Behind the Parks: Meet Tracy at Blacklick Woods

Tracy Holmes

Volunteer at Blacklick Woods

Tracy Holmes is talking with Communications Coordinator, Virginia Gordon

Volunteering at Metro Parks

I’ve been a volunteer at Blacklick Woods since the spring of 2012. As I still work full time, my hours available for volunteering are not as high as I’d like. But I always say to the naturalists, if you really need someone, don’t hesitate to contact me and I’ll try to do what I can.

When I had my first volunteer interview and was told the options available for volunteers, my initial interest was in trail monitoring, which is what I’m always willing to do. I get to meet visitors along the trails and always enjoy the opportunity to share a few comments about the park and the wildlife or plants we might have seen that day. I also do a lot of program support. My favorite programs to volunteer for are the full moon hikes we do here at Blacklick Woods. As they’re night programs and start well after I’ve finished work for the day, I always make myself available for them. The hikes are about 2 miles long, which is a great distance for a programmed evening walk. There’s a certain point on the trails where we usually see the moon coming up over the trees. It’s a wonderful moment. Other evening programs I always try to sign up for are the Lantern Hikes, mainly in fall and winter. We take some of the shorter trails through the woods.

I usually take what I like to call the Caboose position, bringing up the rear. It’s often one naturalist leading the hike, and me at the rear. Sometimes we also have a second volunteer. My role is to make sure we don’t lose anyone on the trail, so we know everyone who started the hike is still with us. It again gives me lots of opportunities to chat with visitors, which is always such a pleasure. We sometimes also do ultra violet light programs, where we get to see the captivating sight of some insects and various fungi that glow in the dark. Humans can’t see ultra violet light, but when we focus this black light on biofluorescent fungi they glow in the dark with a huge array of neon-like colors. Some insects, especially moths and moth caterpillars, also absorb the UV light and transmute it into a neon-like glow. Kids, especially, find the experience quite magical. I’ve learned enough from the naturalists that I can answer some of the questions I get from our fascinated visitors.

I also love to work at our occasional overnight campout programs. We’ve done six of them, so far. Families bring their own tents and I help them set them up in one of our reservable areas. They also bring their own chairs and food to grill. Another volunteer, Mark, always works them with me, and we have Naturalist Shannon there too. We provide the fun, the crafts programs, and lead a night hike. We also set the fires going in the fire rings and bring s’mores for everyone.

WHY I CHOSE TO VOLUNTEER

I’ve always loved playing sports, mostly softball. In my younger days I’d be playing five nights a week, and well into my mid-forties I was still playing two or three nights a week. But it was while playing volleyball, in 2008, that I suffered the first of two Achilles ruptures. Even those words sound painful to me now. The rupture was in my right Achilles, and three years later I ruptured my left Achilles. I bear the scars of surgery for both of them. The second one was worse and took longer to recover from. My foot was in a cast for the first three weeks, and then I had to wear a big boot for a full seven moths after that. I wasn’t allowed to drive for that whole time and had to ask friends to drive me to work and to the grocery store.

As I recovered well enough to get rid of the boot, my doctor told me I shouldn’t continue to play sports, that running and jumping were out, as I could do more damage. But I wanted to be outside and to stay active as much as possible. I’m an outdoor girl with an indoor girl job, so it was important for me to find something to keep my life balanced. That’s why I went online and filled in a volunteer application form for my local park, here at Blacklick Woods.

More About Me

I’m from West Carrollton, which is a suburb of Dayton. I have no brothers or sisters, so it was just me and my mom and dad. We lived on an estate of starter homes for young families, so there were a lot of kids there. But my first really good friend was a boy. He was a very near neighbor of ours and went to the same school as me, although he was in a year higher. His name was Brian. Even as a kid, I loved being outside. Me and Brian would ride our bikes, or just go hiking, in the woods near our house. I didn’t know much at all about what the trees were called or the names of insects we might see or the birds we might hear. But I loved being out there.

My mom enrolled me to go to dance classes when I was very young, but I got kicked out of ballet classes because I was klompy, klompity klomp, rather than being light and graceful. But I did learn to twirl baton and I did that for a good few years. I did dance twirl, which is baton twirling with continuous dance and gymnastics movements. I became very good at that and actually won a few competitions. Then, when I was 10 years old, I was introduced to softball, and that was that. I had found my element. I continued dance twirl for a bit longer, but I was losing interest and I ditched it soon enough. I simply loved having a bat in my hands at softball.

I started out playing for a team sponsored by our local police department. One of my girlfriends played on the same team. My dad was a coach of the team and became the coach for other teams I played on during my teenage years. There were four or five dads of girls on my team that would coach us. Later on I started to play co-ed softball, with five women and five men per team. That’s when I would be playing four and five times a week. I continued playing co-ed softball right the way through to my Achilles ruptures and I finally had to stop playing altogether when I was just 45.

