Today we’re joining our friend Gizmo and his buddy Finn Howard for Parks Day.  A day designed to celebrate and share the beauty of your favorite park.

Long time readers of this blog know that our preferred walk is in our park.  The tiny little park at the top of our street.  The park’s formal name is Boulder Ridge Park.

Our park is not like your typical city or state park.  There are no areas for picnicking, no benches, no bathroom facilities and no place to swim.

Just a big beautiful field perfect for getting your puppy zoomies on and lots of nice trails for hiking.

The enormous field is used for LaCrosse practice three times per week from mid-March until early June, I usually try to schedule our walks so we don’t interfere with their practice.

There are three main trails.  The yellow trail is the easiest, with slight hills and fairly clear trails.  The blue and yellow is slightly more difficult, with tree stumps, and small rocks.  The orange trail is the longest and also the hardest, with many steep inclines designed for those who like a little bit of a challenge.

Most of the trails are contained within the park and generally intersect with one of the other trails at some point.  The orange trail encircles the park and from start to finish would generally take us about 30 to 40 minutes. The blue and yellow trail leads down to and then crosses the local rail trail where you can pick it up and follow it in to Valley Falls, a beautiful town maintained park, with many more miles of hiking trails (and picnic areas, bathroom facilities and swimming.) 😀

Because the trails lead outside of the park, It’s important to understand the markings for the trail system.

This marker indicates I’m on the orange trail which shifts to the left, while intersecting with the blue and yellow which would drift off to the right.

There are also some unmarked trails that have been made either by the deer or two-legged adventurers, no worries they all lead somewhere.

In the last 18 months or so, we’ve had three pretty bad storms, Snowtober of 2011 dumped a lot of wet heavy snow.  Unfortunately most of the trees still had their leaves.   Many branches and trees that didn’t break from the weight of the snow, were weakened.  With each subsequent storm (Sandy last fall and the Blizzard of 2013) more and more limbs and trees fall.

Most of the trees/branches miraculously fell off the trails.  In other areas, hikers move what we can.

Whenever possible we use the downed trees to practice agility jumps.

Of course sometimes it’s just not possible.

Even without all the facilities a state park has, our little park is just perfect for us.  It’s super convenient (I can walk the dogs there in less than two minutes,) it’s far away from busy roads so a dog with a good recall can be off-leash and it’s really not used by a lot of people (not counting LaCrosse of course.)

Plus we get to do fun things like climb rocks.

 This is the Park’s Day blog hop hosted by Gizmo and Finn Howard. Visit Gizmo to add your link.