple has spread its wings wide, but no blossom yet.

The trail gradually descended as it looped around and headed south again. Here's a view into the watershed below.

Joan and I retraced the Bonus Hill connector, and passed through intersections K and S to reach Annie's Trail. This loop steadily rose,

The white spots above are happy spring beauties.

and we passed an offering of hyacinth, a non-native plant, as we neared Annie's Trail.

We reached intersection T,

Click on the image to enlarge, and spot the daffodils

and then added the Rock Garden loop to today's bag. Carpets of squirrel corn adorned the slope, happy with the soils on the ridge top.

The next post will have photos of the Rock Garden.

Joan and I were astonished at the trash we collected today, on the trails or beside them. Our small plastic bags were overwhelmed, so we hauled large kitchen bags out of our daypacks, held in reserve for sitting on damp soils. We hauled out five and a half brown beer bottles, four or five soda and beer cans, a couple of water bottles, five spent shotgun shells, and assorted loose trash such as candy bar wrappers and hair scrunchies. During this hike we met a fellow who had been collecting bags of roadside trash, an even bigger chore.

I repeat: if you can carry it in, you can d**n well carry it out.

Great Seal State Park (Part 3)

In October and November of 2020 Joan and I made four trips to Great Seal State Park, to hike and thus explore this park for the first time, getting outdoors during the pandemic. This post is part three of three about Great Seal, covering the fourth hike, on November 20th. Part one of the series is here, and part two is here.

The park is named "Great Seal" because the hills of the park are a feature of the State Seal of Ohio. They are part of the view from Adena Mansion, the home of Thomas Worthington, Ohio's sixth governor.

Here is an overall map of the trail systems, which curl around and up and down the terrain. Click on the image to enlarge. As you can see from the map, the park is much taller, north-to-south, than wide.

Many of the trails are multi-purpose, with foot, horse, and off-road bicycle traffic allowed. In addition, there is a spider-web of narrow bike trails that are unsuitable for horses and lack the signage of the multi-purpose routes.

Joan and I drove to the southernmost parking area, off Lick Run, where we'd parked twice before.

There is a bench here dedicated to Annie Rooney, the guiding light and spark plug for the creation of the bike trails here; she was killed by a drunk driver in 2013.

The parking area is at location V on this map. We began by taking the Lick Run trail to intersection M, then up the Mt. Ives trail to W. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

On this day we spotted a great many pear-shaped puffball mushrooms, Lycoperdon pyriforme or, since 2017, Apioperdon.

Joan enjoys assisting their spore dispersal, as you can see in this short video.

 At W, another Annie Rooney bench.

As we continued on to intersection N Joan spotted some crane-fly orchid (Tipularia discolor) leaves, easily identified by their green upper surface and purple underside. A single leaf emerges in September and disappears in the spring, the opposite of what you'd expect.

When we reached Y, at a park boundary, we encountered this sign.

Unexploded ammunition? It likely rocketed here from Camp Sherman, now the National Guard Camp Sherman Training Center. Camp Sherman was hastily erected in 1917, just a mile or less away,

when the United States entered the First World War. By the time it was decommissioned in 1921, over 120,000 men had passed through for training -- including the 324th Field Artillery. We were not tempted to enter the forbidden zone. Instead, Joan and I looped around to intersection P, and visited the Bunker Hill ridge top again.

A panoramic view from the swing bench at the tip of the ridge.

Since our last visit to this spot someone had installed some solar powered lights.

I wonder what it looked like at night from the houses below.

Joan and I continued clockwise on the outer loop, the section of Bunker Hill we hadn't walked through before. Wavy trees stood like kelp in salt water.

Not all were still upright.

We also passed an old stone structure, long disused.

The trail lost altitude, and with the leaves fallen from the trees, we could see that were were close to some houses at the edge of the park.

More fungi along the way.

Joan and I continued through point Q and towards R,

and we reached a surprise, a "Trail Pod" with a McLeod tool and a sign. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

Volunteers can scan the QR codes to sign in, review the trail guidelines, use the McLeod to improve the trail, and sign back out. This was designed for individual effort, given that there was only one tool. Intriguing!

We dropped down to the trail next to the road on what might have been a bike trail, or just a well-trodden shortcut. (It was an unmarked, unexpected intersection). Then heading north we crossed the road at intersection J and continued through S and then K to reach the Bonus Hill trail.

At the right spot for the intersection, which has no designation, we saw just a small sign on a tree, as if for a bike trail, and the name was not "Bonus Hill." However, it being in the anticipated location, we took it. The trail curved and turned and crossed the Rocky Knob trail, which we took to L. To finish our return we headed right on the Mt. Ives trail, aiming to cross the road to hit M. But partway back -- well past the unmarked green trail departure to the right --  the trail forked and confused us. Which was the true path and which was an unmarked alternate, another pesky bike path? We went partway on the straight-ahead fork, then returned to take the left fork, then gave up on that when we saw a huge tree trunk across the trail, retraced our steps and regained the straight fork. Of course, that turned out to be wrong choice, a bike trail, which wiggled and wound until it hit the Lick Run trail, which we descended to cross the road directly across from the parking area. You can't get lost in Great Seal, but you can easily take the longer way when coping with unmarked intersections!

Great Seal State Park has been a great find, and it will be fun to visit it in different seasons. (One advantage of winter workdays is the scarcity of other visitors.)