Wildwood Park: An Urban Escape Steeped in Natural Beauty

There are places that feel removed from the world without actually being very far from it.

At Wildwood Park, you can stand on a boardwalk surrounded by cattails and birdsong while traffic hums somewhere beyond the trees, close enough to hear but distant enough to stop mattering.

That contrast is part of what makes Wildwood remarkable.

“It’s rare,” said Chris Rebert, manager of the park. “And it’s rare because it has 90 acres of pristine wetland habitat situated in an urban environment. We’re in the city of Harrisburg.”

For more than a century, the park has served as a refuge of sorts. It’s a place where people come to walk, photograph wildlife, exercise, birdwatch, picnic, think, breathe and, increasingly, unplug.

Wildwood doesn’t try to compete with massive national parks like the ones out West. Rebert is the first to point that out.

“It’s not Yellowstone. It’s not Grand Tetons. It’s not Smoky Mountains National Park,” he said. “What it is is the park that you can go to every day if you want.”

That accessibility might be the park’s greatest strength.

Located just minutes from downtown Harrisburg, Wildwood has evolved into what Rebert calls “nature made easy,” a place where visitors don’t need hiking boots, wilderness experience or a full day of travel to immerse themselves in the outdoors.

Visitors can bike to the park via the Capital Area Greenbelt connection to Fort Hunter Park, use one mile of ADA-accessible boardwalk trails through wetlands, or simply circle the lake on the park’s popular three-mile loop trail.

The park itself is open daily from dawn to dusk, giving visitors access across changing light and seasons. The signature loop around Wildwood Lake remains the park’s most popular route, while the one-mile Towpath Trail offers perhaps the best opportunity for wildlife viewing, with wetlands on one side and the historic Pennsylvania Canal on the other.

Wildwood currently features roughly six miles of trails overall, including boardwalks that allow visitors to move directly through wetland habitat.

And plenty of people do.

According to trail counters maintained by the park, outdoor visitation has increased 40 percent over the past decade, with roughly 125,000 annual trail users and another 35,000 visitors entering the nature center each year.

Spring is one of the busiest seasons, as residents emerge after winter looking for fresh air and movement to shake off cabin fever.

Regular visitors know the park doesn’t stay constant throughout the year, though.

“The scenery changes almost daily here,” Rebert said. “It looks different every time you come. There’s different trees growing and flowers blooming and birds singing.”

That shifting landscape has been drawing people to the area long before Wildwood officially existed. Prior to 1907, the site was known as Wetzel’s Swamp, according to historical records. Residents of Harrisburg used it recreationally, gathering for picnics, walks and Sunday outings.

The park formally opened in 1907 as part of the City Beautiful movement. A dam built in 1908 transformed the swamp into a shallow lake while also serving an important secondary purpose: flood control for Harrisburg.

More than a century later, that system still matters.

Wildwood intercepts water flowing down Paxton Creek and diverts enormous volumes through an underground tunnel directly to the Susquehanna River, reducing flood pressure on the city.

“It greatly reduces the amount of flood waters that travel downstream,” Rebert said.

The wetland also functions as a natural filtration system, slowing water long enough for sediment and pollutants to settle out before reaching the river and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay.

“Every community should have a Wildwood,” Rebert said.

For many longtime visitors, the park’s importance is difficult to measure strictly in acres, trail counts or ecological data. What keeps people returning year after year is a bit harder to define.

Harrisburg resident Linda Haldeman has watched that connection take shape at Wildwood for decades. Since moving to the area in the late 1960s, Haldeman remembers the conversations surrounding the construction of Harrisburg Area Community College and the filling of nearby wetlands, a reminder of how dramatically the surrounding landscape has changed over the years. Yet Wildwood endured, evolving into a place she still returns to regularly with her Border Collie-Lab mix, Yukon.

For Haldeman, the park’s pull goes beyond exercise or scenery. Spring, especially, carries a deeper resonance.

“It reminds me of the new life that we all have … possibilities for,” she said. “You just see so many blooming and budding things. It’s just amazing. And it does remind me, on a real spiritual level, I guess, that this same universal energy is with all of us.”

She often strolls on the North Boardwalk and gravitates toward the pavilion near its far end, where broader stretches of water and quieter surroundings make it easier to slow down and absorb the atmosphere. There, she said, the park offers something increasingly difficult to find in modern life: stillness.

“It just is very calming. You can be very present to the moment,” Haldeman said. “You kind of lose yourself in the atmosphere.”

That sense of reflection and connection, she believes, is part of what makes Wildwood so important to the Harrisburg community.

“We must have places accessible to all of us to sort of reconnect – or stay connected – with the universal power,” she said. “A place like that gives me that opportunity.”

Even small moments have stayed with her. During one walk, she and Yukon stood in the roadway near the boardwalk to keep cars from striking a large black snake stretched across the pavement until another visitor safely moved it aside. Another day, she found herself talking with a retired pediatrician photographing butterflies and hummingbirds from the end of the boardwalk – one more reminder, she said, of how the park quietly encourages people to slow down and pay closer attention to the natural beauty surrounding them.

That relationship between people and place is exactly what park officials hope to preserve as Wildwood faces new environmental challenges of its own.

The lake, gradually filling with sediment over time, has become the focus of long-term restoration planning. What was once roughly 4 feet deep averages closer to 4 inches in many places today. A long-term restoration effort has been underway for years, including feasibility studies, engineering design work and permitting for selective dredging projects aimed at preserving the wetland’s ecological and flood-control functions.

Yet despite the environmental engineering behind it all, most people come for something far simpler. They come because it feels good to be there.