COLLEGE

I graduated high school in 1985 and then went to Ohio University in Athens. My initial interest was in doing a telecommunications major, with the thought of going into television journalism. But I had only done one quarter before I realized this wasn’t the path for me. I played some recreational sports there and began to wonder about the people running the teams and what they had studied. It led to me changing my major to Sports Management. This was much more to my liking. I found myself studying with people with interests much like my own.

After three years at Ohio University, I left Athens and continued my studies at the University of Dayton. The main reason was that the program at OU didn’t have as strong a focus on the business side of sports. I’d become interested in the idea of working for a baseball team, in the major or minor leagues, mainly on marketing and promotion of the teams and their business. Another compelling reason was that I would be going back home. So even though I would miss the many friends I had made in Athens, I felt my decision was right. It did require me to do an extra year of study, As a Catholic University, Dayton had various religion, philosophy and theology requirements. Dayton also had internship requirements, and I was hoping I might find an internship for a baseball team. But that didn’t happen.

My first internship was for the City of Kettering, which is a large suburb of Dayton. I did two weeks at a time in each of these parks and recreation department’s divisions: aquatics, senior programs, kids camps, marketing and special events, and adult sports. They organized softball leagues, and every night I would have to drive to the different ball diamond complexes and deliver scorecards to the umpires and scorebooks to the scorekeeper, and then collect them at the end of the night. Then I’d have to take them back to the department field house and record all the scores. I did that every Sunday to Thursday, and then got to play on my own team on Friday nights.

After I had finished my credit hours with the City of Kettering, my guidance councilor said he’d found another opportunity for me. I was hoping this would be with a baseball team, but again it was something different. My second internship was with the Department of Defense. They were looking for an intern to work on programs at their fitness center, and my guidance councilor had put me forward for it. The Department of Defense had a huge base in Dayton and I worked with their Morale, Welfare and Recreation department, typically known as MWR. There were maybe as many as 5,000 people that worked at the base. I was required to teach aerobic classes, and fortunately I had taken some classes of my own before that. And I also had a role in weight training orientation, where I would demonstrate the equipment for different muscle groups, which included about 12 different weight lifting stations, and exercise equipment such as treadmills and various other fitness machines.

A JOB WITH THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

The interesting thing was, after finishing my degree, the Department of Defense offered me a job. I took it. It was largely doing things I had done as an intern, but with more responsibility. I would mostly do evening shifts, from 4 to 10, and then close down the fitness center, and also to work weekends. I had Fridays off, so I could continue to play softball. Then, in 1995, BRAC IV happened. BRAC stands for Base Realignment and Closure, and was a congressionally-authorized process used by the Department of Defense to reorganize military installations. As a result of BRAC IV, the entire base at Dayton closed down. Many of us were offered jobs at the Defense Supply Center in Whitehall, and that’s how it was that I moved to central Ohio.

A friend of mine from the base, named Stacey, had moved to a Columbus Depot the previous year. Initially I rented a room with her. This was in Westerville, quite close to Inniswood Metro Gardens. I became quite familiar with both Inniswood and the nearby Blendon Woods Metro Park. We loved walking there. Another friend introduced me to the pleasures of playing disc golf at Blendon Woods. Many more of the staff from Dayton moved to Columbus in 1996, and we were able to resume friendships. As the Whitehall base is only 6 or 7 miles away from Blacklick Woods, we would have many office picnics there. Then in 1999 I moved to Reynoldsburg, and became even better acquainted with Blacklick Woods, and also with Pickerington Ponds Metro Park.

I worked for 12 years with the DoD’s MWR department, and then I joined their acquisitions world and became a contracts specialist, buying equipment for the entire armed forces. This was in 2001. I would send out solicitations for bids on military equipment, such as electronics for weapons systems, equipment for US Navy submarines, and weapons systems for tanks, heavy trucks and other military vehicles.

For a decade or more, I had been able to work from home up to four days a week, but they chose to change things and have everyone back on base full time. After so long, I didn’t feel comfortable with that, so I left the DoD, but remained working for the US Government. In January 2025 I started a new job with the National Institute of Health. I work from home mostly, but go into the office in Westerville once or twice a week. I’m coming up close to my 60th birthday, so I’m thinking of retiring in the coming few months. I hope I will then be able to give more time to my volunteering at Blacklick Woods. The only greater pleasure I have comes from my cats and dog.

