Highbanks Metro Park | Columbus, Ohio

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Highbanks Metro Parks Official Website:

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All of the musical compositions or arrangements and footage in this video are original, and were composed, recorded, and captured by Andrew Lin, Bryan Lin, and Robby Huang

Featuring drums by Nate Laguzza

Original content and music is copyright Adventure Archives (c) 2017

Tags: bushcraft,backpacking,hiking,camping,wilderness,survival,outdoors,travel,outdoor recreation,prepping,nature,4k,wild,survival skills,ray mears,les stroud

Video Transcription

my friends and I are avid backpackers and we love traveling all around to explore the wilderness but one of our favorite places to experience nature is Columbus's own high banks Metropark and high banks there are a variety of activities to do and a great deal of things to experience even to those who frequent the park there's always something to discover and plenty of new things to learn one of the first things you'll see upon entering the park is it's impressive Nature Center built in the mid 90s but recently renovated with new and exciting displays here you can learn all about the park and really gain an appreciation of the various things that high banks has to offer but even better is to get out onto the trails to experience them for yourselves so as a kid I'd love to escape here just go on hikes and things like that but one thing I never really noticed until later in life was just how much biodiversity there is how much wildlife there is even still every time I come here I find that there's a lot of things that I don't notice when I'm just hiking down the trail at the edges of the park you see non-native plants brought in from the urban areas surrounding the park as beautiful as these are this is honeysuckle an invasive plant which is why you see them everywhere the berries look really good but you shouldn't eat them although you can eat the flowers there are also ample opportunities throughout the parks to find wild mushrooms on a wet autumn day like today so this looks like there should be lots of mushrooms here yeah that was my hope because see there's all these dead rotting logs which is perfect for mushrooms to grow on and it's sort of a moist day so I'm surprised we're not seeing anything

I'm sure though we can find something if we just remain observant which is often the key to this sort of thing [Music]

down here we've got really bright orange and really beautiful eyelash Cup fungi if you look really closely you'll notice some tiny strands around the edge of the fungal body another thing you'll have to notice on rotting logs are these long sort of black spider web-like things and it might be a little freaky but it's actually just the mycelium or the roots of a fungus that's sort of banded together with other roots to form this long ropey substance and the purpose of this is so that the fungi can travel long distances or grow in long distance rather so that it can find places that are more nutrient rich we have here these nice little round rotund plump adorable mushrooms are called puff balls a name as fittingly adorable as how they look and these are actually in edible mushrooms now there's a few things that look alike that you don't want to eat but the way you know this is something you can cook and eat is that you want to slice it in half and make sure the inside is pure white now sometimes in the later fall and winter you'll find all desiccated ones on some rotting logs and if you see those you can smack them a bunch and this cloud of spory smoke will come out it's really fun to do so now that we're closer to the river there's a lot of trees like Sycamore which has the white bark over there some hackberry which has this really bumpy awardee looking bark there's also some Buckeyes growing in the area but I'm more interested in what's growing on the dead bucket this is dry add saddle also called pheasant back because you can see it's got these feathery sort of patterns and on the other side are these beautiful pours if you smell it it's got a really good smell I'll have Robby tell you what he thinks it is in a second but these are really good for cooking they kind of remind me of portabellas you got to cook them pretty well but they're delicious oh you know what it smells like well smells a little like watermelon yeah yeah this weird watermelon rinds kinda like a hint of cucumber as well that's the way you know that you've got the right thing though is that watermelon smell one tree you'll often find on this Riverside trail is this American bladder nut you can see where it gets the name the fruits are these papery sort of Chinese lantern looking things there are a few non-native trees that have a similar sort of lantern structure that contain these seeds but uh this one is the American bladder nut so it's native and not far from here was one of Ohio's most wonderful fruiting trees so all of these really big leaves trees belonged to one of my favorite trees at the pawpaw if you don't know what a pawpaw is it's this wonderful native fruit that's sort of like a combination between a banana and a mango now there's none here they've either been picked clean or drops not only does it have wonderful fruits the bark is actually really flexible so you can use it to sort of tie things together you know to make shelter with or something like that there's not a lot of them and they usually grow only to the small height because they like the shade so it's best not to hurt them also nearby were some trees that produce edible nuts which on the Sodom day had fallen to the ground these are black walnuts the nut of a walnut tree which actually you can see growing over there but can you eat these or do you need to do something special jump no you can you just have to make sure you find them at the right stage and they're really hard to crack open actually squirrels are pretty good at it but humans not something wait so squirrels can crack that open yeah with their teeth wow that's incredible you can actually use the husk to like make a sort of dark brown or black dye - if you take the really young ones maybe in the spring or early summer you can pickle them and just the whole husk and everything and put them in a jar pickle them and eat them and there are also trees that might give you a fright if you didn't know any better how much money would I have to pay you for you to rub this all over your face a lot of money I don't even know what it is I don't look at it you know what it is right

