Lawrence Woods State Nature Preserve is located in Hardin County, and at 1,035 acres it is the largest woods having mature trees in the area. The nearest metropolitan area is Columbus, Ohio and for residents there it would take an hour to an hour-and-a-half to drive to Lawrence Woods. It's 4 miles from Kenton, Ohio, and the woods seems to be very popular with the local people. While I was visiting in late October I saw people of all ages strolling the boardwalk. The woods is adjacent to large meadows.
When Read more ➜ Lawrence Woods State Nature Preserve
Lawrence Woods State Nature Preserve is located in Hardin County, and at 1,035 acres it is the largest woods having mature trees in the area. The nearest metropolitan area is Columbus, Ohio and for residents there it would take an hour to an hour-and-a-half to drive to Lawrence Woods. It's 4 miles from Kenton, Ohio, and the woods seems to be very popular with the local people. While I was visiting in late October I saw people of all ages strolling the boardwalk. The woods is adjacent to large meadows.
When Read more ➜ 
December 1st was an unusually warm and sunny day for Ohio... shirt-sleeve weather really. We decided to take advantage of the sunny weather by visiting the 502-acre Marie J. Desonier State Nature Preserve in Athens County. The preserve is known for its hills and deep ravines.
The preserve's main trail is the Oak Ridge Trail. This is an irregular loop trail that starts near the kiosk at one end of the parking lot and returns at the other end of the parking lot. There's a short spur trail 
Lake Hope State is a great place to get away from the crowds and enjoy peace and quiet is a scenic natural setting. Lake Hope is located in Vinton County just southeast of the Hocking Hills. In the 19th century it was a major iron producing and processing region at the heart of the American industrial revolution. Today many of the towns centered around the mines and iron furnaces are gone. It is a sparsely populated region of Ohio with an economy based on agriculture, forestry, and tourism.
The 
Lancaster, Ohio has a population just under 39,000, and it is the county seat of Fairfield County. It has a municipal park known as "Rising Park." The park offers the normal sort of amenities that you might expect: a pond, picnic tables, playgrounds... things of that nature. But what's unusual about the park is its terrain. Rising 250-foot (76 m) above the surrounding plain is a bluff known as "Mount Pleasant." The bluff is made of highly erosion-resistant Blackhand sandstone. From the top of Mount 
We'd visited every (non-permit) park and preserve in Hocking county except one - Kessler Swamp. This weekend on the way home from a hike at Conkles Hollow, we stopped there. The parking lot for the preserve in a pull-off off of Hideaway Hills Road. A very short path leads you to an observation platform overlooking the swamp.
The preserve is a 20-acre site consisting mostly of the swamp which is fed by Durbin Run, a tributary of Rush Creek. When we visited we noted mostly waterfowl 
At 26,827 acres, Zaleski State Forest is the second only to Shawnee State Forest in size. Located in Ohio within Vinton and Athens counties, this region was in the vanguard of the industrial revolution in the 19th century. Besides mining coal and iron ore, local residents cut down huge swaths of forest to produce charcoal for the region's many furnaces where iron workers cast pig iron.
Today, the area is sparsely populated. Once a thriving industrial area, Zaleski forest is now quiet 
The parks and preserves in the Hocking Hills area are great destinations for the outdoor enthusiast. We've hiked them all - Hocking State Park, Conkle's Hollow, Rock Bridge, Wahkeena, Boch Hollow. Wait ... Boch Hollow?
Boch Hollow is a 570 acre preserve located north of Logan, Ohio. Like Rhododendron Cove and Christmas Rocks, Boch Hollow used to be a permit only preserve, but it is now open to the public. We've provided directions to the preserve at the end of this article.
Boch 
In early September we visited and stayed overnight at a 60 acre private park in Pike County. According to legend we were just a few hundred feet away from the lair of a spectral wolf named Old Raridan.
The area is known as 'Big Rock' after the rocky peak that towers 200 feet above the surrounding country side. A small cave high on the side of the peak was also reputedly the home of the wolf Old Raridan who legend says was killed in an epic battle with local settlers at the end of the 
A huge rock hurtles through the empty void of space. Its been orbiting the sun for hundreds of millions of years. But this orbit will be different. This time its trajectory and the orbit of earth intersect. It will impact somewhere in southern Ohio releasing energy equivalent to a large thermonuclear weapon and creating a crater five miles across. Alert the governor, start evacuations! But wait, it's already too late!
It's too late because the impact occurred during the Permian Period 
We visited Boord nature preserve on a rainy afternoon in early September. Boord is a small 127 acre preserve in Washington county. The preserve is a few miles down a gravel one lane township road (TR-69). A brown sign identifies it as "Boord State Nature Preserve" and there is a small gravel parking lot and kiosk adjacent to the road.
The preserve has a 3/4 mile loop trail. A light rain had begun and we donned our ponchos and started down the trail. A mown path through some