Hiking Medway Valley Heritage Forest

In the first summer of the pandemic we redecorated our TV room. In the process of this venture, we bought some local photography to affix to the wall. We were both excited about these autumn photos taken by an Ontario photographer in a forest near London Ontario. (I'm currently looking for the link to his Instagram to post here).

This past long weekend we decided to take a short retreat away to Port Stanley. Since Port Stanley is a significantly closer road trip to the Forest from our wall art, we picked the warmest day we had (a balmy 8 degrees) to go and hike Medway Valley Heritage Forest.

There is free parking at the entrance to the forest and enough spaces for about 5 cars. Since the trailhead is located in a residential neighbourhood, if the lot was full you could probably find street parking.

This is a well carved out loop that is an easy to moderate 2-3KM hike (the moderate was only because of the slippery mud). The major challenge this time of year was that the mud made some of the hills slippery and mucky. 

While we weren't given bright fall colours on this early spring hike, the signs of warmer weather and bright colours were hard to miss.

Along the way we found a fort that someone had built in the forest. Jack named it "Castle Byers" as inspired by Stranger Things.

A section of the trail takes you alongside the river. It was a relatively quite day where we only stumbled upon two other groups of hikers and one person in waders fishing in the river.

A failed attempt to skip stones. We couldn't find many rocks that were the right shape.

As for wildlife spotting, our best find was this active woodpecker Molly managed to snap a photo of.

While we weren't wowed by fall colours on this hike or any other spectacular views it was a nice way to break our hiking shoes back in for spring. Early spring hikes are great because the bugs aren't out yet! As a free hike that is only 2-3KM I encourage anyone who is in the area to check it out. We hiked for about 40 minutes and this is a nice, easy, short hike for kids. That being said, it's not going to make my top 10 list, despite being the source of beautiful art in my house. Stay tuned for more hiking adventures later this spring!