Road Trips and Hike Reports

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