Every year, on the first Saturday of June, we celebrate the incredible ways that federal, state, and local hiking trails benefit our lives.
🌳Natural spaces with hiking trails provide numerous environmental benefits such as temperature regulation and air filtration provided by the trees. They preserve wildlife habitats, maintain important wildlife corridors, and promote carbon sequestration.🌳
The physical exercise of hiking is a full body workout that helps you build stronger muscles and bones💪, improve your balance⚖️ and heart health💖, and decrease your risk of certain respiratory and other chronic conditions. Spending quality time outdoors also improves your mental health by reducing stress and anxiety, lowers your risk of depression, improves your mood by boosting your happy hormones, and improves your sensory perception.🧘
Launched in 1993 by the American Hiking Society, National Trails Day was conceived as a program to highlight the importance of the National Trails System, to advocate for increased trail use, and to encourage volunteer trail stewardship—leave the trails better than you found them to make a lasting impact.⭐
Did you know that, in Kentucky State Parks alone, there are over 300 miles of hiking trails? They range from easy to challenging, short to long, some are family and pet friendly, some let you scale rocky mountainsides. But there are many more trails to hike outside the state park system as well—you can even hit the trail in Versailles on a railbike!
Below are just a few examples of some places with a variety of trails in the central Kentucky region. Click on each to learn more. Let’s take a hike!
What kind of hike will you do on June 7?
More Reading:
https://parks.ky.gov/things-to-do/trails/hiking
#BluegrassLandConservancy #NationalTrailsDay #KYStateParks #LandConservation #LandTrust
