What was your “woods” like?

I saw the post about forts and it got me thinking about our woods…Though we lived on the outer edge of a relatively suburbanized town, I was lucky enough to have a yard backing up to a couple of large wooded parcels that were essentially unbuildable swampy bottomland with a creek running through the center of it. Not more than a 1/2 mile wide and about 3/4 of a mile end to end (about 85 acres total) but God it felt like an endless frontier to our 12-13 year old selves. A majority of it was owned by the local Catholic diocese-there was church opposite the woods from us with a CYO day camp attached to it. I’m sure they had gotten the land for a song many years ago but they never seemed to use it beyond taking their campers down to the creek once in a while in the summer. Hiking through the words from my back door, crossing over the creek, and then hiking up to where the camp was felt like crossing a Rubicon. To us it seemed so vast that it felt like it had REGIONS. On the far western side the land was higher and drier “the meadows” - probably logged or cleared for some other purpose long ago. Following east along the creek, the land got lower and swampier until you got to what we called “the pond” -essentially a giant swamp puddle that was only about 2 feet deep at most. It would freeze in winter enough to skate/play hockey on (at least until we lost all of the pucks in the woods)-in the summer we’d have “swamp buggy races” inspired by what we saw on Saturday morning TV-only with old lawn tractors, mowing decks removed and snow chains on the rear tires. Just past that was the base of the “sled hill” - a natural drainage of some higher land that made a perfect bobsled like track in the winter. We had fires, built forts, swam, fished, tried (and mostly failed) to impress girls, smoked stolen cigarettes, drank stolen beer-it was heaven.