My wife and I went hiking recently on the Eddy-Ballentine trail in Kansas City, MO. I used my MapMyFitness phone application to track our route via GPS, and that map is below. We loved the terrain and wildlife. There are lots of rock features, some hills, and some creek beds. And we saw a deer and a turtle during our hike.
The wild life that we didn't appreciate were all the ticks. Luckily my wife thought ahead of time that we should take precautions so we wore long pants and sleeves and hats. When we finished hiking we checked each other for ticks and we literally had about 10 each! Most of those we found on the outside of our clothing, but we both did also find a couple inside our clothing. This was mid-Spring, which I think is a prime season for them. But regardless, cover your skin when you hike there.
The other issue that we had was following the trail. It is marked in many places, but the markers are just pretty small orange dots or arrows. No real signs after the trail head. You can see by the map that there are some loops. At one point we were on the northern loop and realized that we recognized the terrain and had missed the cutoff to get off the loop. Then we back tracked and found the cutoff, but then we missed the next part too. We had to check the MapMyFitness map on the phone to see where we had gone wrong. If we hadn't have had that, we may have ended up at the golf course to the east, or somewhere else, I'm not really sure.
But again, it was a really nice trail, so if you're careful about the ticks and are careful (or familiar enough with the trail) to not get lost, then its a great hike right in Kansas City.
View Eddy-Ballentine Trail in a larger map
