Sunday April 12 - Finger Lakes Trail - Bristol Springs, NY - 6 miles

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 Finger Lakes trail and the terminus for the 50 mile long Bristol Hills Trail. 

There was a large hill that went down steeply from the top of the hill all the way down to what appeared to be level with the surrounding terrain.  The total elevation gained and lost was 2300 feet as recorded by the Alltrails app.  We aren't sure how what it measures differs from how hiking books usually refer to it but while a substantial workout, we both felt like this was probably what books would call an 1150 foot elevation gain.

All of today's pictures are from Brian's phone.

High above NY-64



Interesting devices to prevent bikes from accessing sections of the trail where the private property owner who owns that section of land has deemed only foot traffic to be allowed.  We saw at least 3 of these today.





Not exactly the fudge dipped coconut granola bar of my dreams but that hill was huge and we wanted a snack!

These were an interesting hybrid of a bog walkway and a staircase.


It's hard to appreciate it in this photo but that beaver dam has at least a 6 foot water level difference on each side.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sunday February 4th 2024 - Oak Rim/Power Pole/Explorer trails - Tug Hill state forest area near Rodman NY - 3 miles, just 223 feet elevation gain

Image
Link to our hike plot on Alltrails . Yesterday's hike was from ' 50 Hikes in Western NY ', the origin for this hike was the similar and often similarly challenging to follow ' 50 Hikes in Central NY ' book.  The book wrote up a whole series of different trails in the Tug Hill region as though it was a 2 day backpacking trip.  It is certainly possible to dissect those 2 day plans and work out the individual components but he absolutely doesn't make it easy since he doesn't really call out the breaks between the different trails.  Thankfully, Alltrails had a number of them plotted individually which is more useful for a day trip.  I thought Tug Hill was relatively close to home so I was kind of surprised when it came up at over a 2 hour long drive but we had time so we stuck with it.  The Tug hill region is pretty interesting.  It's a HUGE area (bigger than our 2 smallest US states) and very rural and known for heavy snowfall. Since this hike was  almos
Read more

July 27, 2024 - Canadian Cruise Vacation Day 8 - Bar Harbor, Maine

Image
Bar Harbor was a gorgeous place to drop anchor.  And since it was the only port that was too small for us to directly dock at, we literally did drop anchor there. Unfortunately, the health issues continue to plague our group and I was the only one well enough to go on shore.  I enjoyed the shuttle trips both ways.  It’s really weird to walk from a very large boat to a relatively small one while neither is anywhere near a dock.  The trip TO Bar Harbor I was on a contracted dinner cruise type boat (good sized) but on the way back to the ship I was on one of our ship’s own tenders which are really fancy lifeboats but somewhat better equipped.  For lunch I ate at West Street Cafe and had a spicy chicken sandwich and coleslaw.  Though there are a few deep fried items on the ship, they seem few and far between so it hit the spot as did the blueberry mule.   Other than the trips to and from and the lunch, Bar Harbor wasn’t my favorite.  Far more than any of the Canadian cities we visited, Ba
Read more

Sunday March 24th - Saturday March 30th 2024 - Work trip to Las Vegas - many miles of walking but no ‘walks’

Image
What a week this has been.  At work I’ve been one of the more vocal team members advocating for a cautious and measured journey into the cloud hosted future.  For over a year it has been a rollercoaster of hearing that we were probably going to do a huge forklift style cloud migration then a few weeks later hearing we’d just stay at our current awful managed provider and then a few weeks later that we would probably buy and host our own server farm.  This decision cycle repeated a number of times and I did my best to be as  blasé  as I could be about it since it seemed like the process would go on forever. Then, with surprising rapidity, the decision was made and a lot of money spent buying our own equipment which we are going to operate out of a Las Vegas based datacenter that the West coast half of the pre-merger company has been using for a few years. This week was the week when the parts finally all shipped (there were a lot of delays from HP) and the trip to implement it all was f
Read more