South Chagrin - a walk by the river on April 2nd.

about a decade ago I discovered the ohio buckeye trail and have decided to walk the whole trail, with family. so, with kids, as you can imagine, it is slow progress. the 1st section for me was in south chagrin reservation from the Polo fields all the way to the look about lodge and then walked home. this part of the trail is close to my house. I repeated some portions of this trail over the years and in the right time, it had wild flowers. On a warmish saturday, I took my older boys to explore the trail. We park on the intersection of Miles road and chagrin river road and the trail generally follows the river. the buckeye trail here is wide and has tiny side trail that hug the river, we followed the smaller trail as much as possible. Just as I warn my kids to stay away from the edge, or risk falling the swift and cold river, we spot fisherman, in the water! fishing with no bother. this is a great trail for kids, we had a few breaks to skim stones on the river, and several fallen trees to climb on. this hike kept them busy. after a while we passed by Jackson field. this is a larger parking lot in the middle of the secion and here there is more open grassland, and with open land the flower chances increases. the trail here was a bit muddier , but not much. there was still snow the day before so it will all go away by May. we nearly reached the intersection with Chagrin road , sort of a half way point to the polo fields and we turned back. there are multiple trail zigzagging here and I chose to explore as much as possible and finally,  A flower!, a single yellow beacon of spring. 

Excited, we moved on and now yellow flowers were more and more visible. still early in the season but there will be more...
            

                                                            All this greenery will be flowery

                                                                1st flower of the year