CATS AND DOG

All four of my cats are strays, and all of them are black cats. One of them, called Purrl, is extremely social. She loves to greet everyone who comes to my house. The other cats are named Beau, Axel and Ally. I used to have a lovely dog, called Niki. I’d take her walking in the parks, but I lost her eventually and it was just me and the four cats at home. Then, about four years later, some friends found a stray dog that they were feeding. As they already had three dogs at home, they didn’t feel they could offer this new dog a home. They asked me if I would take her. I said that I would, as long as she got along okay with my cats. And so Belle, short for Belle Mae, joined us at home.

Belle weighs about 20 pounds, and has some huskie in her, and maybe a touch of chihuahua, and a good dose of basic hound. As soon as she walked in the house, it felt as if she had always been there. She gets along great with the cats. In fact, Purll grooms her, as if she’s one of her own.

I’ve often taken Belle on organized hikes at the parks, including Blacklick Woods, Blendon Woods, Three Creeks and Glacier Ridge. It’s fun for her, to socialize with other dogs, and for me, to meet other dog owners. Unfortunately, Belle now has a bad back leg and can’t walk as much as she used to.

My favorite Metro Parks story that includes a positive or memorable visitor interaction

What comes immediately to mind happened at the end of one of our winter hikes. We get more than a thousand people at the Blacklick Woods Winter Hike. I was walking back to my car, long after the event itself was over, and I saw a woman with a kid in a push wagon and another young kid walking beside her. I could tell she seemed agitated or distressed and I approached her and asked if I could help. I never figured out where she was from originally, but her English wasn’t very good and the communication wasn’t easy. But I gathered that she had been walking the trails for what she said was hours, looking for her vehicle, and that she and her kids were lost.

I think that simply having someone there offering to help made her calmer. I asked if she could remember what she saw when she had parked her car. She kept saying, “a building,” but it wasn’t the nature center. I wondered if it might have been the Lodge, so I asked if there had been a pond there, but again she said no. Because we have so many visitors at the winter hike, cars are parked beyond the usual parking lots. So I wondered if it might have been the little trading post where she had parked. I described the trading post for her, but again she said no, no, it wasn’t that. She was beginning to get distressed again, and her kids seemed weary and upset too. Finally, I asked if there had been a garage there, and she said, yes, there might have been. And that made me think she may have parked at our maintenance compound. That wasn’t too far away from where we were, so I led her that way and she saw her car parked there. She was very excited and relieved, and thanked me deeply. I felt really good to have been able to help someone who had been almost on the point of despair. It made that particular year’s winter hike feel very special for me.

Traveling

EUROPE

Me and two friends, Mike and Dan, have planned hiking trips every year for well over a decade. I met them through my friend Stacey, although she herself wasn’t a hiker. Mike and Dan also worked at the Department of Defense. Our trips have mostly been here in the States, but a couple of years ago we had a fantastic hiking trip to Europe. It’s funny how it came about. We were together talking about our next trip, and thinking about Alaska. Mike was actually on his computer looking up information about Alaska, when I said out of the blue, couldn’t we go to Germany? I’d started learning German, so it just came to me as a wild idea. Mike looked away from his computer and said, “Are you serious?” And I said, “Yeah!”

THE ALPS

Dan said he had been to Europe before and would love to go back there. So we tried to find information about Europe instead of Alaska. Ironically, we didn’t spend much time in Germany. We flew to Zurich, in Switzerland, and then took a train to Germany and stayed one night in a beautiful town on Lake Constance, which the Germans call Bodensee. Then we headed back to Switzerland, to Lucerne, and took some mountain hikes in the Swiss Alps. On one of our hikes we had a perfect view of the famous Matterhorn the whole time. We also had a great view of it from the little cottage we rented. For our hikes, we would take one of the amazing cogwheel trains up to a high point of the mountain, and then hike back down as far as we could manage.

After a few days in Switzerland we took a train to France for some hikes in the French Alps. We had clear views of another famous mountain, Mont Blanc, on all our hikes. We stayed at a lovely town called Chamonix, which has the distinction of being the host of the first ever Winter Olympic Games, back in 1929. We had dinner at our hotel the first night and asked our waiter if he had any recommendations for a hike. He said we really had to see Lac Blanc, which is an alpine lake high above the town, and famous for its remarkably clear water and the incredible reflections in the water of the overlooking peak of Mont Blanc. We took gondolas up to the lake, which was fabulous, and then took chair lifts to a higher point of the mountain, to start hiking back down. We stopped to admire the views, had ourselves some beer and bread, and then started walking.

WHAT’S THAT ABOUT THE GONDOLAS?

