Morrow Mountain

Here is a quick post about my first hike through Morrow Mountain State Park.  Miles and I went out to Morrow Mountain State Park a couple of weeks ago, and I am finally getting around to writing about it as I promised.  I was really impressed with Morrow Mountain in general. Each trail intersection is clearly marked with signs indicating the available routes to take with small descriptions which include distance. There are busy spots to see the views from the top of Morrow Mountain as well as secluded ones which I definitely prefer. My right knee was in tons of pain that day, so I was glad to be able to hike on easy trails which were only steep for small bursts. There is plenty of parking too.

We spent the day talking about rocks, trees, and other places we wanted to hike. I consider that a good date!

I didn’t have high expectations for the views because I figured that it would be overlooking housing developments of some sort. We were happy to see probably half a dozen small lakes from different vantage points along the trails. We didn’t look over housing developments. The whole place felt like a secret. The area around Morrow Mountain is very rural and beautiful.   I was thankful that there were views of the other small “mountains” in the area instead!  This area has a really nice network of trails which can be combined to make loops (which is nice because I don’t really like to hike the same trail twice in one day).  We went to the top of Morrow Mountain and Sugarfoot Mountain within the park.  I had three problems.  My right knee hurt terribly.  The motorcycles were very loud and distracting whenever the trail intersected or came near the road which takes people straight to the top of Morrow Mountain.  And the route we took to the top of Sugarfoot Mountain was very steep and would have been easier to do backwards.  Woops. Overall, the trails were very visually interesting throughout the park. I bet this area is even more beautiful when there are leaves on the trees. There were small streams and a various amount of trees I could identity (botany shoutout–loved that class) in the surrounding forested areas.

We noticed large amounts of quartz and calcite at three or four areas along the trail.  You can tell the difference between the two based on how hard the they are because they look very similar.  Quartz (hardness of 7 on the Mohs Scale) is the hardest, commonly-occurring mineral.  Calcite’s hardness is Yes, other things are much harder such as corundum and diamond, but Quartz (SiO₂) is the most abundant mineral in the world.  Calcite (CaCO₃) is much softer at a hardness near 3.  Furthermore, the signs throughout the park (any state park has these signs) which said “Please do not remove any plant, rock, or mineral specimens from the park” made us really laugh out loud.  Obviously those signs made me want to figure out which types of minerals the park could possibly be hiding!