Crow’s Nest: Update to trail guide

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager.

It’s a new year, and time for a new look. We still offer paper trail guides to our visitors, though we also offer alternatives (more about that below). Not everyone has a good cell signal here and paper offers a reliable and useful means of communicating about where you are and what to do at our preserves.

We were about to run out of the old Crow’s Nest Preserve trail maps and so it was time to reprint. This most recent trail guide is mostly the same inside, with minor changes that improve the map. The cover is different, using another excellent Jim Moffett photo, this time of a Red-eyed Vireo.

If you are curious to see how the brochures have changed over the years, you can see photos of a progression of them here and the outgoing one here.

There are electronic alternatives available. You may have noticed that we are no longer promoting our Explore Natural Lands app; it needed too much new coding to stay current with recent mobile operating systems (though it still works on my phone, and maybe yours). But the maps also haven’t been updated with current land and trail additions, so we recommend that you try AllTrails which now supports new information about our preserves. Their home page helps you find local places to experience and it offers reviews and tools to track your activities.

You may recall a weblog post from November 2020 where I wrote about what to expect if you’ve never been here before. In it I mentioned how information on AllTrails didn’t specifically mention Crow’s Nest even as it included some visitor-submitted trails from here but those didn’t offer much visitor guidance. This isn’t true any more: the AllTrails website and app now accurately represent our trails and provide information about what to expect here. AllTrails lets us curate the information about our own preserves so it represents us well and is easy for us to update as needed. You will find that the QR code that we formerly used to direct you to a web page about our app now takes you to AllTrails.

Finally, you can also find information about visiting our preserves on our own website: https://natlands.org/visit/. This website itself is getting an update but this link should remain a way to get you where you want to go!