Kirtland Hills walk

We took Saturday afternoon to head east along Lake Erie out of Cleveland towards the town of Mentor to check out a few things we’ve haven’t really explored yet. We ended up driving up through Holden Arboretum and found an area called Penitentiary Glen. There are miles of trails looping through a small gorge lined with hemlock, fields of dogwood, ponds. and a section of the Buckeye trail that runs through the hardwood.

I figured it was called Penitentiary Glen because there used to be a prison in the area or something, but we learned it’s called this because the walls of the gorge that the creek runs through are steep, solid rock, and the original settlers of the area joked that “it’s easy to get into, but difficult to get out of”… earning the area the nickname “penitentiary gully”. At some point they must have changed the name thinking that “glen” sounds more pleasant for a park than “gully”.