Saturday September 16th 2023 - Ausable Chasm Trails - near Plattsburgh NY - 3 miles, some modest elevation gain

A few weeks ago, a cousin of Brian’s and the cousin’s grandson were killed in a freak accident while at their vacation home in Maine.  I never met the people who died but I have met some of their siblings etc.  We came to Vermont to attend the celebration of life that was held for them.  The celebration was an ENORMOUS gathering with hundreds of people in a field near an Organic Dairy in Vermont and it was a touching presentation but it’s really family business so it is not something I’ll describe farther.

We started our trip after work on Friday and drove to Clifton Park (suburban Albany) in a fairly easy 190 miles for the first night’s hotel.  The next morning we got a pretty early start, partially because we didn’t sleep all that well.  The upside was that we had a little more time to spare than we might have guessed before need to get on the road to arrive at the celebration at 2 pm in Vermont.  

One attraction that I’ve been wanting to see is Ausable Chasm which is quite near where the ferry we were going to take to Vermont would depart from.  We had about 2 hours to spend at this famous and very old commercial attraction and it was enough time to walk most of their basic trail network, take a lot of good pictures and be in a good mental space for the rest of the drive and the other events of the day.

Ausable Chasm is an absolutely astounding handful of acres of geologic oddities and superb natural beauty.  It’s the kind of place that could easily be a state park except that it was discovered (and commercialized) so long ago that it’s operated like a cross between a park and an AMUSEMENT park.  They offer various packages including floating the river at the bottom of the Chasm, adventure walks very near the river and various other add-ones. The basic, and most popular attraction is just to be able to walk their 3 main trails, 2 of which run parallel to the river and the Chasm.  It was early enough when we arrived that the number of people in the park was very modest.  Even on the busiest (closest to the Chasm) trails we saw just a sprinkling of people but a large percentage of the visitors we did see or hear were either from the French speaking part of Canada (which is only an hour away from the Chasm) or other, much farther away places.  It’s definitely an internationally well-known attraction.

Some of the photos we took show the immense pieces of rock which have fractured, leaving gaps in the surface of the land that go down 100 feet or more from the top of the Chasm to the bottom at river level.  Others show some of the impressive but somewhat precarious  looking stairways and other structures that have been built over the last 140 years to make the scenic wonders accessible to a wide audience.

I really enjoyed my visit to the Chasm.  While I understand the current sensibility that natural treasures should, ideally, be owned and available to everybody, I definitely feel like the operators of this attraction have done a wonderful job at making the site enjoyable to a wide range of people without destroying or cheapening the natural beauty.

There are several ferry’s that cross the NY/VT border formed by very wide and deep Lake Champlain.  This was the relatively short (under 20 minutes) crossing from Plattsburgh NY to Grand Isle VT, just North of Burnlington.  Both sides of this crossing are at the end of peninsulas jutting out into the lake which helps keep the crossing shorter.  It does mean a fair amount of extra miles of driving to get to and from the ferry terminals at the ends of the peninsulas but even this shorter crossing is a very charming, picturesque affair we used on the way to the celebration.  We only waited a few minutes to board and paid less than 20 dollars for the car and 1 extra passenger to cross, saving about 30 miles of driving.

After the celebration we had a spontaneous dinner with several of Brian’s siblings who were also there at the celebration.  The Jericho Cafe and Tavern did an amazing job accommodating an unreserved table for 8 and we really enjoyed out dinner together.  On the way back to our hotel (in Plattsburgh) the Ferry was busy and would have involved a lot of waiting so we opted to just drive North to use the bridged crossing at Rouse’s Point which is also very scenic and historic but it added quite a few miles so it was a relief to be finally checked at our Plattsburgh hotel for the first of 2 nights.