Road Trips and Hike Reports

This hike was the start of our long weekend trip to Pennsylvania.  I really wanted to get away for a trip before summer crowds and heat set in.  We stayed Friday night at the casino in Salamanca (NY) then 1 night at a motel in southern PA before a planned 2 night stay in a Yurt at Ohiopyle state park (PA). The hike was a good start to the weekend.  This was not a site we'd been to but, like about half of our NY hikes, it is along the Finger Lakes Trail.   There was, on a per mile basis, a fair amount of climbing on this hike.  

This was a good vigorous hike on a part of the FLT that we hadn't done before.  Almost the entire length of the trail goes through 'Hoxie Gorge' which, despite starting almost beneath a tall bridge carrying I-81, was fairly wild feeling.  I don't know the name of the creek that we were walking along but really it a series of different little streams constantly splitting and merging.  It was hard to even keep track between stream crossings if we were crossing the same stream multiple times or different streams each time. The trail itself wasn't the most impressive piece of trail infrastructure. There were no bridges, almost no boards across muddy areas and a lot of areas where there wasn't any sort of a shelf for the trail so it was a little more tiring than it needed to be. This was also the first substantial hike with the new backpack. We bought a new backpack on our trip to Saratoga a few weekends ago with our friend Jim from Vermont.  The new backpack is the ...

This was a nice little hike that we haven't done before.  We bumped into a few people on the trail who were all part of a group of 6 people doing a hike together.  They didn't know where the others in their group were at relative to each other so it was fun telling them there was just 1 person in front of them or that they were the last group etc.    

Clearly this wasn't an expedition.  It was a brief stop on the way to dinner but it was a nice way to enjoy the longer days of spring.   Brian found a ring on the ground which I took back to the park the next day.

This was a new park for us.  I don't think I'd ever looked into it before.  A gulf, in this part of the country, is a deep gorge with a creek in it.  This Erie county park is over 500 acres and, as the county's park webpage clearly states, not developed.  There are 11 named and marked trails in the park but no bathrooms, garbage service and with the exception of 1 bridge, seemingly almost no trail structures to make creek crossings easier.  The markings were interesting.  All the trails we used were color marked matching the map from the website.  Some of the trails that were only a mile or two had dozens of fence stakes with color matching, sequentially numbered little markers on them.  Still, we had to do a lot of visual scanning to follow the route because it has been very wet and in this early part of the season there weren't super obvious tracks in some areas. We haven't been hiking that much lately so this was a good spring, get back into i...

Monday was going to be a long day.  We had to leave our hotel around 10 (both because that is checkout time and because we had an architecture tour that started at noon) and from then until our 9:30 pm train, we had to find something to do and someplace to do it. We left all our bags except 1 backback at the hotel.  The hotel overall was a little disappointing.  The air conditioning (and even the fan) wouldn't come on and the wi-fi was randomly very slow at times.  We also could hear almost everything going on outside and in the interior hallways because despite being a historic building, it just isn't set up to block sounds very well.  Thankfully, some parts of the hotel were great.  The tub in our room was perfect for soaking, quite deep and well shaped.  The jacuzzi part worked well but like most of those things, it was kind of noisy and I valued watching a TV show on my laptop more than the bubbles. We arrived at the dock for the architecture tour ...