Essay #13: Mount Airy Forest

Yesterday I had the day off work, and I spent the morning as I normally do on days when I have off and my children are in school: hiking. I went to Mount Airy Forest with a friend from work, and we did a little over five miles on an unseasonably warm Friday morning. Mount Airy is pretty special. It's the largest Cincinnati Park at 1,459 acres, and it's one of the few places within the 275 Loop where a hiker can get some decent mileage (most suburban Cincinnati parks don't have more than 2-3 miles of trails). While you can't escape the sounds of traffic, you can escape the sights of it. There's a section where you walk along a ridge, and you can look out on the forest beyond. Since it's December, the forest floor is covered completely in fallen leaves. It's hard to believe that such a place exists only seven miles from downtown.

Recently Mount Airy has received a bad reputation from some sexual assaults that occurred there a couple years ago. In fact, the first time I tried to make plans to hike there, a friend warned me off: you can't go alone, she insisted.

Still, I eventually visited anyway. I usually hike alone, and I wasn't going to give up that many real hiking miles close to my home. The first time I hiked, it was on a cold and dreary Friday in April of 2022. I was practicing for my summer backpacking trip, so I wore a 40-pound pack. Certainly the park didn't look promising in such weather, but I completed the trail nonetheless and only saw one other person--a benign-looking old man. I hiked a second time on a muddy day in early April of this year, and the third time I visited, in late May, I did my longest hike at eight miles. That third time, it was bright and warm, and the park's shelters were full of families celebrating Memorial Day. I took a trail that wound through the park's Arboretum. It was the first time I really appreciated what the park had to offer, beyond mileage.

There's the old adage that everyone is better than their worst moment. That has to be true of Mount Airy too. After all, it was established in 1911, so a history that long can't be all sunny. I was surprised to learn that it's actually a man-made forest, so the beautiful canopy I looked out on didn't even exist a hundred years ago. That's something to admire.