Favorite Place in CU

    Last year, I discovered that the Parkland campus and surrounding area is a great place to run and explore with friends. During the full force of the pandemic, nearly everything I enjoyed doing had been shut down or reduced to some type of remote Zoom activity. Cross Country, however, remained one consistently fun activity for me and my teammates. Being an outdoor and easy-to-socially-distance sport, cross country thrived with a somewhat normal training schedule. Since we’d enjoyed practices, after the official season ended, Edie, Jeana, and I still met regularly to run on our own. I’d never run at Parkland before since it’s about a twenty minute drive from my house, and anytime I run on my own I always start from my doorstep and then jog somewhere in my neighborhood. But after a while of meeting to run at Parkland, always in the same place, we got bored with sticking to a strict training schedule and decided to meet for runs and then explore the campus and surrounding area.

    The first place we discovered that interested us was a small pond by the Dodds Park softball fields with a square dock on one side. There were a few scraggly trees surrounding the pond, with small hiking paths around the perimeter perfect for jogging. A short distance away from the pond, a creek called “Copper Slough” flows under Parkland Way; this creek became another popular spot we’d go to sit and rest after a run. Three huge pipes support the road and also allow the creek waters to flow undisturbed through their midst, creating an ideal place to sit or lie down to watch the small current go rippling by, sometimes while poking at weird shapes under the water with sticks. The Staerkel Planetarium’s scale model Solar System along William Froom Way (the perimeter drive around Parkland) was another favorite running course: with this path we were able to combine running and exploring the campus into one (although we never were able to find the last planets in the solar system). 

    Another fun aspect of Dodds Park was that before the weather turned too cold, and all the leaves had fallen off the trees, we were able to build the biggest leaf pile I’ve ever made in my life. A packaging plant (Plastipak Packaging) is surrounded by a chain link fence that borders the edge of the park near the Eddie Albert Community Gardens, and the wind had blown hundreds of leaves up into the fence, where they’d been caught. Since there was nowhere for the leaves to go, they piled up in gigantic proportions. We had run through leaves practically a foot high, so shaping them into a monumental leaf pile was ridiculously easy (made especially fun since any painfully sharp sticks were too heavy to have been blown into the fence along with the leaves). 

    Discovering all these places with my friends in the middle of the pandemic has made for some long-lasting memories, and as a result the Parkland campus is one of my favorite places in CU. We enjoyed exploring all of these areas, but my absolute favorite spot in this locale is the spot I’m about to describe, a spot that Edie, Jeana, and I stumbled across by chance. If you cross Bradley Avenue and run south following the Copper Slough out of the Parkland campus, you’ll end up at a lower point in the creek in the middle of Heritage Park. From there, if you can successfully make it down the muddy bank without slipping, you can cross to an island made up almost entirely of tiny shells with an old picnic table sitting right in the middle. This island is my favorite spot in the area by far. It feels closed off from the rest of the park and has a unique atmosphere to it. Nearby the picnic table there’s a pile of abandoned concrete slabs strewn about the creek and a short tunnel to check out that opens by a larger lake, but my favorite section is the island where the battered picnic table sits. It’s the most peaceful spot in the park by far, devoid of any other pedestrians yet it offers plenty of interesting things to do, making it my favorite place in CU.