Park Land, Part One

At the corner of Battleground and Pisgah Church Road, at the Lowe's stoplight, you find the start of a massive park complex. This complex stretches to Lawndale on the eastern boundary and Lake Brandt Road on the northern boundary. When I was little and the school activity bus dropped us off there, I thought it was one big park land with a caged tiger, see-through anatomically correct woman who talked, a planetarium, paddleboats, a graveyard, tennis courts, soccer fields, a hidden pirate spinning ride, and a statue of Nathaniel Greene. With picnic shelters.

The area is actually a group of connected parks, municipal and federal. If you enter from Pisgah Church Road, you first come to Lewis Recreation Center and Lewis Park (at the fork in the road, veer left for parking behind LRC). This is more of a playground-type park which always makes me hesistant to take my big dog to. There are some picnic tables and lots of trees but it's mostly for people, especially wee people. Beyond Lewis Park is Forest Lawn, a city cemetery, and as tempting as it might be to take dogs there (all that wide open space!), no dogs are actually allowed.

Past Lewis Park (this is now if you veer right at the fork in the road) is an enormous parking lot bordering the J. Spencer Love Tennis Center (supposedly housing the NC Tennis Hall of Fame which I've never been to mostly because I've always been terrified of this section of the park as this was where all the mean, scary ass rich kids went to summer tennis camp), a lot of tennis courts, soccer fields, and a baseball diamond, all collectively known as Jaycee Park. This, however, is NO PLACE FOR DOGS unless your dog likes being leash-walked around the perimeter of parking lots. This is a place for people wielding rackets and balls.

However, on the northern edge of the parking lot, you'll spot a little pedestrian- and bicycle-only road (actually the park has, strangely, a tram which I've always thought was cool, like you're fixing to see some natural formation that might rival Yellowstone -- I've always wondered if the original park planners envisioned something more tram-worthy). This road is the entrance to Country Park. The road winds for about 1.5 miles throughout the park and is an excellent place to walk any dog. The road is big enough (as in long and wide) so that you don't feel like you're walking with the rest of Greensboro even though there's a good deal of people-traffic at the ole Country Park. Additionally, all throughout those woods that you're walking past are additional trails, themselves pretty good dog walking places. However, these are sort of hard to navigate, figure out where they go/end up, but there's a very helpful little guide, Trails of Greensboro, available for $5 from the city, that helps with this. (This guide, by the way, is helpful for navigating all the trails of Greensboro, not just Country Park.) The down side to walking dogs along these trails is the possibility of getting whirred by a mountain bike. Severn hates wheeled traffic of any kind.

Back when it was first built, within the last ten years I think, I was pretty excited about the Bark Park, located off the Country Park road, up a hill, on the western side of the park. A leash-free space for dogs to run, socialize, play frisbee, hotdog! I need to revisit this place to see if anything has changed for the better but I believe it's the perfect place for a ball-fetching, frisbee-catching dog who's both friendly (but mostly indifferent) to other dogs and mostly is "master"-centered. In other words, not Buddy and Severn. Buddy likes other dogs but what he really loves is their piles of poop so, each time I took him, he spent his time wandering off, following his nose from pile to pile. While he doesn't eat poop, he does investigate it pretty doggone thoroughly. He's a nose dog. Severn, on the other hand, likes dogs and is eager to play with them but only if they're female. If she comes across a strange male dog, she nips his heels, obsessively. This makes for a very stressful time at the Bark Park.

GO ON, BLUE RATING:
Lewis Park: *1/2 (again, for kids)
Jaycee Park: N/A
Jaycee Park parking lot: *** (when empty and not so hot outside)
Country Park road trail: ****1/2
Country Park wood trails: *** (mostly due to mountain bikes but if you can figure out a good way through these, email me)
Bark Park:
for "good" dogs: **** (not exactly a dog walk kind of place)
for all other dogs: **
Area of Town:
Is this Battle Forest? I don't know the neighborhoods around there so good.
Location:
On Pisgah Church Road just past stoplight at Battleground/Pisgah Church. However, the park(s) is so big you can access it from a number of places -- see Greensboro maps or the city guide Trails of Greensboro. Also, see Park Land, Part Two.