Sunday November 12th 2023 - Nichols Pond Park Trails - Nichols Pond (Near Fenner NY) - About 2.5 miles, little elevation gain

In my continuing hunt for things to do and places to visit, I identified 3 somewhat under the radar minor parks which, in broad terms, could all be considered ‘in the Syracuse area’.  This was the day to visit them.

First up was Nichols Pond which was really an afterthought because it was mentioned on the website for Delphi falls since both are run by the same county parks department.  This was slightly farther away from home than the other 2 parks so we headed to this one first.  It also had the least information available so I had low expectations.  

It turns out this was the site of a historically significant battle involving Samuel deChamplain in 1615, Samuel generally more associated with Vermont and the lake Champlain named after him.  There were 2 modest loop trails that went around part of the pond which was very scenic And another that went down a hill to a natural spring which was significant to the history of the Indian settlement which was here.  A third trail hugged a different part of the pond’s shore and included a boardwalk leading into the pond.  It was an enjoyable isolated feeling little gem of a historic park.



















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