Nelson's Ledges State Park Reviews & Reports

As the trail description mentions, do not let the short distances of the hikes in the small state park disuade you from visiting here. This is a most unique place, indeed. The narrow slots and jumbled rock caves make this an enjoyable day of scrambling and exploring. The "trails," such as they are, are difficult to follow due to the nature of the place so I recommend not worrying about it too much. Follow the passageways wherever they lead. Since the park parrallels a good sized roadway, you're not likely to get lost. The park is certainly well loved. On the day of my visit, there were a handful of people walking about even in the damp of a wet autumn morning. The fallen leaves made for dicey footing but with caution we all saw pretty much the entire park in 3-4 hours. The only negatives were evidence of human stupidity, i.e. beer cans and graf. We picked up a bag full of trash and shook our head at the graffitti. It will wash away before any of the rocks do for sure, but it was still disturbing. If you are in the area, this place is a must-see and must explore. Again, not much hiking, but lots of fun.

I did this trail on Sunday 7/27/2008. It is a very small state park, but it packs a lot in those 2 miles. There are 4 marked trails, but they are very poorly marked and very difficult to follow. Another downside is that there is a lot of trash and bottles lying along the trails, and a lot of graffiti on the rocks and in the caves. If you can manage to look past all that, the trails offer some unique and amazing experiences. The white trail is the easiest, but it doesn’t really offer you anything that you can't see better from the other trails. The yellow trail goes to the opposite side of the park as the other 3 trails, but is not to miss. The trail passes through "dwarf's pass." If you are over 3 feet tall, plan to crawl through this portion of the trail. They have built a little boardwalk here, so you don't have to crawl through the mud. This leads to a few caves and a small waterfall. If you are not up for the crawl, you can go up and to the right and bypass the pass and still reach the waterfall. Once you reach the waterfall, you are at the edge of the park, so you can backtrack from here. The red and blue trails parallel each other, at different elevations. The blue trail leads across the creek to some cool rock formations and back around to "The Devils Icebox." Walk into the creek and follow it upstream into the large cave. This is where a flashlight would be nice to have. Once you loop back to the beginning follow the red trail. This is the best part of the park. Follow it down into the crack (30-40 ft deep and only a few feet wide). When you reach the squeeze, it narrows to about 15" wide. If you are claustrophobic or have even a little stomach bulge, this might be impossible for you. Once you shimmy though here the trail climbs back to the surface. Once you get up top, turn around check out the little crack in the ground you just climbed out of!! Overall this is a nice hike, but not physically challenging.