Looking for actual hills, mountains or ledges for a nice hike about an hour away from Toledo. Does it exist?
Wow. That's kinda awesome.
In Waterville at Roche de Boeuf there's a ledge that goes down to the river...
Honestly, check out the Brighton/Pinckney/Waterloo Rec Areas north of Ann Arbor. It's not mountainous but it's a moraine area so you get some decent hills.
Yeap. Easier to go to Michigan. The Waterloo/Pinkney trail has plenty of quick climbing and decending. Its a littleover an hour. Also checknout Heritage Park in Adrian. Quite a bit closer.
The best and closest place by far is Oak Openings. It has very little elevation gain but lots of great trails and you can camp there. Multiple camping options there. There are some big parks along the Maumee including Side Cut Metropark, River bend and a lot of others that have some trails going in and out of the river bottom but the primary trail connecting them is flat.
Personally I like Findlay State Park and there are a lot of awesome trails in the Cuyahoga Valley Nwtional Park area with plenty of vertical.
That said the closest place that has real Appalachian foothills is the Mohican National Foresr and Mohicam State Park. This is home of the Mohican 100 MTB and Mohican 100 Trail run. It has a tremendous amount of vertical footage and tonsnof bikepack, horse ans MTB trails all of which wre hikeable. I have crawled just about every inch of it hiking, MTB, gravel grinding up amd down the Mohicam River Valley. The forest service and gravel roads run south in out amd around the valley for sixty miles. We have done rides with 11000+ vertical footage. But explore the State Park trails firstnfor hiking and then the State Forest trails. There are impressive hiking loops completeneith lots of well hidden hiker/biker campsites onky reachable by foot, horse or bike. Was just down there last weekend. Be aware they did a lot off reconstruction in the State Forest and logging due a tornado or group of tornados ripping it up. The damage and selective logging is heavy in the state forest but it is no less beautiful in my opinion but the trails habe not eecovered and are currently very muddy. Stick to the awesome and huge state park for at least a month or two to let the south dry out.
Avid hiker/hunter/outdoorsman here. You will not find any real elevation changes within an hour of the city. NW Ohio as a whole is pretty flat.
Come visit NE ohio
There's a few over by Cleveland
Not much more than an hour from Toledo, but might want to look at The Ledges in the CVNP.
https://www.nps.gov/cuva/the-ledges.htm
To a lesser degree but still, ledges would be the Worden's Ledges in Hinckley Reservation, part of the Cleveland Metroparks.
https://www.clevelandmetroparks.com/parks/visit/parks/hinckley-reservation/worden-s-ledges
Thanks! Gonna check it out.
Grew up in Toledo. Following to see what pops up. Now I have the opposite problem, too much elevation gain. One trail about five minutes from my house gains 2200 feet in 2.1 miles. Just a casual walk around my subdivision can give me 300 feet of climbing for the day.