Road Trips and Hike Reports

What a stunner this was.  It was completely spontaneous, we were in town for some mundane reason that escapes me right now and decided it would be nice to try for a walk.  I pulled out the phone and used AllTrails and tried to find something that might be mostly paved or cleared of snow.  This was mostly paved but not really cleared on snow but I'm pretty sure neither of us cared once we got into it because these cemetery grounds are aaamazing.  Wonderful sculpted grounds that went up and down over and over (gently) with numerous beautiful vantage points to look up, down or across the land.  It was both the largest and the most lovingly plotted out cemetery I'd ever been to.

This hike came from the 50 Hikes in Western New York book.  It was a lovely hour long drive from home.  The hike was quoted at 5 miles but a combination of overshooting when looking for 'the third pond' and then failing to find a clear path on the other side of one of the other two ponds (so we used the alternate directions) added considerably to this hike. It was very enjoyable especially considering it was cold out.

This was a funny little walk. We were trying to follow directions from a book and we thought we were on track until we got to the top of the hill and saw the buildings near the reservoir which the book said is where we should have parked.  We were parked at the bottom of the hill but I actually used the GPS coordinates from the book to get to the trailhead.  No matter because this wasn't the type of hike where you could easily get lost.

This was basically a leg stretcher with 2 friends and their dog who was recovering from surgery.  I include it just for completeness.

I desperately desired a fall camping road trip. So despite Brian being unable to join me, I went to Ohio for a wonderful long weekend of exploration. One of the two hikes I did this weekend was at West Branch State Park near Ravenna Ohio.  The park surrounds an enormous reservoir (Michael J Kirwan Reservoir) and has a lot of different areas scattered through its 5,352 acres.  I parked just North of the bridge across the approximate mid-point of the reservoir  (Rock Spring Road).  The Buckeye trail (Ohio's statewide very long distance trail) passes through the park so it was my hope to follow it for about 3 hours then return.  Unfortunately after maybe 3 miles I got to a piece of trail that walks along a road and though it seemed to be blazed, after maybe 1.5 miles of hoofing it along a dull country rode I lost sight of what I thought were the blazes and the only local I had a chance to ask was unaware of the Buckeye trail going down his road other than right where it popped out o

Brian had a work function to attend and I wanted to stay out of trouble so I decided to try joining Foothills Trail Club on a nice long walk on a beautiful Saturday. I learned a lot on the hike.  The trail club doesn't just lead hikes, they also maintain a very long corridor of their own trails from Canada to Pennsylvania.  Their trail is affiliated with the Finger Lakes trails but FLT has its own trail conference so I'm not sure how the two exactly relate. So the hike was a one way hike with a shuttle along the clubs own trail. Despite starting in  a little trail head lot that directly abutted Darien Lakes state park just off US-20, the hike was entirely NOT in the park and went to the other side of US-20 right away and stayed south of it the whole time.  The trail passed through mostly privately owned lands on negotiated easements.  Much of the mileage was along the edges of corn fields and little areas of trees in between the farm plots.  There were some brief steep sec

I ordered a pocket size Rochester hike guide from Amazon.  It has easy day hikes in and near Rochester. I'm not sure why I've never seen a pocket sized hike guide before.  Some hikes are intricate enough we end up carrying around the book for most of the distance. This hike was along the bluffs above the Genesee River starting near the Seneca Park Zoo.  The first part of the walk is on a really cool elevated walkway and bridge far above the river surface.  I'm not sure why they went to such expense to build an overpass type walkway on the hillside when there is also a trail at the natural top of the bluff but it's pretty cool. Above picture from trover.com The rest of the walk was more 'traily' Remaining pics by Brian

Finally its labor day weekend and we have made it out for some hiking and camping.  Ok, the camping is in a cabin but we enjoyed Oil Creek Family Campground a few years ago and we are enjoying it now.  The drive down from Rochester was easy and not particularly busy.  We got into camp about 9:30 pm Friday. On the way we had a very down home dining experience at Nellies in Arcade NY.  Though I rarely go for it, I had the fried shrimp dinner.  I appreciated that it came with macaroni salad (everything seems to come with mac salad in Western NY) and coleslaw and I had my choice of potato so I had mash instead of the normal fries.  It was very good and our server was extremely nice.  We also both had pie which was great but probably a mistake for me in terms of feeling very full and still having two hours of driving left. When I was looking for hikes around this area I printed out a single page double sided map and guide for the Morrison trail .  It detailed a 5.8 mile loop, an 8.8 mi

