Hiking the Hills of Northeast Ohio

Chauncey's family lives in a beautiful part of Ohio with rolling hills and rivers. In all the 10 years that I've been coming out here, we've never explored the hiking trails that I guess are all over. I'm so glad we got out because we saw some beautiful sites within an hour's drive.

Our first stop was in Bedford, OH where there are the remains of an old Viaduct and mill. We drove through the main street in town before we got to the park which had a cute downtown with cobblestone side streets, and this picturesque old history square, complete with quant train station and 1900s school house.

Viaduct Park

Viaduct Park is just around the corner from main street. The park has plaques where we read the history of the viaduct being built before 1900. The water was redirected and used to build power through a mill.

I've gotten to a place that I can shoot in manual mode on my camera (what-the-what! :)), so I had a ton of fun getting some long exposures of the water (although with this sun, long exposure meant only about 1/20th of a second). 

Chauncey was a bit nervous of first of ticks and snakes, but we quickly got right up in there next to the river.

Close to the viaduct was a wall of shale which was beautiful. The layers in the stone were such a palpable representation of the layers of time. One of the last observations Chauncey pointed out to me was that there were small shells at the base of the shale, which melted away from the shale. This area used to be covered in water, and the shells were remnants of a time when there was sea life here instead of land!

We spent almost 2 hours exploring the area and marveling at the history. Back on the road, we stopped on the side of the road to take in the views of this bridge and panorama:

Cuyahoga Falls

On our way home, we stopped by Cuyahoga Falls which is a man-made fall. There is also a cave in the area that we hopefully will come back to hike to.

This was only the beginning of the amount of places we can explore (why again haven't we done this in the past 10 years??), so looking forward to doing more of this in trips to come!