In the height of morel season, my visits with Wiggs were energetic, even frenetic: Each day we would go on at least one walk in a different park to inspect the bases of elms and poplars and comb the woods for mushrooms. It seems to me that since then, and since finding our first morels, we’ve calmed down a bit. Maybe it’s the warmer weather, or the gleam of quarantine rubbing off, or my sadness that I’m not in Europe right now, exploring Ireland and hiking the Camino with my mom like I was supposed to. Or maybe in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the wave of increased worldwide awareness of the insidiousness of white supremacy, I feel a sense of overwhelmed urgency, a worrying that at any given time I’m not doing enough.

Whatever the case, I didn’t spend as much time in the woods in late May and early June as I did in April, and I was missing it. So on my most recent visit to Columbus, Wiggs and I decided it was time to get back on the trail. He had visited Clear Creek Metro Park with his family a couple of months before, and he thought I would enjoy a long day hike there. So we got up early, packed a lunch, and headed south.

The Park

Clear Creek is located about 40 minutes southeast of Columbus, just off OH-33 near the town of Rockbridge. It is located on the stolen ancestral lands of the Shawnee, Osage, Hopewell, and Adena people.

The drive to Clear Creek is very pleasant. The roadwork and hubbub of the metro area fades and gently rolls into green hills that from a distance bear a striking resemblance to the landscape in Virginia along the Appalachian Trail. This is the part of Ohio where the glaciers didn’t flatten the land; the unglaciated Appalachian plateau where hills still abound and cornfields give way to forest. Driving there felt like breathing again. Ohio isn’t all corn and fields and Confederate flag-painted barns and threatening “hell is real” billboards after all. This landscape exists too, and it is a blessing to be a visitor here.

Clear Creek Metro Park features over 5,300 acres of woodland interspersed with blackhand sandstone cliffs, ravines and creeks and is home to more than 2,200 species of plants and animals. Forested areas range from Canadian hemlocks and ferns, to oak and hickory, to Ohio’s last remaining colonies of rhododendron. Home to Ohio’s largest state nature preserve.

-Clear Creek Metro Park Website

All in all, there are about 12 miles of trails in the park, though many of them loop and reconnect in various ways, and it would be easier to make a longer or shorter day depending on your preference. On this particular day, we selected a combination of trails that enabled us to hike about 8 miles overall, each one of which was verdant, quiet, and precisely what we needed.

The Hike

We began our hike at the Creekside Meadows picnic area. True to the name, the trail first meanders into a meadow, with the creek on one side and tall grasses full of buzzing insects on the other. After rounding a curve the Creekside Meadows trail turns into the Cemetery Ridge Trail, which crosses the road and heads sharply uphill.

Though this first hill caught me off guard, the trail was very well maintained and I never felt like the grade was unbearable. A few pitstops for breath-catching and water-drinking and we were at the top of the ridge, which the trail followed for most of the rest of the day.

One of the first landmarks we arrived at was an old barn dating back to the 1800s. It is open for exploration, though we didn’t find much inside besides some fallen boards, an adorable toad, and an owl that took off as soon as we approached. As it was sprinkling a bit by this point, we decided to stop here for lunch, which we enjoyed while listening to the light patter of rain on the old roof.

We continued on the Cemetery Ridge Trail until it met an open meadow dotted here and there with daisies. We continued straight onto the Chestnut Trail, which was a bit hillier and dipped into valleys, crossed small creeks, and came back up onto the ridge several times. It was on this section of the trail that we saw the most people, including a hiker with a full, large backpacking pack. Wiggs asked him if there was camping around here and he said no, he was training for the Colorado Trail. We were both instantly jealous, smiling wide and imagining all the mountains. We wished him luck and he kept on hiking the other way.

We took a break for water and snacks, then turned back the way we came and headed once more for the Cemetery Ridge Trail, noticing as we walked back the other way that there were Monotropa uniflora, Indian pipe plants, everywhere on the forest floor. These parasitic, mycoheterotrophic plants take in nutrients from mycorrhizal fungus and grow only in the perfect conditions. They were all over the Appalachian Trail, and though they are a bit creepy, it was nice to see them again, like someone you recognize from a different time.

Meeting back up with the junction, we turned right, continuing the loop, and hiked back down to the road and the meadows by the creek. It was late afternoon by now, and we had made good time, so we found a bench by the wide, peacefully flowing creek and sat down. I enjoyed the way my limbs felt tired and worked, though this distance was nothing compared to an average day on the AT. In a weird way I love the pulsing in my heels, the tightness in my calves, the slight shortness of breath that tells me I walked here. I sat eating sriracha peas, enjoying the creek, enjoying being with my partner, kind and adventurous and full of life, whom I met by chance because we both walked really far in the same direction in the same year. How lucky. How right.

We completed the flat mile and a half along a combination of the road and a dirt path right next to the creek, eventually ending up at the back of the parking lot where we had started. I stretched, took a last sip of water, and got in the car.

Love to Ohio

Without Wiggs, I never would have given central Ohio much thought, much less given thought to the idea of moving there. I think there’s an Ohio-shaped space in the brain of every American, and that space is full of boring rows of corn and small towns on the edge of a flat plateau surrounded by Amish farms. I should have known there was more; after all, I was raised in Kentucky, and what’s the stereotypical Kentucky-shaped space in the mind? Hillbillies and soda? Horses and coal? When there’s a whole nuanced world of beauty here: Sandstone so beautiful you can’t help but breathe it in, and fields of flowers by wide wandering creeks, and towns with heart, and waterfalls and caves tumbling into forever. No place is ever fully what it seems.

I’d like to go back to Clear Creek and do a longer day hike. There is no camping there, but if you get an early start you might be able to walk every trail and feel satisfyingly tired by dinner time. There are several picnic areas and parking lots with well-maintained privies, in addition to areas where you can fish in the creek. There are flat trails to walk in the valley if long hilly rambles aren’t your thing, and there are wide possibilities for big days if you don’t do small hikes. The day we went it was pleasantly quiet and uncrowded; it was also a weekday, however, so this may not be the case all the time.

After the hike, we left the rolling hills and slowly meandered back through the highways and buildings and intersections, back to Wiggs’s house and showers and beer. It’s nice to know that there’s a place nearby that feels like the AT, where there are conifers and plants I know and quiet woods.