Road Trips and Hike Reports

We originally talked about hiking at Powder Mill park which is only 15 minutes from home, about 1/4 of the way to downtown Rochester from where we live.  Since it was rainy Sunday and I remember Powder Mill as being quite shady plus the longest trail there I could find on Alltrails was only 2 miles, I decided to look slightly further afield. I'd never heard of it but at only 35 minutes away (maybe 25 miles) I thought Wesley Hill was in the realm of an after work hike.  The drive there was actually pretty fun.  Although not Kansas flat, the area immediately around us has just gently rolling hills.  But the last 5 or more miles on the way to this hike went up up and up. Nice and curvy too.  The trail I had downloaded on Alltrails was just an out and back of 2.9 miles.  It went around a charming pond and then headed towards the other end of the park, ending near a rustic (falling apart?) cabin.  After reaching the end of the trail we planned on doing I had been

We just haven't been able to stay away from this park.  Despite having tried this park twice before, weather and lack of 'the book' kept us from doing the '11 mile' loop.  We got a good early start today and were on the trail just after 9 am.  And the weather was very pleasant, starting in the mid 40's (like my age!) and heading to about 60 by the time we finished. As we started off reading the trail guide, we had a hard time understanding it.  The description very clearly started off from the same overlook we started at last weekend with the 6 mile hike.  Then it cut left info the forest after a few hundred feet of walking along the tall edge of the bluff.  Just like last weekend.  But then the book seemed to describe a 1/4 mile here, half a mile there and bippity boppity boop you are at the hiker lean-to at the bottom of the other side of the hill you started on.  This wasn't how we remembered it and though we tried to keep our eyes open for possibilitie

This hike had been on the to do list for a little while.  It is a longer drive than most hikes we do so no traffic April 2020 was a good time to do it.  Utica is about 120 miles away and this trail head was about 20 miles South of Utica.  I took US-20 all the way there and it was a lovely but long 2.5 hours.  This hike marked the first use of the middle sized of the 3 outdoor backpacks we own.  Our normal day hiking pack is an Osprey Stratos 34 which we have absolutely loved ever since we got it in Arizona years ago.  The middle bag is also an Osprey but an Exos 58  which was only worn a few times in Oregon to prepare for what turned out to be a single night of backpacking along the Deschutes River near The Dalles.  I would really like us to get out again to try overnight backpacking this spring and dusting off the bigger bag is one step.  There is even one larger backpack in our collection but that one only fits me whereas the middle one is marginally able to fit Brian's smaller

This was our re-attempt to do the 11 mile hike from yesterday.  I made some really good potatoes for my breakfast this morning then we headed out, all the outerwear carefully double checked to be packed.  Then we got to the trail head and realized we didn't have the book .  Maybe this 11 mile hike thing just isn't meant to be for us.  Still, we felt confident that we could get in a good stiff hike just walking the Finger Lakes trail for a few miles and then turning around.  It wasn't as elegant as the 11 mile loop would have been but it was enjoyable on its own.  The scenery was wonderful today.  The hike starts from a place that at least used to be called Jump-Off.  This overlook is very near the park roadway for Gannett Hill County park and looks hundreds of feet down at NY-64 below.  This is an extraordinary county park. It has camp sites, cabins, multiple playgrounds, 3 softball diamonds, and a very extensive network of trails including a piece of the 950 mile long

We started the day off very early.  We went to McDonald's for breakfast and headed off eagerly to Gannett Hill Park near Bristol Springs NY.  Unusual for an intense hike, this was less than 30 miles from home.  The plan was to do an ambitious 11 mile hike from the 50 Hikes in Central NY book.  As we got ready to leave, I was pretty sure my hat was in the car and Brian contemplated but ultimately decided against taking his gloves with him.  Well, it turned out to be very cold (32 with a stiff wind) and my hat was not in the car.  One thing we didn't know about this hike since we'd never been to Ganentt Hill Park is that it starts on the top of the hill which accentuated the cold start to the day.  So we regretfully decided that this wouldn't be the day for this hike. A few miles from Gannett Hill (at the bottom of the hill) we had noticed a NY state manged 'multiple use area' called Stid Hill.  We tried to walk there but it was very wet and mushy and not all th

A quick and beautiful after work hike. This is the park we checked out a while ago but it was muddy and we didn't have our boots so we stuck to the main gravel road between the two reservoirs.  This time we had boots, it was still muddy and we walked around two two reservoirs, not using the main gravel road at all.  Surprisingly, this wasn't flat or even mostly flat.  None of the ups and downs were very big at all but there were a lot of them, especially on the more Eastern of the two reservoirs which had a less developed trail. Just two random pics from this walk.