Great WET hike on the Green Trail!
Written: Oct 13 '05
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Pros: Varied ecosystems provide great diversity of plant and animal life; The trails themselves are fun
Cons: None about the trail, wish the weather was nicer
The Bottom Line: Go! The varied ecosystems you'll find make this a very interesting hike, and your chance of encountering wildlife (mostly deer) is high.
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| locoono's Full Review: Cheesequake State Park |
Today was my friend Josh's birthday, and we both had the day off, so we had made up our minds to go hiking. Well, it's been raining in the area for 4 days, almost nonstop, but we decided to go anyway - for a quick hike like this close to home, you can always take a hot shower and have some cocoa and warm up afterwards!
We started by doing a quick loop on the Yellow trail, which was pretty neat. There's a lot of boardwalks and stairs - the area is pretty wet - and it leads out to Hooks Creek Lake, where we saw some ducks and some interesting trees and plants, including the Chestnut Oak and our first of many Sassafras trees. This loop was a quick 20 minutes with not too much climbing. But at this point it's appropriate to mention that in addition to it raining for 4 days prior, it was coming down pretty heavy today as well! By the time we had finished the Yellow loop we were well on our way to being wet.
We had planned on staying out to do the Green trail though, so we continued on, figuring we couldn't get much wetter - boy were we wrong! The Red and Green trails joined for a little hike up a hill to the visitor center, where we had hoped to get inside for 5 minutes, but it was closed. We took a break under the awning and checked out the turtles inside (as best we could) and the bird feeders outside, before starting back off along the Green trail.
Almost everywhere we went, we had to straddle the trail - about 1/2 of the distance we covered on the trail was covered in puddles, some 50 feet long or so! But it was a ton of fun, we were laughing the whole time, and by this time we were so wet we didn't care.
After passing through more Sassafras, we entered the White Cedar Swamp, which was breathtaking. The White Cedar trees themselves are beautiful, and descending into the swamp was surreal and peaceful. The long boardwalk across the swamp gives you great views of the thriving wet environment around you. We continued over several more boardwalks, with great expansive views all around.
By this point we're completely soaked through, but the wettest stuff was yet to come. After walking for a while more while climbing, we came slowly downhill through waterlogged trails. The Green path took a left turn, but it wasn't possible for us to go left - the path had been flooded by rainwaters and became a stream flowing towards us!
We tried going around to the left, to no avail - a number of thorned bushes blocked our way. We then tried to the right, crossing a log over rushing water, and succeeded in getting to the top of a hill, where we got our bearings and identified a path back to the trail. Getting back to the trail was no picnic though - we had a few more sinkers with our shoes, and had an even more treacherous go across a log when we joined the path again.
The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful - at this point we were supersaturated and just ran through flooded parts of the trail with no concern for our mud-soaked shoes. On our way back, we passed a clearing with picnic tables, where we saw 5 deer grazing, before they heard us and bounded off.
While I'm thinking of it...Two fauna I haven't mentioned yet - the American Holly was prevalent throughout the hike, and there was some kind of Cinnamon fern in the marshlands whose leaves were sprawling.
On a wet day, a relatively simple hike turned into an extreme one, and we had a great time out there! I would imagine that on a clear day, this is an ideal hike for introductory hikers, or for a family hike, and I would surely recommend it!
Recommended:
No
Best time to go: Anytime
Recommended for: Anybody
Review Topic: Hiking & Trails
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Epinions.com ID:
locoono
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Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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