Road Trips and Hike Reports

This hike was great.  It started at a big turn around at the end of a dirt road.  There was one van there when we arrived but it was gone when we got back and we didn't see a single person on the trail.  Anytime there is more than 100 feet of elevation gain per mile we consider it a relatively stiff hike.  While the warm weather weather and the climbing did combine to make for a good exercise hike, the trail was very well graded and most of the time the climbs were gradual and mild There wasn't too much of note on the loop but there was a very large pond with a rocky island in the middle and one section had some giant rocks in a rock garden type setting.  The weather was also good with a fairly consistent breeze to keep the sweat and humidity under control.  

This wasn't the hike we intended to go on.  The first one we tried to go on was a piece of the Finger Lake trail that started on a road called Harrisburg Hollow.  Harrisburg Hollow was a rough rutted dirt road. Besides being nerve wracking to drive down in our low slung Chevrolet Cruze, there was also absolutely no parking near the FLT crossing.  So we decided to skip that hike and head to something else.   This hike near Corning wasn't too far away and seemed like a good 2nd choice.  The Alltrails hike for this trail system is just a bunch of forest roads forming a loop.  Once we started walking up the steep forest road I could see some more 'traily' options leading off of it and we basically built our own adventure using the Alltrails map but not the route they originally showed. The weather was gorgeous with nice sun, a steady breeze and low humidity.  It was actually pretty cool (50's) when we started and probably didn't quite hit 70 by the ti...

Brian didn't want to get up as early as I did on this, our unexpected day at home before returning to work.  Since it was going to be really warm (near 90) on the 2nd day we were going to be at Ohiopyle State Park in Pennsylvania, we opted to head home Monday instead of spending a 2nd night in our yurt.  While it would have been nice to have our full 2 night yurt camping trip, it was nice coming home Monday and having all of Tuesday to do something different with.   I got up early and got blood work drawn for an upcoming medical appointment. I also needed to go to Best Buy to try and find a new laptop for my father who has been having frequent crashes on his Dell Latitude.  I had about an hour and a half between getting blood drawn and Best Buy opening plus it was going to be pretty warm here too.  So I decided to squeeze an unplanned mini hike into the time and opportunity I had.  The Crescent trail is a wonderful trail network that is very close to u...

It was a little warm by the time we got to this trail.  This 'state forest wild area' is the largest in Pennsylvania at over 50 thousand acres spanning 3 counties.  I'm not sure what exactly differentiates a state forest wild area from a normal state forest.  The largest state forest in PA is astonishingly large at 300 thousand acres.  The Quehanna Wild Area is a fascinating and under-visited area.  The drive through (on th Quehanna highway) is exhilarating with lots of curves and dips and very little traffic.  It was previously home to a number of defense industry research areas including a small nuclear reactor.  This hike actually started just off of 'Reactor Road' which led to that, now completely demolished, nuclear reactor. The variety of scenery along this loop trail was phenomenal.  There were areas that were very dry and even semi-arid feeling but also wet and muddy areas.  The vegetation varied a lot from mostly hardwoods in some a...

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 ...