Road Trips and Hike Reports

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...

It's been warm this weekend with humid days, highs in the mid 80's.  My #1 goal if were going to do a hike was to do our best to beat the heat.  So I picked out a hike that wasn't tooooooooo far away and sounded like it wasn't super exposed.  This out and back hike in the southern part of the Finger Lakes National Forest was a different part of the Interloken trail that we've used a few times in a loop with the No-Tan-Tako in another part of the Finger Lakes National Forest. The first mile or so of this hike had a lot off wet and muddy sections.  We've had rain showers for about 4 of the last 5 days.  There was almost no obvious climbing or descending on the whole 8 miles we did, just short little ups and downs that didn't seem very noticeable.   Some people on Alltrails said this was more of a solitude than a view hike and for the most part that seemed accurate.  There were 2 sections where to trail opened up enough to be in direct sun.  One...

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.