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I decided to spend this weekend with a friend at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It’s currently the only National Park in Ohio; located near Cleveland, in the northeastern part of the state.
Since it’s winter, we thought it would be too cold for camping this one. We decided to stay in a local La Quinta for a couple nights. I mean, FREE BREAKFAST always sells me! We arrived on Friday night, after driving 2 hours to get there. The weather was starting to get a little icy so we knew we were in for a COLD weekend! We got settled into our room and began planning the next day’s hikes.
So I have this thing about trips; I can’t sleep well the night before and up getting up super early, ready to get moving! Unfortunately, I got up so early that Katie wasn’t awake yet and it was still pretty dark outside. We’d decided that night hiking wouldn’t be a great idea in this kind of weather, simply because of how cold it would be without the sun and the views wouldn’t be great if we couldn’t see them well!
After getting dressed and heading down to breakfast, we headed out to start our day at the Stanford House. We planned a 3.5 mile hike to Brandywine Falls and back. The hike was beautiful as we watched the sun coming up through the trees! We passed an amazing bridge over frozen water. When looking down into the gorge, it was impressive to see what the flow of water does to the land! And then got we got to the main event, Brandywine Falls!! Even frozen, they’re completely incredible!
We got tons of pictures there, from all sorts of different angles. I just love the ice and snow contrasting with the red rocks! There were also so huge boulders below that were calling to us to be climbed all over, however, there were multiple signs posted about not climbing them, so we abstained.
After we finished this hike, we decided to head to another one that we thought would be somewhat short. It was another 3 miles but it was significantly more difficult than the first one! It felt like we were going uphill the entire time! And, then, we came to the steps.
Coming down wasn’t a big deal, but we knew that we’d have to go back up those!!! The rest of the hike was pretty level after that. Blue Hen Falls were very pretty as well. I loved how the water streamed through the center of the ice. However, even though the falls were pretty, I don’t think they were worth the hike. Others may disagree, but I wasn’t super impressed by it. We cheated on the way back to avoid the steps and walked up the road back to the parking lot.
A cool tunnel we found! 
Carvings on one of the walls.
Next we went to check out the Ledges and it was by far my favorite part! It’s basically just tons of giant rocks and boulders. We found a little niche off path to go down and disappeared in there. Found some cool carvings in there too! We climbed around back there and eventually found our way back out to the path. We had such a blast this weekend and I can’t wait to get back out there and visit another place!!