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One hike ground in Mishawaka stands at full documentary strength, and it is not on the river. The Mishawaka Res, at 13950 Scout Lane on the city's east side, is a 23-acre youth camp and nature center on Eller Creek, founded in 1920 as a Boy Scout Reservation and held today by a nonprofit, The Preservation of the Res, Inc., whose fifteen-member board represents the community and the organization's charter members. Its own statement of its trails is plain and present-tense, read in November 2026: "Our trails are open to the public, unless the property is closed for an event. Listen to the creek, hike the trails, and enjoy the beauty of nature close to home." The ground is worked as well as walked: the city's parks department counts the Res inside its working care — an AmeriCorps crew of seven spent eight weeks of the summer of 2023 on maintenance in the city's parks and the Res together, removing invasive growth enough to fill a semi-trailer and a half — and the trails' volunteer maintenance is one of the organization's standing asks. In December 2023 the state announced the Res's trail project at announcement strength: a crowdfunding campaign through the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority's CreatINg Places program, seeking $15,000 by 4 February 2024 toward a matching grant, the funds "to build a new pedestrian bridge spanning the beautiful Eller Creek in the Mishawaka Res, a 23-acre nature center and park." Whether the campaign met its goal and the bridge stands built is not verified in the record; the campaign prints at announced strength and the bridge's completion as a named gap. A route aggregator gives the ground as 29.8 acres against the organization's and the state's 23; the 23 governs, as the first-party figure, and the aggregator's number prints here only to be set aside.
The rest of the hike record is a park-system pointer and a negative. The city's twenty-five and more parks carry paths as park furniture — the river parks' paths are the Riverwalk's course, counted there and not again — and no second hike-only trail ground, no nature preserve with a trail system of its own besides the Res, stands in the record reached. George Wilson Park's winter use is a hill, not a trail: the city's tubing hill there, in a park named for a Mishawaka High School coach of the 1950s and 1960s, is a winter-sports ground at the parks file's strength, and no trail system attaches to it. The hike pass therefore prints at the Res's size: one documented ground, a century old, scout-founded, publicly walkable, and still being built on at campaign scale.