Posts

Sunday July 19th 2026 - Peace Bridge and city streets - Buffalo NY and Fort Erie Ontario - 3.4 miles, not much elevation gain

Image
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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sunday July 19th 2026 - Buffalo Harbor State Park - Buffalo NY - 2.8 miles, 100 feet elevation gain

Image
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tuesday July 7th 2026 - Webster Park - Webster NY (suburban Rochester) - 2.6 miles, 105 feet elevation gain

Image
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.  
Post a Comment
Read more

Saturday July 4th 2026 - No-Tan-Tako and Interloken trails - Near Lodi NY - 6.1 miles, 320 feet elevation gain

Image
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.  
Post a Comment
Read more

Sunday June 21st 2026 - Number 3 reservoir - Bradford PA - 4.4 miles, 210 feet elevation gain

Image
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thursday June 4th 2026 - Mont-Bellevue loop - Sherbrooke QC - 3.7 miles, 360 feet elevation gain

Image
I originally tried to go to a more wild location in New Hampshire near a river.  The insects at the parking area were so bad that I couldn't imagine doing a hike there even with the bug spray on.  So we abandoned that hike and headed into Sherbrooke early.  I had planned for us to see the Devil Wears Prada 2 in Sherbrooke anyway so I just made sure to find some sort of little hike we could do there also. The park we went to is immediately next to Sherbrooke university and almost in urban Sherbrooke yet it has a ski lift and a very extensive trail network.  Most trails allowed bikes OR hikers but not both.  I'm generally not a fan of hyper-segregated uses for natural spaces but given the high use this park might see at some times and the large number of trails to choose from, maybe the way they are doing it makes sense for this park in particular.  The trail we walked was a forest road basically and it went up and down a fair bit but was basically along the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wednesday June 3rd 2026 - Hubbard Hill Loop - Pisgah State Park (near Keene NH) - 5.8 miles, 790 feet elevation gain

Image
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.  
Post a Comment
Read more