Road Trips and Hike Reports

This hike was on the way home from Oswego. As you can see in the pictures there was no snow and it was in the 40's, quite a contrast from the day before. Not sure why the Adirondack area was so much snowier. We visited this park once before and today we went farther down the Dogwood Trail.  There was nobody else visible at any time during our walk and since the park is at the end of the road leading to Lake Ontario, there was no road noise and the winds were very calm. We could hear birds including, at the beaver pond, Swans trumpeting, something neither of us had heard before. It was a lovely relaxing end to a very good weekend.

This isn't a statistically impressive hike.  But those 3.5 miles were all on snow and parts of the trail was so steep there was a step and ropes to hold onto.  Another spot had an inclined ramp type thing, again with a rope. It was just non-stop interesting scenery too which is harder to do in the winter when most everything is white. Though owned by a conservancy group, this trail is maintained by either 1 guy or 1 guy and his family, we aren't clear on the details.  He happened to be walking into the trail network from the parking lot and when he saw us he turned around. Turns out he was just going in to refill a map display.  We chatted, played with his very cute dogs and then thanked him for all that he does to make this trail system work before heading in.  There were a few poems broken up into little phrases almost Burma Shave style on some of the trail sections.  There are also numerous little carved things on the signs like cartoon bears or berries etc.  Very personalit

 Super Bowl Sunday is not a special day for us.  We didn't even know who was playing and certainly didn't care.  We headed out relatively early and as I hoped there was even less traffic than a normal Sunday morning. This made it a good day for a relatively long drive to a hike.  We had a bagel at Bagelicious in Liverpool (near Syracuse) and then headed South on I-81, passing through Cortland on the way to the trail.   We didn't bring our dedicated winter boots because around where we live there is basically  no snow left.  So it was a big surprise when we found consistently packed snow on almost every step of this long hike.  The route we hiked was a balloon shape.  The stem of the balloon gets walked on twice and was mostly shady plus it was early in the day so that first mile was pretty icy on the way in. The loop portion of the balloon was better for traction and as the hours passed the warming temperatures helped even the stem part be less icy by the time we walked out

After some unusually cold days, the temperatures rebounded from zero yesterday morning to about 45 this afternoon.  Since we headed out relatively early in the morning everything was still frozen on the trail and we knew we'd be walking entirely on snowy surfaces.  So I went once again to Alltrails to find possibilities that night be closer than the existing list of 'to-do' hikes which tend to be 6-8 miles long and at least 2 hours away.  I ended up coming across this 'No-Tan-Takto' trail which I'd never heard of. This trail, about half way to Ithaca from home, was very different than most trails we go to.  It not only spent a lot of time walking in a field, it wasn't even walking the edge of the field but rather a diagonal shot through the middle of one then a straight arrow through the middle of another.  The trail did go by some rows of trees but the fields went on quite a long time.  Later the trail did go into a more forested area and a little hillier.