Mendon Ponds was on my little list of places to hit when we need a close by walk.  Monroe county's park site has handy PDF files that can be double side printed onto single sheets of paper and that is all we had as headed out for the morning's adventure.  We drove the perimeter of the park to find the best trail head for the hike we basically randomly selected from our cheat sheet. The trail was almost entirely comprised of mowed paths through meadows.  There were a lot of paths going every which way but we tried to just follow the red blazed trail.  There were a few spots where we got off track and the hike got a little longer than we anticipated and the weather a little warmer.  Still, it was a really good spontaneous walk on a beautiful day.

Letchworth Gorge is the state park that has been mentioned or suggested the most since we arrived in NY.  It's 'the Grand Canyon' of the East etc.  PA has a park that makes the same claim so lets at least call Letchworth the Grand Canyon of New York. I recently got the 50 Hikes in Western NY book by William P. Ehling.  For whatever reason its still being sold in its original 1990 form.  This was the first hike we tried from this book. Like the Central NY book by the same author, this book is a little wordy but the loops and trails it has are unique and come with a description and a map. This hike started at an unassuming parking area on the side of NY 436 immediate before a very old and narrow bridge over the Genesee river.  The hike almost immediately went onto a detour (which isn't very temporary since our 1990 book knew about it and it is still in effect).  The detour was very make shift and steep as it went around an area of trail which has apparently sloughing

This hike came from a book I've had for years... 50 hikes in Central New York .  When we lived in Scranton we would drive up to do hikes between about Binghampton and Ithaca.  Now we are at the northern (and Western) extreme of the area this book covers but a lot more of the hikes are a reasonable drive from Rochester than they were from Scranton.  Sometimes the descriptions are a little wordy and we end up having to carry around the book for most of the hike but its a good resource. Today's hike started near Naples NY.  We actually tried to do this same hike last weekend but upon getting into the car found out there was a screw in one tire.  So we spent the day dealing with that.  But today was different.  We were up early.  The high temperature was below 80 today.  The humidity is low.  So we headed out and after only 40 minutes of easy driving we were at the trail head. Unlike the Finger Lakes Backbone trail, this one had over 1000 feet of elevation gain and multiple

I found this hike, as I do so many, on Alltrails .  The drive was just over an hour and other than the 20 miles on I-90 Eastbound, there were very few cars out and about on NY-96 and NY-414 past many many wineries, almost all with amazing views perched over Seneca Lake.  I'm still surprised how quiet Western NY is in a lot of places, even in summer, even not particularly early in the morning.  It is a huge relief to both Brian and I not to be dreading getting in the car.   The trailhead involved driving about 4 miles along well maintained dirt roads.  The trail is in the Finger Lakes National Forest, one of the newest and the second smallest National Forest in the US.  There was a pleasant and fairly constant light breeze this morning which helped mask the upper 70's temperature (and maybe about the same for humidity).  We started off going to the wrong trailhead (they were only .25 miles apart) but that gave us a chance to see a very secluded and beautiful pon

Though there have been other hikes in 2019, we've not been doing a ton of great hikes and the blogging kind of fell by the wayside since we aren't actively pursuing any specific 2019 hiking goal. Not wanting to put bug repellent on, I started looking for an urban walk we could do early Saturday before it got too warm.  I was originally looking at walks downtown but we did one of those not too long ago and the eerily quiet kind of sketch downtown Rochester downtown on a Saturday morning scene wasn't that appealing.  So I kept googling and I came upon an appealing shot of a curving walkway over water... Once I figured out that it was Turning Point park, we were off.  Besides never having been to this park, I'd actually never been on the state portion of 590 (I-590/NY-590) which goes north of I-490.  Rochester has a few roads like this where part or most of the mileage is an Interstate but the road continues on, suddenly a state route with the same number.  I fin