International Mountain Day at Radnor Lake State Natural Area

Celebrated on December 11th annually, International Mountain Day is an international observance day whose goal is to raise awareness about the role that mountainous regions play in the lives of people and their importance to our planet. On December 20th, 2002, the United Nations designated December 11th as International Mountain Day.

“Thinking like a mountain” is the term coined by Aldo Leopold in his book A Sand County Almanac and our focus-inspiration as we host our fourth celebration of International Mountain Day at Radnor Lake State Natural Area.

On December 11th we celebrated our 4th International Mountain Day at Radnor Lake with a 2 ½ hour strenuous sunset hike and volunteer effort. We began our hike from the Barbara J. Mapp Aviary Education center at 2:30pm then hiked the Hall Farm native grasslands with Ranger Matthew Bowling and Park Manager Steve Ward.

Ranger Bowling highlighted the abundant birding species now calling the mature native grasslands habitat including newer bird species that have moved into this area including red-winged blackbirds.

After hiking thru the native grasslands, we climbed to the top of ridge to enjoy the scenic views and enjoy the natural area habitat being restored back to its natural state from our prescribed burning efforts in 2021 now free of invasive-exotic plants. We stopped for a ½ hour volunteer segment to pull invasive-exotic plants along the side of the ridge utilizing weed wrenches. After our volunteer segment, we hiked to the top of the Hideaway Ridgetop acquired in 2013-14 to enjoy sunset before hiking back to our vehicles.
Thank you to our 7 hiker/volunteers who came out to enjoy this resource management focused hike and celebrate our 4th International Mountain Day at Radnor Lake!
Special thank you to Friends of Radnor Lake for providing bottled water, weed wrenches and work gloves for our 2023 International Mountain Day.