With a multitude of different choices on where to hike, both Evansburg State Park and Hawk Mountain Sanctuary have standout trails to hike and spend a day exploring.
A great hiking experience can be found at Lake Nockamixon, where there are easy trail routes around the place, but if you rent a kayak, there are secret trail inlets around the lake that you can explore.
I decided to follow one of the trails and found some nice views, but due to it being isolated, there were a lot of plants that proved inconvenient when wearing swimwear.
The view, however, wasn’t the best, but I would recommend that if you see a little trail inlet, then you should venture out and explore.
Depending on what you bring with you while you kayak, these spots can serve as good places to relax and eat food instead of doing so on a kayak.
One of the best state parks to hike in, located in Collegeville, is Evansburg State Park. Evansburg offers a fairly challenging five-mile loop around the Skippack Creek called the Skippack Loop Trail. This trail includes two uphill sections, which can prove difficult, but there are plenty of spaces for breaks. The view offered by the trail is nice, especially at some of the high points.
There are also areas of interest, like an abandoned farmhouse and a few areas where people can cut part of the route through climbing up steep rock faces.
The farmhouse, particularly, is a nice place for pictures and is fairly early in the trail, making it possible to go take pictures and then leave.
A trail that I would not recommend is the Cave Falls and Jim Thorpe Overlook trail due to its difficulty and lackluster rewards when you finally reach the top.
The hike is only two miles going from there and back, but it has the hiker going up 750 feet of steep hiking with lots of rocks that can be painful to the ankles.
Upon getting to the top, I was not rewarded because the Cave Falls had lots of people and had enough vegetation to block good picture spots, leaving people waiting for others to clear out. Overall, the trail isn’t worth it and should be avoided unless you specifically want the uphill.
Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, on the other hand, offered a much better experience and with a better view that is clearer and easier to reach.
It is a part of the Blue Mountain range and offers a variety of different trails.
The easiest trail is the Hawk Mountain Loop, which is a difficult but manageable trail since it is four miles long with roughly 1000 feet of elevation gain.
Hawk Mountain by far had one of the best experiences with a pleasant view that people should experience.