oh is it poison ivy actually it's not this is a tree called boxelder and they've got these compound leaves which sometimes look like poison ivy what gives it away is that the branches grow oppositely of each other meaning they both come from the same area see I thought you were gonna say that these are like cents I have a horrible fungus Oh

so uh I've been trying to learn some of the trees Andrew and I'm pretty sure that one is a maple right nope that's a red oak well that one's a maple right nope

shag bark Hickory okay well that one over there's got to be Elm that's what I was gonna say you didn't let me finish I don't know I don't think there's any maples in this area further ahead was another nut bearing tree growing along the stream it was actually from a tree related to the walnuts and this is a hickory specifically the husk of the hickory the nut is somewhere else probably something got it so these are a lot easier to break yeah well the husk is actually always going to be decently easy although these do split apart like more naturally and I've actually eaten the nuts inside and when you crack them open it's kind of like walnuts which I guess makes sense but sometimes you get one that's a little old and there's a weevil grub inside but uh they still taste pretty good the grubs when you learn about the forest biodiversity you can appreciate the park in a completely new way but along with its natural riches high banks has relics from some of its earlier human inhabitants at the Nature Center you'll find examples of artifacts and stone tools that the Edina created thousands of years ago and outside you can still find ancient burial mounds and earthworks throughout the park one of those mounds is found in one of high banks vast open meadows we visited the mound in person and talked about the Edina who created it I know that they are Paleo Indians who lived in this area and I believe it's a burial mound with some artifacts inside so what you're seeing now is actually a mound that they've sort of reconstructed someone oh so the original height was six to seven feet and then it went to get some more information about the Edina people we talked with Jill Schneider one of the naturalist at the park the Edina lived here thousand BC they were one of the first groups to really start to settle they did some squash some corn some different crops that they would make and so then they would do the burial mountains as their way of kind of preserving things and normally what they do is they would start with whoever you're burying plus your you know a couple of their important items so a hammer or a hatchet or you know some pots some jewelry and then they would actually put water around it and burn it and make a funeral pyre and let that kind of burn they'd cover that with dirt that's where you get the mound and then the next time someone died they'd put them in that same spot

do the same thing burn it and it would just slowly get larger the more people that they kind of added to it the one mound here has never fully been excavated we did enough that we know the culture and got some of the artifacts out of it but it's left mostly intact the Edina Mound along with the diverse plant life of a meadow stay preserved thanks to the park but still modern civilization bustles all around the park and with it comes invasive species okay this is another introduced plant it's called autumn olive if you actually look at the underside of the leaves it looks like someone's painted it with some sort of like silver coating oh wow see how shiny it is that's really cool holy crap but these fruits are edible but you're gonna want to find one that's a little more shriveled up because otherwise they're kind of a stringent how much nutritional value these actually have it's a good question edibles one thing see ya they make him rather really dry if they're not shriveled up enough but they taste good that's really weird yeah they do taste good that's really surprising one of my favorite ways to connect with and learn more about our prehistoric ancestors is to try and reenact the process of creating stone tools I'll be it with some more modern materials so to demonstrate how people turn Flint into an arrowhead I'm gonna be using this glass bottle which is actually easier to work but it's also more commonly found throughout the world to break the bottom of the glass bottle which is the piece we'll be working on we're gonna use this screw and we've got two pieces of deer antler to actually flake pieces off of our glass and shape it into an arrowhead and we've got leather to hold the glass and protect our hands we've got a hammerstone to sort of work at the glass and finally a trash bag to catch all of the fragments and things so that they don't get scattered all over the ground so to break this bottom piece off of the bottle I'm just going to drop this screw in here cover the top with my thumb just sort of shake it [Music]

they're clean break [Music]

now what you're looking for is an edge that's sort of sharper to get started this actually took some of the side of the bottle off so I'm gonna try to use my hammer stone to sort of clean this edge up so that I can work with [Music]

