The Cuyahoga Valley National Park is a wonderful place to spend a Sunday afternoon. It has such a diversity of flora, fauna and landscape that you can pick a new area every week this summer and not see the same TYPE of place twice.
Ira Road Entrance to Cuyahoga Valley National Park
Yesterday we visited the Ira Road area near the Marsh.
This entrance to the canal path lets you turn right or left. Being that we knew from the Bolanz entrance just up the road that we wanted to see the Marsh, we turned left. The Marsh has a wooden boardwalk that straddles the marshlands, and is about 300 feet long. My picture overlooking one side of the marsh is below.
This park is really neat because its On the water, literally. From one side of the board walk to the other, you can see all sorts of animals including beavers, herons, frogs, ‘gi-normous’ turtles, ducks, fish and young lovers holding hands. Sometimes those have giant tattoos covering their bodies… but I digress.
You can also see all sorts of interesting plants- from wild looking trees that have been overtaken by the marsh, flowering lillipads (they are flowering right now at the end of May) water-born plants and on your way up to the marsh the ‘weeds’ (what we call plants that we don’t understand!) are already taller than me= atleast some of them.
Below my son Elijah checks out something we’ve never seen before, albeit with his ‘condition’.
Ya, poison ivy has attacked the face of Elijah- my husband HAS to clear that out of the woods behind our house. It’s all over his face and body. It’s temporary, but I hate to see the little guy suffer.
My daughter, on the other hand, enjoys nature, as long as she isn’t rolling in it. She showed off her height and stretching abilities to the beautiful hanging pines along the short route to and from the parking lot.
At the marsh itself, Elijah made the most of his height to get to the water. Not a place to play in, but it is one of the most unique and obviously free places in Summit county to visit. We counted fish, searched for turtles, watched percolating bubbles here and there.
What’s your favorite park in the park? Please comment and let us know. If you’d like to write a guest post about one of your adventures here, we’d be happy to post it! Just contact us!
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beautiful family Cindy,- poison Ivy and all!