February 8, 2025.
4.5 mi. | 130′ ele. gain | 2 hr.
Photo album
After a morning of learning about the history of the Clotilda at the Africatown Heritage Museum (recommend!), I was in need of a walk in the park. I got on Google to find something, anything near our campsite for the night and I stumbled across Graham Creek Nature Preserve. Sounds good to me, I thought, so we headed that way.
A red-tailed hawk greeted me in the parking lot. Lucky for me, I guess, he was busy looking for rodents or daydreaming or whatever else hawks get up to in their downtime. I had no idea what I was dealing with until the end of the hike, when we came across this sign:
Aaron decided he’d chill out in the van while I got my energy out. I grabbed my backpack and walked to the trail map at the parking area. I was intrigued by the 4-mile route marked for obstacle course racing. It sounded cool and I thought maybe they set it up once a year for an event. But I quickly found out that many of the features are permanent fixtures of the trail! This is something I knew Aaron would not want to miss. I roused him from his comfy spot on the bed and said let’s go!
Over the next 2 hours we balanced, crawled, climbed, vaulted and swung our way through the course. This was not at all what I expected at a nature preserve. But the park had another cool element: tons of carnivorous plants!
We were a bit out of season to see them at their prime, but we found a few species of pitcher plant. I had never seen them in the wild, so I counted this as a big win. The park was beautiful. We enjoyed the natural landscape as well as the built elements. I could see where additional challenges were put in certain sections of the trail and also how much different it would be after a lot of rain. During our visit the temperatures were pleasant, there were no bugs and the terrain was quite dry.
A quick search online told me that they host a mud run in the spring every year. That would be a ton of fun. I’ll be honest though: we were both pretty spent by the end of the course and there was NO running involved. If I lived in the area, I’d visit this park on a regular basis. Despite the number of people here, we didn’t run into too many of them. A handful of folks were playing disc golf and we came across them in areas where the trails crossed. Overall, this park offered us a pleasant diversion and way more bang for our buck than we were expecting. To be fair, I wasn’t sure what to expect in Alabama. But I was happy to be welcomed into the state’s natural areas this way.
If you’ve ever seen a year-round obstacle course like this, PLEASE send me a message or leave a comment. I would love to visit more!