sometimes your glass will break in half any time during the process really in which case you just make a smaller Arrowhead the problem with this is the edge is really flat and again you want a sharper sort of pointed edge so work with a handler so well I'll just have to keep it clean enough so what you're looking for is this sort of edge of the glass and what you do is you use this antler to apply pressure into the edge and then since it's below as you apply pressure you want to push it down somewhat so you want to push it in and then below pop a flake out and then keep going until it's sort of even through that so this is the bottom this side is the top yeah you want this edge to be right in the center yes so you apply pressure down as you're pushing in it and that the pressure pushes a flake off the bottom of it and brings this the edge to the center sometimes if the edge of the glass is too fine you want to go in with this hammerstone and sort of scrape some of the finer bits off and what that does is it makes the edge stronger so that when you actually push a flake off it won't just crumble little pieces off it'll actually take a significant piece off working with tools like these can be a slow and rough process but it's also incredibly engrossing and rewarding some time had passed and the glass was beginning to look a little more like an arrowhead so sometimes you've got this sort of flat edge that you can't really do anything with and what you want is a sharper edge like here so that you can actually push flakes off of it to get this flat edge workable you want to push a flake in the direction of the edge and then you just sort of keep working back and forth extending this sharp edge along the flat edge until the whole thing becomes workable so after a bit of work got this rough Arrowhead shape in the interest of time I'll leave it at this but you'd want to chip in some notches here or maybe down here so that you can more securely tie it to the shaft of an arrow but that is more or less that unit Flint for more child friendly activities the park also has green spaces for families and kids to play in here at the edge of these woods is a natural play area where children can use sticks and logs to construct shelters and interact with nature directly we decided to try our hands at building a basic lean-to shelter

[Music]

okay so we don't have quite as many materials available to us as we might in the middle of some forest when we're lost but there's all these logs for kids and some adults to play with I really like to just be outside I like to be dirty and be experiencing it as much as I can so like I said as a kid I played in the creeks all the time I loved being out there turning of rocks looking for things that exploring part so now I like to do it out in the woods here I like to be able to turn over rocks turn over logs so there's always something new to learn and explore and find and I think that's the other thing that I've always really enjoyed doing is just see what else is out there and as a brace in the forest you can usually find sticks that are y-shaped preferably with one main trunk and then a branch coming off so you can hammer it into the ground on top of that we can put smaller pieces okay so after we put all these big pieces on I'm going to look for smaller thinner pieces of wood to stick in between all these little gaps and then even on top of that even smaller sticks to put on that and what that does is it makes a bunch of layers and things that we can finally dump a bunch of dead leaves on top of in the natural play area you can also wander off trail through the woods we collected some sticks to create a sort of rough lattice on our shelter next we gathered fallen leaves to waterproof and insulate the shelter and around this time of year there were plenty of those all over the ground know what you want to do is you want to start from the bottom and then go up in that way it sort of creates layers like if you think about how angles overlap so then when water pours down and of course in an actual deciduous forest you'd have way more material to work with if you were really going to be using this you'd want about like I don't know fifty more bags of these because you want to pile it on thick for warmth and insulation best leads to use in the deciduous forests our beech leaves now those drop later in the later in the fall and those have a compound in them that kind of repels insects so and like I said you'd want a lot more bags of this so you can pile it on all across this shelter and so that you can pile it on thicker to keep warmth in we left part of the shelter bare to show the difference that even a small amount of leaves can make and then give it a little test I suppose if like obviously like survival situation if you're all lying under here you know pretty decent you you want to make it a little bigger we also only finish half of the roof thatching yeah it's not home till you got leaves on your roof I was gonna test it and jump on the top but I thought about the ramifications it actually isn't sturdy sturdy enough to support yeah sticks and leaves you're not making a bed children who get to interact directly with nature end up growing happier and with a greater appreciation of the environment and it's thanks to places like high banks that they can still have these experiences one of the first things you'll notice at the Nature Center is a model of a giant sycamore tree and to the west of the Olentangy River and high banks newly-opened River Bluff area you can find the real deal [Music]

when we visited the tree we had to wander through some the thick understory of plants before long we were at the tree whose massive trunk was in itself a menter ecosystem with moss herbaceous plants fungi and all sorts of insects and spiders

[Music]

as we admired the tree we also admired the life that it supported like this orb weaver spider weird to think that this be largest Sycamore and it's just like in Ohio Central Ohio where everyone thinks everything is flying it's been amazing since we've renovated the Nature Center and we've added the giant sycamore tree I think that's one of those pieces that you know people just don't appreciate the fact that we do have all of these big old trees here I mean none of this is old-growth forest and it's all been farmed or long but we do have the largest sycamore tree in the nation and they it's still here it's alive it's still growing we were also fortunate enough to get to see the River Bluff area before it opened thanks to a tour from Jill you lose the perspective because we're up high here but if we go down this hill you'll see the big shale Bluffs and so the way the park actually formed is they one of the founding fathers of Metro Parks they were walking on this side of the river and saw the high banks and the bluffs and we're like that we need to preserve that area we want to protect this view and so initially they wanted to protect this side so that you could see that side but it ended up being that that side was easier to buy property and we have some pictures from that overlook deck spot of them kind of standing and pointing this way and it is all wide open field as far as you can see there's not a tree there's a it's amazing you know 45 years later how much plants you know trees fields have actually grown up we always think it's knob next Jill took us down the hill closer to the river where a grove of new growth sycamore trees grew hi [Music]

the soft warm glow of the sunlight through their leaves give the woods an absolutely magical feeling once we reach the river we could see a bald eagle in the distance perched on a tree while we watched it

