Road Trips and Hike Reports

In terms of exercise this wasn't anything notable.  It was very close to home, nearly flat and we didn't walk particularly far.  What makes this little walk notable is that, despite being super close to home and on trails we've done parts of before, this was all new scenery that we didn't know existed. The Lehigh and Auburn trails are 2 different rail trails which cross at least once here in Victor.  We've walked on both of them before but this time we started at the Lehigh Crossing park which we hadn't been to before. Very close to where we parked was a long pond with at least 5 turtles sunning themselves on logs.  Brian absolutely loves to see turtles so he was super excited.  There was also a large railroad bridge where the Lehigh crossed the Auburn railroads.  We've done several hikes on different sections of these trails and it's all very close to home and seemingly in a built up area but here was an entire section that was new to us.

Part 2 of our adventure (see previous post about Buffalo Harbor walk) was attempting to follow a guide I found on Buffalorising.com that described how to, as a pedestrian, cross the Peace Bridge into Canada.  You might think that crossing a bridge on foot would be a very obvious activity that you don't need a guide for but the Peace bridge is a major international crossing.  It has long complex ramps that funnel auto traffic then spread them out to a dozen border control booths on both the US and Canadian sides of the bridge.  Freight traffic has its own even longer more complex set of ramps that pulls them away from the car traffic.  For our purposes, the hardest part was finding a place to park near the nearly invisible pedestrian entry to the bridge complex.  Once we found parking (near the corner of Busti Ave and Rhode Island Street) we headed across Busti and walked along a series of tight fenced areas that take you through a turnstile into the controlled ...

I wanted to come up with an 'adventure' for the day.  Not just a hike or just a city walk but something of a combination.  I started out by looking for Buffalo urban walks online and found this trail along the harbor.  At least part of it is called the Fuhrmann trail. We got an early start on the day and had breakfast at Panera along the way.  This trail runs along the harbor and our walk started with a very strange horseshoe shaped jaunt around a strange dead end along the Union Ship Canal, a very historic but short canal that connected the harbor of Buffalo with a series of industrial works, most notably the Lackawanna steel company.  I don't think I've ever seen a canal come to an abrupt dead end like this before.  It seems like it was probably used to park ships for unloading.  The state has done a lot of work to repair and remediate the canal to make it suitable for various forms of aquatic plant and animal life.  At the very end of the canal...

I thought this would be a park we'd never been to before but when we actually arrived it seemed like this was just another part of Whiting Road nature preserve.  It was certainly a different section of trail than we've done before and Whiting Road nature preserve is a really great park for a suburban city park. The Alltrails description for this hike said we were unlikely to encounter other hikers and it was certainly the case today.  Parts of the trail were a little muddy and some had light overgrowth.  I kind of expeted a wide gravel covered trail so we didn't bring the hiking boots or bug spray.  Still, for a 'pre-dinner' weeknight hike, it was good.  

This is a trail loop we've done a new times.  It isn't a super long drive from home, it's not a popular trail and most interestingly, you get to head out on one trail and, if you choose, come back on a different trail with different scenery.  The other times we've gone to this trailhead we walked out the forested Interloken trail until it crossed a gravel road at the southern end of the long pasture that it starts at then came back on the No-Tan-Tako trail which nearly comes together at that same point.  Since our friend Fred was with us on this trip, we were a little more ambitious and went farther south than the first gravel road we usually turn around at.  This time we made it to a surprisingly nice pond, Teeter pond. Having a friend hike with us was a nice and unfortunately rare plus to the day.  It has been pretty hot here in the last week so I'm very glad we made the effort to get out on this gray but reasonably mild day.  

I presented Brian with 3 options for getting some sort of hike in for our day.  1 was relatively close to home, one was really close to home and the third was from a brochure I had laying around in a basket of travel ideas.  The brochure was about the Allegheny area of Pennsylvania and included a decent list of hiking ideas but very little detail about each one.  Based on just a nice photo and the desire to have our adventure take up most of the day, we headed out to Bradford PA, just south of the NY border. The reservoir is a really beautiful body of water.  There are a few different trails but we wanted to walk the 'Marilla Bridge Trail' but we knew very little about it.  Though described in the brochure as a 2.2 mile trail, it actually goes on considerably farther.  It starts by going over the namesake bridge then around half the reservoir before heading off deeper into a lushly forested area.  We only went about as far as the brochure brochure said...