Eagle Creek Park Indianapolis, IN 8-18-2009

I made a trip to Eagle Creek Park in Indianapolis to walk some nature trails today.  This park has a 1,400-acre lake, nature preserve, Earth Discovery Center, trails and park.  I drove from Brownsburg. IN to the park, which should have only been about 6-7 miles, but road construction detours turned it into a 12 mile trip one way by car.

I entered the park at the 56th Street entrance on the south side of the park.  I paid my $5.00 daily fee to enter by car.  If you are a bicyclist or a walker, the charge is only $3.00.

I had looked over the map on the website, but I was unable to print one out, since I do not have a printer back at the hotel.  I neglected to ask for a map at the entrance, and I wish I would have, since the nature trails were a little difficult for me to find at first.

I drove around until I was able to see a nature trail cutting through the woods by the park road.  There was a pickup parked in a small parking area big enough for about 5 cars.  I guessed correctly that this was a trail head.  It is a little difficult to locate trail heads (at least in the area of the park I was in).

I walked and tried to take not of some of the trail signs.  There were some colored arrows in places and designations like M5 and M7 at different points along the trail I was on.  Somewhere there must be some maps that can help relate to what these symbols mean.  The markings were plentiful, but I did not have a map to make sense of them.  The maps on the website do not show these symbols.

I walked toward the Eagle Creek Reservoir, which is a beautiful sight.  I stopped and took a few pictures near the marina while the sun was getting low in the late afternoon sky.  There were a few small boats out on the water, and the way the sun reflected off of the water was beautiful.  I took it all in, and then started back along the trail in the general direction of where my car was.

 I wondered off on some side trails, and ran into a lot of deer along the trail, who did not seem to care that I was there.  I have never seen deer like this where I was able to get so close before they moved off.  The deer never ran.  They watched me, and if I was too close, they slowly walked in the other direction.  None of them ran.  I guess the deer here are so used to people, they do not spook very easily. 

I eventually got back to my car around 7:45 PM, and called it a day.

The park address is at 7840 W 56th St. Indianapolis, IN 46254-9706.  The phone number is (317) 327-7110.  The website of the Eagle Creek Park Foundation is http://eaglecreekpark.org.  There is even a YouTube channel for Eagle Creek Park which is at http://www.youtube.com/EagleCreekPark.

The link to the complete photo album on Photobucket is http://photobucket.com/EagleCreekPark_20090818