Road Trips and Hike Reports

Letchworth state park was someplace we visited last August .  I just noticed today that all the mentions in that post I made of the state park name I has misspelled as Lechworth.  It's Letchworth! On the way to the park I wanted to try a bakery in  Geneseo which was on the way.  This turned out to be a lovely place.  Though they are 30 miles from Rochester, they have bagels brought in from Rochester's very well liked bagel place, Balsam Bagels .  Brian and I both got a french toast bagel toasted with cream cheese.  When I saw the lovely baked goods they had I had to get a cookie too.  The owner of the bakery started chatting with us as she was frosting cinnamon rolls.  The conversation was really good and she also gave us a cinnamon roll.  So our light breakfast didn't end up being so light but we joyfully inhaled a lot of carbs back in the car. Letchworth state park is a very busy place.  It's easily the most talked about state park in central NY and it's a ve

We originally set out to find a trail that was supposed to be in a Marine State Park at the southern end of Honeoye lake as shown on Alltrails .  Unfortunately, this lovely boat launch is surrounded by private property and while intriguing, we didn't find any boardwalk floating over the lake as shown on their map.  But on the way to this we did notice Sandy Bottom Park, just a few miles north on the same road as the Marine State Park.  So we went there. This hike didn't look like much.  Certainly no elevation gain, no hills or valleys.  But it was very peaceful and calming. The trail we walked goes completely around a very large and at this time of year, very verdant green field.  At the back end (farthest from the trailhead) there is a set of two boardwalks that branch off the field trail.  These go over a wetland and provide a beautiful stroll over water and swamp vegetation.  We were kind of in exercise mode so we didn't linger for a long time but even walked with purp

This was an almost spontaneous hike. The aim was to find something close to home and hopefully very quiet.  We succeeded at both.  The trail was a mix of dirt and boards.  Much of the trail goes near wet areas so the boards made up a fair bit of the trail.

After a fitful night of sleep we headed out early and were on the trail before 8.  There weren't nearly as many miles to cover on this day.  The first mile or so was back tracking until the main Gerard trail met up with the bicycle path.  A tiny piece of the bicycle path formed the larger white cross over trail to the East side of the loop.  There was a fair amount of up and down and one long up not long before the end of the trail.  Here are the pics from Sunday:

We finally did it.  After having had my own backpacking gear for 8 years and only using it once on a test run we finally went on an overnight backpacking trip.  It was rainy on the way and parts of the trail were muddy but it was surprisingly low on bugs.  The Gerard Trail has a LOT of ups and downs.  The trail is very interesting with a lot of relatively narrow foot path areas with steep slopes but also areas of broad gravel or muddy rocky road width trails.  We started from the Cow Run shelter parking area and headed South for a few miles.  Then we crossed down the canyon and up the other side of the creek on the VERY strenuous white connector trail.   I had hoped we'd be able to just use our paper map (a 4 legal sheet tile of a PDF from the PA State Park's website) but those cross trails in particular are not as straight forward as they sound.  After the crossing we went up up and away, climbing some extremely steep slopes.  Some had switchbacks but some just scaled the sid