The TrekOhio Guide is designed to help you find interesting, natural sites in Ohio. We wanted to create a place online where you could learn about sites that were in the same geographical region regardless of whether the park, nature preserve or trail was managed by the federal government, the state government, a county government, or a non-governmental agency. In addition we wanted the information to be accessible via your cellphone or other mobile device, so it would be easy to adjust your trip plans, or find additional information while away from home. With that in mind, we made sure that the TrekOhio Guide has an easy-to-navigate, mobile-friendly layout.
The guide can be accessed from the TrekOhio site by using the menu found near the top of the page (underneath: “TrekOhio: Exploring Ohio’s Nature Preserves & Parks”).. If you are using a desktop browser, hovering your cursor over the Central Ohio tab will display a list of menu items representing the Central Ohio counties. If you can’t hover because you’re using a cellphone, clicking on the Central Ohio tab will display the same list of counties. Clicking on any county’s name will display information about parks, preserves, and bike trails found in that county regardless of what agency manages these areas (so the per-county list isn’t limited to parks managed by the county government). Faster yet, you can just type the name of the county in lower case letters right after our URL, and go directly to information on that county. For example:
| County that interests you | URL to enter in your address bar |
|---|---|
| Franklin | http://trekohio.com/franklin |
| Hocking | http://trekohio.com/hocking |
| Van Wert | http://trekohio.com/vanwert |
To date our guide covers Southeast Ohio (including the Hocking Hills) and Central Ohio. So far we’ve published information on 28 of Ohio’s 88 counties. We hope to expand our coverage of Southeast Ohio and Central Ohio into an even more detailed list, but for now we are trying to expand coverage to the other three regions of Ohio. The map at the top of this posting shows to which region we’ve assigned each of Ohio’s counties.
We welcome feedback on our guide. In addition if you believe you have information on a specific park or preserve that would be useful to our readers, feel free to add a comment to the page in our guide that lists that park or preserve.
Update (June 7, 2012)
We just added southwest Ohio to our guide (see the menu at the top of the page). The TrekOhio Guide now covers 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties. We are currently collecting information on parks in northeast Ohio.
Update(July 1, 2012)
We added northeast Ohio to our guide (see the menu at the top of the page). The TrekOhio Guide now contains 657 entries for parks, preserves, trails, etc. We plan to add the northwest quadrant soon.
Update(July 18, 2012)
We added northwest Ohio to our guide (see the menu at the top of the page). The TrekOhio Guide now contains 789 entries for parks, preserves, trails, etc. This completes our initial release of the guide. You may have noticed that as we went along we added more information per entry. We plan to update some of the earlier entries and have some ideas for making the guide even more useful. If you want to see some of our plans for the guide – take a look at the (SE Ohio) entry for Hocking County. We welcome your comments on the guide and hope you find it useful.
Bob Platt
Deb Platt
Deb, I noticed you didnt have any parks in Auglaize county. My family is from there and I would like to find some parks or preserves in that area.
Deb, an entry is now available in our guide for Auglaize County.
Deb – when we started work on the guide, we knew there were 88 counties, but didn’t realize the number of parks and the agencies involved. The state has parks, preserves, forests, and wildlife areas. We’ve included federal, county, and non-government agencies. As a result we have yet to cover the northwest quadrant and we’ve documented 657 parks, preserves, an trails so far.
Auglaize County is in northwest Ohio which we’re working on now. The northwest has remnants of old growth forests, sand dunes, and some spectacular birding sites, so we’re looking forward to getting this published. We thank you for your patience and hope to complete our initial version of the Trek Ohio Guide by the end of the month. Then we’ve already identified ideas for improving it further.