Exploring The Wilds

Not to far from Zanesville, Ohio is a very unique place called The Wilds.

(Reminded, images cab be clicked to be viewed larger if  you would like.)

Well worth the 30 minute drive through some of the rolling hillsides and back roads of southeast Ohio.

The Wilds is unique in that they are the largest nature conservation facility in the entire North American continent.  They are a private, non-profit safari park and conservation center that offers unique experiences such as ziplining and horseback riding through the preserve.

We had wonderful weather for it.  It was hot, about 90 degrees hot, but we had a great breeze throughout the day.  Plus it was overcast, so that helped.

It’s an interesting course.  You are taken through trees, not being able to see the platform on the other end.  All the way to an open area over the ponds and fields where you zip past and over the animals.

Here are two videos of the zipline that David captured off his GoPro helmet mounted camera…

The last zipline delivers you to an area where you can feed these huge Catfish, look at the Trumpeter Swans, which The Wilds helped reintroduce back into Ohio, and view the Giraffes.

By the time we were done ziplining it was already 2pm.  We had enough time to scarf down a hotdog, get our tickets for horseback riding and jump on a shuttle bus to take us to the horseback riding area.  The next horseback riding tour was at 2:30.

We made it with time to spare.

Now, I don’t know about many of you, but I have never been on a horse before.  So this was all new to me.

David on the other hand had barrel raced in his younger days.  So he was familiar with riding to say the least.  However, it has been a while.

It was a nice trail that took you along the preserve.  It was a very different perspective seeing the preserve and the animals like this.

Our horses were great.  They originally came from Oklahoma and they were trained to just follow.  So I really didn’t need to do much but hang on.  Levi just followed David’s horse, “Charcoal”.  A little too close sometimes.  David’s horse would stop to swat at a fly bothering him and Levi would just run right into Charcoal.  Oh well.  It didn’t seem to bother him any.  Charcoal’s tail kept swinging and swatting at flies and my horse Levi seemed to like that because it kept the flies off of his face.

All in all it was a wonderful day.  It was hot and humid, but a breeze helped with that.  The day before it had poured, so we lucked out with the timing of the weather.

If you ever find yourself in the southeast area, around I-77 and I70, you can stay at Wolfie’s Campground in Zanesville and have a wonderful day exploring The Wilds, only 30 minutes from there.

Oh and about Wolfie’s Campground…I think I was a little hasty to judge them in my previous post.  We had some rowdy and obnoxious campers there that gave us a bad feeling about this campground.  They ended up leaving the next day and the rest of the 2 days we were there were fine.  Although, I still would not stay in the site we were in.  There are only a few level sights and ours was not one of them.

Now on to Louisville and The Rally…