Road Trips and Hike Reports

With an intense but short warm up period coming the next day, I thought Saturday would be a good day for a relatively far away winter hike before it all gets sloppy.  We headed out pretty early and had breakfast at Cracker Barrel before heading all the way south into Pennsylvania.  It was about 2 hours 45 minutes drive (not counting the drive to breakfast) but traffic was very light on this cold day in the middle of an extended weekend.  The roads in PA weren't as well plowed or salted as in NY but it wasn't too bad. This trail starts out from a trailhead off a very quiet PA-44 highway.  Most of North Central PA is  very  sparsely populated.  The main trail led through a seemingly unending and unchanging corridor of brush and trees.      While not unpleasant, the almost completely flat and unvarying scenery wasn't very exciting.  Thankfully, the Alltrails plot we were following led to not 1 or 2 but 3 scenic overlook spur trail...

Alltrails is our trusted digital companion that we use for almost every hike and have for years.  Usually it lists a lot of different trails and in areas with a dense trail network there are often multiple combinations that people have submitted that give you different lengths, routes and elevation gains.  At this trailhead, there is only 1 trail on AllTrails and it is the No-Tan-Tako trail.  I guess in isolation it’s an ok trail.  It mostly cuts through a long scrubby field, passing through a number of cattle gates and other agricultural looking land.  But the Interlaken trail starts at exactly the same trailhead (maybe 20 feet away from the No-Tan-Tako sign) and takes you to exactly  the same place as the other trail.  This makes it a matter of picking a favorite or, as we have done here, making a loop of the 2 trails.  I’m just surprised the No-Tan-Tako trail was the one chosed to put on AllTrails.  The Interlaken trail runs through an att...

This same trailhead has been the starting and ending point for at least 6 other documented hike on this blog.  This time we followed the 'Swedish Loop' instead of the 'Spanish Loop' we have done more frequently.  It was odd looking at Alltrails.  The Swedish trail loop and the Spanish loop trail look overwhelmingly the same on the overview pages.  Yet, as our hike went on (and on) we realized that this was a substantially different and somewhat longer and harder hike than any of our previous visits to this trail network.  The Swedish trail, in reality, only makes up a certain amount of the total hike.  The first mile or so on the way into the trail network is the main Finger Lakes Trail and then the Swedish trail branched off and gained more elevation than the other trail we normally take.  I believe we did at least part of the Swedish trail (with blue blazes) before but when we popped out onto a gravel road after a long gradual climb and then had to w...

This hike was a rare return to the 50 Hikes in Central NY book.  It's an old book and we often have some challenges following the directions to the trailhead and today wasn't an exception to that rule.  We did eventually find the starting point along a narrow dirt road.  Finding an unobtrusive place to park the car that wouldn't be in the way of the road and not in mud took a few minutes.  When we got out of the car we realized that the hiking boot bag only had my boots in it.  When I picked mine out I didn't think to grab Brian's and apparently he didn't either so Brian did the hike in his street shoes. There wasn't really much to see during the first mile or so. It was just a series of trail blazes leading through a scrubby, maybe harvested a few years ago, forest.  There were quite a few wet spots and puddles but thankfully after the first mile there were almost no wet spots the entire rest of the way.  The scenery also improved with some narrower b...

We previously visited this very beautiful county park last year.  Fall color is still pretty strong here right now but the leaves are dropping fast.  We finally had 2 days with substantial rain Thursday and Friday so everything was wet but that also meant the creeks and falls had a useful amount of water in them now. We actually did 2 separate trails here, the North Rim Trail and the West Branch trail.  The North Rim was very hard to navigate because this park insists on using little colored trail blazes at junctions.  Unlike East Coast standard blazes which tell you (from the color) which trail you are following and (from the arrangement of the 3 blazes in the color you are looking for) which direction to turn and where the trail ends, these little markers just vaguely reassured you that you were on the right trail but not very directly which was to turn.  Many times we walked up to the marker from the back side (just seeing a stick in the ground) and had to in...

 Sometimes hikes that start out seemingly like sad compromises end up being great.  Since we came all the way home (albeit very late) Sunday night, we both had Monday off. Though I was not full of energy after the late night drive home, my first inclination was to find a 'normal' nature trail sort of hike.  Brian wanted something with a good distance but didn't want to need to weak hiking boots.  After some Alltrails scouring I found this trail loop but thought it was largely a repeat hike of the Trolley Trail we had hiked in the past which runs behind NY-31 in the rail bed of a former interurban train.  This turned out to be mostly NOT that same trail and it was a lot more interesting than I expected.   This loop starts at a parking lot near a popular restaurant rich piece of the Erie canal.  As you head west along the canal it quickly gets quieter.  It then heads North through a long and narrow easement used for some small power lines.  It ...