After a while, we began to hear people talking and saying that the gondolas had closed for the day. We were intending to walk back down to Lac Blanc and then take a gondola back down the mountain. We were joined by a family of Australians, who also hadn’t known that the gondolas closed at 5pm every day. So now we were faced with something like an 8-mile hike to get back down the mountain. The Australian family was in a worse position than us. They had two kids, age about nine and 11 with them. The descent was very steep, very rocky, and very rough. Some people ahead of us weren’t even properly dressed for hiking. One woman had sandals on. She had taken the gondolas to see Lac Blanc, and had expected to take a gondola back down. Goodness knows how she managed!

It became something of a race to get down, as the sun was setting behind us. It took us about four hours to get down, and we managed that just as the sun finally set for the day. We reached the bus station and took a bus back to our hotel. We found out that the bus services were stopping about an hour later, so we were doubly lucky.

After that astonishing adventure, we headed back to Zurich and then flew back home. Even though the hike above Lac Blanc had proven so nearly traumatic, we really loved the entire trip, and we’d all love to go back some day.

UTAH – THE MIGHTY FIVE

For last year’s hiking trip we did the so-called ‘Utah’s Mighty Five,’ which involved hiking at the national parks, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capital Reef and Zion. We flew to Colorado and then took a hire car to Utah for the hiking. All the parks were beautiful, but our favorite hike was up to Angels Landing in Zion. We walked the 2 plus miles from the Grotto Trailhead up to Scout Lookout, which includes plenty of steep switchbacks as you labor upwards for about a thousand feet of elevation. The hike is invigorating but a real challenge. I was proud to have made it that far, as a couple of years before I had had to turn back before reaching the lookout. From Scout Lookout to the summit of Angels Landing requires a permit. It goes by a chained half-mile section to the summit. Mike and Dan had tried the permit section a couple of years ago but had turned back pretty quickly.

OUR NEXT ADVENTURE

About a month from now, we are heading out on this year’s trip, to Glacier National Park in Montana, and its sister park in Alberta, Canada, Waterton Lakes National Park. Together they are known as the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. We’re flying to Montana and will then take a hire car to ride the famous Road-to-the-Sun through the American park and then head to Canada.

My favorite food and dessert

I’m not a foodie at all. Mom stays with me sometimes and she’ll sometimes cook, or we’ll go out to eat. My food tastes are very basic. Macaroni and cheese serves me as well as anything. I don’t like to eat red meat at all, although I will eat chicken or turkey dishes. I’ve been like that since I was a kid. I used to argue with my mom about it, but she’s well used to me by now.

I do love all kinds of bread. When we were in Europe, the grocery stores had entire walls filled with every kind of different bread. And it was always fresh. If I went at the end of the day, there would be nothing left, and everything would be perfectly fresh again the next morning. I had the best soft pretzel ever in Switzerland, so soft and tasty, and topped with a wonderful whipped cream cheese. Their pastries were amazing too.

For dessert, I enjoy brownies or ice cream. My favorite ice cream is a butter pecan flavor. Graeters have a really good butter pecan ice cream, and Hagen-Daz also. Johnson’s Home Made Ice Cream, a little shop in Pickerington, makes perhaps the best butter pecan ice cream of them all. Although I don’t like to cook, I’m happy to bake my own brownies. But not entirely from scratch. I use a brownie box mix. My favorite is a Ghirardelli triple chocolate brownie mix, with fudge and chocolate chips. Amazing, especially fresh out of the oven.

My favorite entertainment

I’m a huge baseball fan. Dayton is in the catchment area for the Cincinnati Reds, and the Reds have always been my team. I went to games with my parents, and as a kid we could win tickets at school for getting straight A’s or other achievements. The Reds can be my greatest joy and my greatest angst, depending on how they do season by season. I look for their results every day, and will watch them on TV as often as I can. I sometimes start to feel guilty about watching too much baseball, thinking that I should really be doing something else.

I also like to do jigsaw puzzles. Nothing too elaborate, maybe a 500 piece up to a 1,000 piece puzzle is best for me. But I get so totally absorbed with it. I like to do puzzles with nature themes, or puzzles with cats as the main image. And then, just spending quiet time at home with my cats and dog is amazing too.

I’m still learning a bit of German every day, using Duolingo, and I like to watch documentaries on TV. Two interesting documentaries I watched on Netflix recently were about Abraham Lincoln, and about George Washington.

Blacklick Woods Naturalist Shannon Heist has this to say about Tracy:

And Naturalist Rachael Rice, who is the volunteer coordinator at Blacklick Woods, adds:

“Tracy is a volunteer we can always count on, jumping in to just about anything, finding a way to make it fun even if she’s simply passing out popcorn or hot cocoa. I look forward to having her assist my programs knowing she will always make me smile. We are incredibly lucky to have her as a volunteer.”