Road Trips and Hike Reports

As members and supporters of the Finger Lakes Trail Conference, we get their magazine covering trail projects, stories about through hikers and members who have made substantial time and effort commitments to the organization.  The last issue we got talked about a new piece of trail that connects Kinsella park (a city park in Corning NY) to an existing part of the Crystal Hills Trail.  The CHT is about 45 miles long and, based on my minimal research, connects from the PA state line to a junction with the Finger Lakes Trail in NY.   It is also part of the ' Great Eastern Trail ' which is a developing long-distance trail network that spans the Eastern US from North to South. The article was really about the news of the little connector trail between the city park and the existing CHT segment and also that a piece of the CHT now goes through Corning Glass lands which eliminates what used to be a road walk.  It wasn't a how-to or even a why-to on using the new trail...

This entry isn't  really  about the trail.  We went to Kinzua Bridge State Park finally in PA.  It's some place I've been aware of since at least the time we moved to PA but just never made it to it.  This was the location of a very tall railroad trestle that crossed a creek and a small valley.  It was an impressive and old structure that very few people paid any attention to until it fell down during a storm in 2003.  The rail line it was on was abandoned and rather than demolish what was left of the bridge, it was made into a mix of man made and natural spectacle in the form of a state park. It's hard to appreciate from the photos how huge this bridge was and how high up you are when you walk to the stub end of what is left of it.  It's an impressive and imagination stirring view but a LOT of people would find walking on the bridge (which is made of boards with some gaps in them) nerve wracking.  There is a lovely modern visitor center/muse...

Brian is in Vermont visiting his family.  This left me with a weekend to fill on my own.  I decided to not let the weekend to go by without getting a hike in.  Little Rock City is a really interesting geologic area near Allegheny state park but not in the park.  Today's pictures aren't the best because it is summer and there is so much green it doesn't give a lot of contrast to show the rock formations clearly. I left the house pretty early so I could get there as early as possible.  While it wasn't hot today, it was very humid and the trail surface was almost all wet with some puddling.  There were some slippery rocks here and there and I didn't get very close to the edges of any of the drop-offs since I was already antsy being there by myself.  I saw just 1 other set of people on the trail and they were on bicycles just crossing the path I was on briefly. Despite the minimal elevation gain, I found this hike more tiring than it should have been....

This was just a quick walk on the way to dinner at Cracker Barrel.  We went to this park once before but this time we took nearly every junction along the trail to take us to the outer extremities of the roughly rectangular shape of the park.  There is a main trail that makes a slightly shorter loop around the park but the outer areas we went to this time included a little more variety in terrain. It was pretty humid and warm, one of those days when getting ANY hike in seems like an accomplishment.  

This is another trailhead we've been to SEVERAL times and it's one of the most consistently enjoyable places to hike within 2 hours of our house.  The first few times I went here I thought for some reason that it was the Labrador Hollow Unique area .  Unique areas are an interesting land designation in New York.  They recognize areas (seemingly mostly not huge acreages) of land that stand out in some geographic or botanical way from their surroundings.  But this trailhead and the road leading to it are NOT Labrador Hollow.  You can GET to Labrador Hollow by trail from this trailhead but it's a hefty walk, one of the larger vertical elevations we've ever done as a day hike.  We did it in 2024. Previous hikes we've done from this starting place mostly went down one side of a scenic pond near the trailhead then a gentle meander through some very thickly forested rambling hills followed by crossing the road we parked on (but not near the car) and then climbing...

The name I used for this post is what Alltrails called this particular loop.  We've been to this same trailhead multiple times and I've always called in Connecticut Hill since it's in a Wildlife Management Area by that name.  Though the trailhead was the same one we've used before and the start of the hike was super familiar, the majority of this walk somehow was different than what we've done before.  There were some really nice stacked granite type landscapes and a beautiful stretch of tinkling babbling steam in a scenic little ravine.  The last mile (which we usually actually do first) was a nearly flat walk elevated above a scenic creek. It was almost certainly and old road for cars at one point but now it's a lovely stroll with a very steep hillside on one side and another but less severe hill on the other side of the creek, complete with some minor streams flowing down the hill to join the bigger one. All that said, this wasn't a super fun hike.  We th...