The number of parks and hiking spots makes enjoying the outdoors extremely accessible
A 2023 study from Trust for Public Land ranked Cincinnati’s park system as one of the best in the country, with us coming in at No. 6 out of the U.S.’s 100 largest cities. Noteworthy in the study: Cincinnati scored high when it came to equity in access to parks by race and income. The study found 88% of residents live within walking distance (about half a mile or a 10-minute walk) of a park.
And Cincinnati’s parks are beautiful, with a few like Smale Riverfront Park, Eden Park and Mt. Echo Park offering sweeping views of the city and Ohio River. Mt. Airy Forest, the city’s largest park, has several miles of hiking trails, a disc golf course and mountain biking trails, as well as Everybody’s Treehouse, Ohio’s only wheelchair-accessible public treehouse, an arboretum and dog park.
Outside the city, you also have Hamilton County’s Great Parks, which is currently working on several exciting projects, like some
new trails along the Little Miami River, a trail
connecting Lunken Airport to Sawyer Point, building out the master plan of
its new Westwood park and
a proposed trail system linking the county’s western neighborhoods and parks via a series of blueways, or water trails, and shared-use trails along the Great Miami and Whitewater rivers.
As for hiking,
that’s plentiful here too. Western Wildlife Corridor manages several nature preserves and hiking trails on the city’s West Side, and Cincinnati Nature Center offers 20 miles of hiking trails across prairies, wetlands, forests, ponds and streams at its two preserves: Rowe Woods and the members-only Longbranch Farm. For more intense hiking and rock climbing, Hocking Hills in eastern Ohio and Red River Gorge in central Kentucky are just short drives away.