I knew this place had a big chance of being mostly closed. I however thought why not check it out and make sure they just had not forgotten to update the website. It turns out nope it’s up to date and I was a bit disappointed by that fact.
Apparently, at some point, Lake Lotus Park was a wild place. I did a little digging into it and the land was donated for use only as a park. It even has a full-blown ranger center, ranger house, and yes, a ranger sitting in a cart watching over the only real thing to do there and that was the playground.
It appears a couple of years back a hurricane came in and ripped the place up. What has been done to fix it since then? I have no idea. All I do know is they want to remind everyone just how many backers this place has. It was at some point some kind of science incubator.
While I did end up discovering there is still a very tiny amount of parking inside the park. It looked like everything else was decommissioned with no parking signs added. There is, however, an offsite parking area.
All I have to say is unless for some reason there are people here take your chances and try in-park parking. To get in here from the offsite requires a couple of blocks of walking and a nasty interception that is known for red-light runners with long lights.
I’ve been told years ago they used to shuttle people in from the offsite car park. Not only was there no posting saying such things occurred. I did not even see so much as a bus parked anywhere to do so. I’m glad we did not wait around for that as I think we would have been waiting all day for nothing to happen.
At least once you make it into the park there is quite a decent paved road that you and your cars will be going down till you reach the playground and ranger station area. There are also a couple of offshoots along the way. They appear to be open trails. Most of them but one tiny wooden path was closed.
I opened up my AllTrails application as there were supposed to be a few different trails to this place. Every time there was supposed to be a trail going somewhere in the park we were greeted with some kind of sign and path block such as this.
To be fair to the park they did list on their site naming a few of these trails as being closed. I was, however, after realizing this information was up to date hoping there were some minor routes.
It seems for the most part the issues were with the dock areas. I’m not sure why the entire path was closed if it was just the docks that got taken out. I’d later find in an open path a trail sign closure that was quite imbedded in overgrowth that I can only guess a few paths have fully regrown over again but I could be mistaken.
They at least have a nice little playground area and some benches to sit on. It seems like this is quite a tranquil place to be. Just not the tranquil activity I was looking to enjoy. I think I'm a little too big to play on the slide.
There were also quite a few warnings around the place about bears and alligators. Along with don’t feed anything. No pets or bikes on what used to be trails either. There was at least a path into the woods that I found.
It has also been ages since I've been on a true trail that was not just paved over. Lots of bumps, roots, and very uneven surfaces. This would be the kind of fun I was looking forward to. Granted it required you to work a bit harder to get anywhere on.
The issue was it seemed every so often this thing was weaving all over the place. There were also forks in the path that looped back onto itself. I have no idea why this section of the only trail I could be on was such a mess.
I felt a bit silly, but I kept my phone out the entire time with the trail map open. Thankfully I got reception there. I just did not trust such a weaving and looping section of the path. Even more so with the lack of any signs of what it truly was.
A section of the path ended up taking you back to the road. Which I suppose saved me time when I'd walk out of the park from having to check the other side of the road to see what was open. As it would have just been this pathway.
A couple of times I did end up finding myself back off the path going around to where I started again. I was here to get a hike in after all. I was not looking to just take a couple hundred steps and call it a day.
If that was supposed to be some kind of path at some point. All I can say is it’s no longer one whatsoever. That direction also happened to be according to the AllTrails map I was looking at supposed to lead down to a much longer main trail. I knew after seeing this that there was nothing but the tiny little trail I found to explore.
Final Thoughts
Even the little garden area they had set up was dead. I feel this summed up the entire park. It was quite a disappointing but not unexpected adventure. I don’t even want to know how much money this place took to make. Right now, it seems to be a highly overpriced playground area in the middle of the woods.
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Photos were taken and content was written by @Enjar about my personal experiences in the real world away from the computer at home.