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 possibilities, we couldn't see any obvious alternate trail that would have miraculously cut off a mile or more. So we did the same first 3 miles we did last weekend and pressed on, sometimes feeling good about being on the planned loop, sometimes uncertain. Finally, somewhere over 3.5 miles in we came to a field which sounded like the field described in the book. And sure enough that field was near West Hollow Road though it took some sleuthing to figure that out because Alltrails maps called it just County Road 33. Here are some photos from that first part of the hike:
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| Still not budding out here in the Bristol Hills but the air quality was great |
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| The beaver pond is still lovely |
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| It really was sunny today, I wasn't JUST trying to look cool |
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| There was a little starter beaver lodge nearby and it looks like this beaver has plans for adding on a wing |
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| There was seemingly no mud under any of these boardwalks |
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| And they went on and on |
After the field and the paved road we'd finally gotten to we went to the right on West Hollow road and then on the left side of the road almost immediately was the next piece of trail. This area had its own trailhead and immediately climbed 400 feet in about half a mile, pretty steep and (for a single climb), tall for this part of NY. We saw our 2nd group of fellow hikers on the big climb and they very helpfully stood off to the side so we could pass them with social distancing. The trail was not narrow at all but we're trying to be super uncompromising on our distancing and they made it easy.
Once we got to the top of that hill we were able to look down, across the hollow or valley all the way over to the OTHER hill which our hike started on the other side of. Most of the ridge on this other side of the paved road seemed to be private property with an easement. One nice thing was that most of the hike on this side was under tree cover yet there were at least 3 spots where you have a beautiful uninterrupted view down into the hollow, something that might make this a very inviting trip in the summer since it would combine cooling shade with wide open views in spots. There was a lot of active logging debris and some torn up areas on this part of the trail. I think to my West coast friends this would seem outrageous but Brian and I both reflected on how great it was that we were allowed passage through at all since the landowner probably has little to gain by working with the Finger Lakes Trail Conference at all and yet they do. There are plenty of lovely state parks and state forests in upstate NY but they aren't large or contiguous enough to facilitate making a long state traversing trail like the FLT (Finger Lakes Trail) and most of the long distance trails in NY pass through a patchwork of public and private lands.
The ridge hike went on and on and we kept wondering when we'd go down Cleveland hill and be able to start the road walk back to the park which formed (I thought) 3 of the 11 miles of today's looping adventure. Eventually we saw a paved road far below us and confirmed via GPS map that it was the road we would be walking back on but the ridge trail went half a mile or further past it before heading down hill. Then there were a few ambiguous junctions where the FLT and the Bristol Hills trails overlapped and diverged etc. In the end I think we chose fine although it's possible one part of the other alternative we looked at would have been less brutally steep going downhill. At this point we were the farthest south and farthest from the car of the entire hike.
Finally we started walking back on West Hollow road about a quarter mile to catch Porter road and then headed East on Porter Road which apparently was dirt at the time our book was written. And though it had no bearing on our doing this hike (neither of us had really poured over the trail guide before embarking), what I had originally opportunistically read as roughly 'Porter road makes for an easy last 3.3 miles to your car' was neither as simple nor easy as I thought. Porter road went 1.5 miles then what was supposed to be Powell Hill Road but was now marked as Garnett Hill Road took us for another 3.8 miles, almost all of it uphill.
All told, we figured both by step count and our almost never varying overall pace and timing, that we had walked every bit of 13 miles, not 11 as the book suggested. Perhaps the trail network has undergone some reroutes since the book was written or we missed some time saving diagonal trail but we never backtracked of felt lost. It was just a long ass walk. The weather was gorgeous and the trail conditions were mostly very good but the longer, steeper than expected road walk did feel interminable. Oh yeah, today was also Brian's turn to take the backpack and this was the medium of the 3 backpacks which is really a better fit for me but when I'm wearing the biggest pack, he has to manage this one for us to have any hope of backpacking and that is really what I'm pushing us forward on training for and Brian is doing his best to gamely try it again.
I feel very tired and sore. It was a great hike, a good adventure and one of the most ambitious hikes I could ever imagine for only being like 28 miles from our home. And we never want to do it again! All of today's pictures are from Brian.
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| Looking down, way down, on Porter road which was our route back to the car |
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| There were several of these minimalist benches along the ridgeline, I suspect provided by and maybe for the landowner |
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