A Year In Tennessee State Parks
I challenged myself to hike in all 26 Middle Tennessee State Parks in a year and discovered a passion.
This article was originally published in the September/October 2021 issue of The Tennessee Conservationist magazine and was entitled “Middle Tennessee State Parks Hiking Challenge.”
“We should hike more often.” For years, this is as far as my fiancé and I got in reviving our hiking hobby. We’d agree that we should get back out on the trail, but we never even got our boots out of the closet.
Finally, we decided to turn our nebulous aspiration into a specific plan. We began 2020 with a New Year’s resolution to hike in all 26 Middle Tennessee State Parks by the end of the year. Even though I grew up in Middle Tennessee and my fiancé had lived in Nashville for years, we had only visited a handful of state parks between us and were mostly unfamiliar with the park system. Using a map from the parks’ website, we determined which parks were within Middle Tennessee. Our area of focus was bordered on the left by Johnsonville State Historic Park and Mousetail Landing State Park, and Pickett CCC Memorial State Park marked the right boundary of the area we needed to cover. With every park on our list about two hours from our home in Nashville and most of our weekends in the year…