After more than two decades at Wildwood – first as an environmental educator and later as park manager – Rebert still seems genuinely energized by the place.

What continues to surprise him most is the biodiversity tucked inside the city limits.

“There’s currently a graduate student from Shippensburg University who is studying biology,” he said. “He’s doing some turtle research in Wildwood Park, and we never knew that we had a certain kind of turtle population.” Rebert declined to name the species at this point.

Birdlife is equally impressive.

Wildwood is designated as an Important Bird Area by the National Audubon Society because of its relationship to great egrets, a Pennsylvania endangered species that feeds extensively in and around the park wetlands.

Depending on the season, visitors may spot great blue herons, green herons, red-winged blackbirds, osprey and migratory songbirds using the wetlands as a stopover during long journeys between Central America and northern breeding grounds.

The first two weeks of May typically bring peak songbird migration, as neotropical migrants moving north from Central and South America stop to rest and feed within the park.

Late winter and early spring, especially February into March, draw migrating waterfowl as ice begins melting from the lake. By late summer and early fall, monarch butterflies, hummingbirds and birds of prey begin moving south through the region again, using the wetlands and nearby river corridor as feeding grounds along the way.

“It changes seasonally,” Rebert said. “That’s what keeps people coming back.”

Wildwood’s location contributes heavily to that diversity.

The park sits near the Susquehanna River and the Kittatinny Ridge migration corridor, placing it at what Rebert calls a “crossroads of migration.”

“We’re really lucky,” he said. “It’s a neat area.”

For photographers and naturalists, that luck translates into opportunity. Wildwood’s wildlife often becomes surprisingly tolerant of people, allowing visitors unusually close encounters with animals that might flee elsewhere.

Rebert said that adaptability creates meaningful experiences, especially for children or first-time visitors.

“You can see the sense of wonder that sort of overtakes them,” he said. “We provide that opportunity for everyone to experience nature and have it be easy.”

The park attracts an eclectic mix of users: walkers, runners, birders, photographers, cyclists, researchers and families. But Rebert said another growing category has emerged as well: those who simply like spending time at the park.

“There’s a lot of people who don’t have any agenda,” he said. “People just enjoy coming and strolling around.”

He believes the park increasingly serves as an antidote to the overstimulation of modern life.

“What we know is that it’s almost like when you enter the park, a switch flips,” Rebert said. “Usually, it’s when you start actually walking down the trail, and you give your eyes a break from straight lines and right angles.”

Earlier that same morning, a visitor told him, “I don’t know what I would do without Wildwood.”

Rebert understands exactly what she meant.

“We offer the ability to distract yourself with nature,” he said.

The park continues to evolve through partnerships, grants, restoration efforts and volunteer work. Since the late 1990s, more than $2 million in improvements have been invested into the park through state and federal grants, private donations and support from the nonprofit Friends of Wildwood organization, said Rebert. The park is part of Dauphin County Parks and Recreation under the leadership of Director Anthea Stebbins.

Projects have included trail improvements, boardwalk repairs, ADA accessibility upgrades and the addition of comfort stations.

The park also depends heavily on the public.

Roughly 100 active volunteers assist at Wildwood itself, while around 200 support Dauphin County parks overall. Last year alone, volunteers contributed nearly 6,000 hours at Wildwood, Rebert said. They help maintain trails, clean litter, restore habitats, monitor bluebird boxes, assist with research and staff the front desk at the Benjamin Olewine III Nature Center.

Founded in 1991, the nonprofit Friends of Wildwood spearheaded fundraising efforts for the nature center, which opened in 1999.

Named for the businessman and philanthropist whose office once overlooked the park, the nature center became both an educational hub and gateway to Wildwood itself. Rebert said the building was envisioned as a place where visitors could experience indoors what they would later encounter outside along the trails.

Today, the center houses wildlife exhibits, educational displays and one of the park’s most popular features: a bird-viewing area that allows visitors to observe feeding birds up close throughout the year. A large habitat diorama showcases many of the mammals, amphibians and bird species found throughout Wildwood’s wetlands and forests.

Now, park leaders are preparing for the next chapter. After more than a quarter century, many of the exhibits have simply aged out.

“The exhibits have just outlived their lifespan,” Rebert said. “Some of them are obsolete because they’re just too old.”

Park officials and Friends of Wildwood are now laying groundwork for a future capital campaign aimed at reimagining the exhibit hall experience entirely. The project would modernize displays, create more interactive educational opportunities and potentially offer sponsorship and naming opportunities for businesses and private supporters interested in helping shape the next generation of environmental education at Wildwood.

“We see this as a tremendous opportunity and a really big need,” Rebert said.

Looking ahead, Rebert hopes to see continued investment not only in infrastructure, but also in stewardship – protecting the park from invasive species, maintaining habitat diversity and growing community support.

Growth for Friends of Wildwood is a particular priority to help the staff of seven full- and part-time workers.

“We want to increase our membership a lot,” he said. “The best way someone can help the park is to join, to become a member.”

Still, for all the discussion about wetlands, migration corridors, restoration engineering and environmental science, Wildwood’s appeal may ultimately come down to something much more intrinsic.

Time behaves differently there. A quick walk has a way of becoming an hour. An hour quietly stretches into an afternoon on trails that loop gently around water and trees. Turtles sun themselves on logs. Red-winged blackbirds call from cattails. Wind moves through sycamores that have witnessed hundreds of years of history.

And somewhere along the way, almost without noticing it, the stress we all carry with us seems to just melt away for a moment.

To find out more about Wildwood Park, including becoming a member of Friends of Wildwood Park or learning about supporting the upgrade of exhibits in the nature center, visit explorewildwoodpark.org.