Road Trips and Hike Reports

 This (for the purposed of this blog) was a Chris only hike. Brian had to work so I joined the Foothills trail club for a lovely group hike along the Niagara River a few miles down from the falls.    It was a busy morning with some work tasks that had to be completed from the night before and started at a certain time in the morning.  I actually started one of them from a gas station parking lot about half way to Niagara.  The drives to and from the falls were both very peaceful and nice. The hike started at Art Park which I'd never been to or heard of.  There were so many people for this beautiful summer like day that we had to split into 2 groups of about 12 people to avoid being too large of a mob.  The start of the hike was high above the river at the park.  We first took a trail down to river level then walked maybe 3/4 of a mile along the river before coming to a very steep switchback scramble that took us up to a section of the Niagara Scenic Parkway which is now only access

 We were originally going to head down to the Ontario Pathways trail head on NY-5/US-20.  As we headed there it occurred to me that we were going to go right by this little park which is probably the very closest to home of any of the 10 trailheads we are within 5 miles of. Other than the little climb from the parking lot to the old railroad grade which ran above it, this was a very level walk.  Surprisingly for a a rail trail it wasn't all wide well graded trail.  At one point the rail embankment can clearly be seen but for whatever reason the trail builders opted to build a new path that paralleled the rail bed and that brief section was more of a hiking trail than a typical multi use trail.

 This was a park we'd never looked at or been to before.  It packs a lot of interesting scenery and water features into its 19 acres.  I think this park flows into some other park system because I feel pretty certain we covered more than 19 acres on our visit and we didn't even go one direction from the parking lot.  The highlights for this park were the wacky tilted bridges and boardwalks on the lower part of the trail that goes along a vigorous beautiful creek and a hidden away beautiful overlook with a bench that looks down on the creek side trail from a substantial little bluff.

 Just a nice chance to take advantage of a weekday off to go to a park that is a little busy on weekends.

 Our long planned Ohio trip first became a Connecticut trip then when even that would be not recommended due to travel restrictions we settled for a single night in Buffalo.  The hike however was awesome.  We'd never been to this park before and it was delightfully large and remote feeling with very little road noise or other distractions.  We also (for the first time in 9 years together) forded a creek by taking our shoes off.  Usually a creek we can't cross easily becomes a turn around point but this creek was pretty shallow and we'd covered so much ground before we got to it that I reallllllllllly didn't want to turn back. Pictures from both of us.