Jill recounted a story of one of her earlier encounters with the bald eagle during a guided hike and all of a sudden the bald eagle flew overhead it was one of the adults that nests here flew over our heads and you know the kids were impressed by it but the adults were really amazed because you know for adults they the bald eagles were on the endangered species list there was a point where people didn't think they were gonna see him anymore and so all these adults were just completely in awe they'd never seen one before it was amazing and and I think that's the nice conservation success story people can screw up a whole lot of stuff but when we decided man we don't want to lose our national symbol like we need to do something we did something and now the bald eagles have totally come back and it doesn't matter how many times I see a bald eagle every time I see it it practically brings me to tears because it's such a cool I mean they're huge they're they're majestic they're all those great things but it's a good story so that's another one of those that has made high thanks really cool to me is that we've got the nest we've got babies not every year but most years for the last six years we've had babies and get to tell the story again and again and again

in addition to the eagle we can also see the parks famous high riverbanks from our vantage point and when they first saw them there weren't all the trees so just bear who it was very you know boom here it is whereas now you kind of have more stuff in the way we actually tried to recreate one of the original pictures so we tried to get like to the spot and either we couldn't figure it out or it's just changed so much and it didn't quite have that well imagine the shale just roads alive it does yeah I mean so that's part of it is that you know it's constantly brittle shale of the Bluffs can also be seen in the river where it crunches beneath your feet as you walk along the riverbank it was great to get to tour such a beautiful part of Ohio's natural landscape and now the River Bluff area is open to the public now anyone can enjoy its new nature trails and access the river to go canoeing and kayaking [Music]

we explored the river and its surroundings a bit more as when we entered our way back to the Nature Center now it was time to explore the waterways that feed into the Olentangy high banks winding streams [Music]

hi banks is home to fascinating geology for brittle dark-gray Ohio shale is exposed in the bluffs and in the streams and every so often you'll find embedded in the shale a strange round object called a concretion these were likely formed 350 million years ago when Ohio was still covered by the ocean as layers of sediment collected around dead fish for plant they would eventually form a sphere over hundreds of thousands of years

I didn't even appreciate until I started working here is the amazing geology of the park

rocks are never all that exciting and not to most people anyway but now that I'm here it is really cool like these round concretions formed from things 350 million years ago once you start to really look at the rocks that's something that I think I didn't appreciate and I think a lot of people don't appreciate is just how impressive the geology of the area is [Music]

sometimes when you're wandering these streams you'll find a light gray soft rock called Olentangy shale and with enough time on your hands you can use it to make some crafts okay so this is shale yeah this is Olentangy shale it's a lighter color than the Ohio shale which is what you've been seeing mostly and it's a layer below that and so soft yeah it's super brittle it's got a lot of clay content in it and actually you can grind it up and sort of moisten it with the water and make some sort of clay figurine which I think we should do the first step is to take the Olentangy shale and grind it into fine particles all while keeping it wet with the stream water as you keep grinding it up your hands might get a little bit messy but it's nothing that won't wash away with water after grinding up and squeezing the shale you can start making little figurines like this turtle although what we made here was pretty crude with a little more time you can get the shale very fine and create objects like this [Music]

whether you're observing the flora and fauna learning about the Edina who called this place home or exploring the river bluffs and streams high banks offers everybody a way to escape from their daily lives and enter a world of natural wonder the thing I love the most about high banks is that it's not what you expect for Central Ohio you know Columbus is it's a big city lots of development and it's fairly flat high banks is kind of the opposite of all of that it's this awesome thousand acres of forest and woods that are pretty old you know you can hike the ravines here you can hike along the river you can see the giant trees even if you do the same trail every time you see

and stuff every time [Music]

we've been all across the country backpacking through mountains canoeing across lakes and camping beneath the Stars but still some of our most wonderful experiences out of nature have been here at high banks I think people don't realize how many awesome cool things are right here in Columbus you don't have to I mean it's cool to travel out west but you could do a weekend hike at high banks and see some of the same stuff so

the forests meadows and ravines that have been protected here for decades are no ASUS of fresh air wildness and freedom

and no matter how the landscape changes elsewhere generations of children will be able to come here to hike to play and to learn to love nature this park has been around for a little over 40 years it was established in the early 70s and back then it was in the middle of nowhere

it was all farmland it was all fields whereas now everywhere you look around here there's housing developments there's every restaurant you could possibly imagine

so it's all developed but then once you get inside the gate you don't see it you don't know is it the wilderness is a place to let go to be free of the stresses of modern life it's a place to learn and to grow to relax and to unwind and it's thanks to the preservation of this park that we can all have such a wonderful place so close to home [Music]

there you get here's your money