Sunday March 9 2025 -Tennessee road trip day 11 - Jasper IN to St Clairsville OH - 1 hike, 3 miles, 300 feet elevation gain

On a previous trip across country (on the way home from Oregon with hope chests I think) I had stopped at Martin State forest off US-50 in Indiana and wanted to come back when we could hike there.  So when we were getting to the end of our planned time in Memphis I played with routes and decided our trip home could swing through this scenic hilly part of Indiana.

Martin State forest was only an hour from Jasper so we hiked in the late morning after a leisurely start from our hotel.  There is a hike in Alltrails in Martin State Forest but I wanted to go back to the exact spot I had been before and hoped to find a good trail from there.  We found some trails for sure but the trail map wasn't super helpful and Alltrails only had a map for one of the trails that passed through that section of the park. We tried following signs (shown below) for some lake that was 1 mile away but the trail soon branched and headed steeply downhill in the direction we went and going the other way the lake was supposed to be just .7 miles away. I couldn't see how we could have been heading the right way given the information I could cobble together so we backtracked and tried an unmarked but obvious path that seemed to stay closer to the lake but this just went back to the campground.  From there were able to walk the 1 short loop trail Alltrails knew about called the Woodland Education trail.  It did take us to Martin lake and was a nice enough trail but without our electronic aid I'm not sure were would have even found the trail at all.  Still, the landscape and scenery of Martin State forest was great and I'm glad we went.  Given our energy level and the amount of driving we had left to do, a short hike was enough.









 

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