Cypress Trails Park

Located at Woodgreen Dr and Woodley Dr.

I have a confession: I didn't go to the last park until Easter. It was just so far up the hill and it was tiny and it was Cypress Trails Park, which means it was basically, just Cypress Falls Park and not even anything different from the rest of that forest. Right? Wrong!

Not only does Cypress Trails Park rock the district's most awesome park sign, it does it's own thing.

I arrived at this park via the Cypress Falls trails, but not as directly as I'd hoped. I got lost and ended up wandering around the undeveloped British Properties roads for a while, before taking a trail I'd hoped would bring me to a real road. It did me one better.

That trail opened up to a sunny clearing.

I liked the light, so I stopped and took a picture.

Then I noticed the playground in the background. I had arrived!

This is the best picture that I got of the park, because there were many young kids (one of them is seen climbing on a ladder here) with their parents watching them closely, so I couldn't stay for long. I made the comment "I hate it when there are kids on playgrounds" and immediately felt awful. It means I can't play or take pictures properly, though. I'll just have to trust my observations of the kids' fun and you'll just have to trust me that this is a really excellent playground.

There were actually multiple groups of kids there. I feel like this is how I should feel after discovering the newest, coolest underground dance club at the age of 20, but instead, I feel like I found something incredible with this park.

PPR
Good: playground, a lot of sun, benches for parental supervision
Bad: at the very top of a huge hill, oddly popular
7.5/10

Westwood Park

Main entrance at the end of Woodburn Rd.

We knew this was going to be a great park when we saw the entrance:

That's not just one entrance, that's three! You know it's going to be good when it splits up like that right away. Anyhow, we chose the entrance with the bike jump:

We didn't have bikes with us, but we managed.

That is not even close to all that this park has to offer... there's a tennis court that's entirely green!

Tennis courts look a lot better without the orangey stuff if you ask me. The green ground was also really warm. The sun had only been out for a few hours at this point. It really doesn't take much to heat up this surface, making it a great place to hang out on a colder sunny day.

But wait, there's more!

Now that is a beautiful playground. They don't make playgrounds like this any more, but this one is somehow in perfect condition. It's a three structure set: the one in the picture, a shorter platform with a slide that the picture is taken from, and a playhouse. It might just be me and my 90's kid heart, but I am in love with this playground. It is actually made of wood!

There's also a trail leading off into a forested area, but we ran out of time to explore that part of the park. But we'll get around to it. Without even seeing the forested part, we are sure that Westwood Park is worth returning to. I can't wait to see what's in those trees, run across the bike jump again, and visit my new favorite playground.

PPR
Good: bike jump, trails, playground, tennis court
Bad: inconvenient location (lucky locals)
8/10

Cypress Falls Park

Main entrance at the end of Woodgreen Pl.

First of all, Cypress Falls Park is enormous. When we finally came out of the park, we were confused about where we were. We assumed that we were at the other end of the park, but really we were only half way there. That's why there will be no review of Cypress Trails Park at this point in time.

But the half of the park we did see was very nice. Most of it looks like this:

The whole park is a network of trails. We saw a lot of dogs while were walking through the park. They all looked very happy, but their owners weren't quite so ecstatic. The trails are all muddy, and the dogs were having fun. Whether you have a dog or not, that's something to keep in mind. If it has rained at all recently, don't go to Cypress Falls in your sneakers. A pair of watertight boots is a must. Particularly near the main entrance, the mud can be deep and impossible to avoid.

The trails are really great, but the highlight of this park is, of course, the waterfall:

That's pretty damn impressive. It kind of makes the waterfall in Westridge Park seem like not a waterfall at all. This is a serious bottle neck canyon really tall splash fest. There's even rainbows in the mist! My camera couldn't see them, though. If you want to see them, you're just going to have to go there yourself.

Now for a shot taken from the exact same spot as the last one!

Cypress Falls Park contains this brontosaurus tree that I would absolutely never want to sit on, except I totally do want to sit on it. Can you imagine the view looking down suspended over top on that canyon? But that moss would be so slippery that you would definitely die. There's moss all over everything in this park, actually. It's really pretty, but Nina pointed out that it's basically a flesh eating disease for trees. I sure hope that trees have no pain receptors.

The climb back up from the waterfall was brutal. The whole park is basically just a giant ravine. The uphill just kept on going up. I tried to take a picture, but my camera (I should really name this camera... how about Igor?) couldn't capture how steep the slope was. Igor tends to have trouble understanding concepts such as light and depth perception, but I still love him.

It only occurred to me after I'd left the park that it's called Cypress Falls Park. Falls is plural, and we only saw half of the park! I bet there's another waterfall somewhere in the other half! If that's not a reason to return to a park, then I don't know what is.

PPR
Good: trails, waterfall, tennis court, field, apparently there's a playground somewhere in the unexplored half, will take near forever to finish exploring
Bad: too big (not all bad), crazy-steep hills, it's always dark in there
8/10