Road Trips and Hike Reports

What a wonderful winter day.  After initially thinking we would go to Rock State State Forest it occurred to me that this was a fine day to finally do a hike at Allegany state park, someplace we've never hiked before.  With temps not getting past 20 degrees, I knew it would be VERY quiet at the park.  It also turned out to be exceptionally quiet on the roads both ways which was fine with me. This balloon hike follows part of the Conservation trail which is built and maintained by the Foothills Trail Club which I was a member of and need to renew with.  It headed up some stairs across the parking lot from the Admin building for the park and quickly and fairly consistently gained most of the uphill climb in the first half mile.  This trail was said to be built to connect from the Finger Lakes Trail (which the far side of the balloon loop does indeed connect with) to the more developed section of the very large Allegany State Park.  There isn't any particularly notable scenery p

Reading about this trail it sounded like a typical rail trail.  It's quite close to urban Ithaca so I imagined a lot of buildings around it and probably quite a few people.  It turns out this is a beautiful strip of nearly level old rail bed that feels surprisingly isolated.  Many of the side trails lead into Ithaca's Six Mile Creek natural area. Temperatures were in the 20's with a wind chill in the teens and those temps, combined with a few inches of snow, made this a very wintery hike.  The distances on the signage and mile markers along the trail made no sense to me.  Going south (we parked at the seeming north end of the trail) some mile markers were counting up and some counted down.  One set had a brown background on the mile markers and another had a slightly blue background.  The signs at the 2 ends of the trail we hiked seemed to confirm that we indeed walked the entirety of the trail based on the maps they showed.  Yet those same signs said the South Hill Recrea

We were at this surprisingly impressive state park just minutes from Syracuse once before back in October 2022 .  It snowed lightly most of last night and daytime temps remained well below freezing so this was a great chance to walk on some nice fresh clean snow.  The drive to Syracuse went well and while there was blowing snow in spots, it was pretty early and traffic volume was very light.    There were only about 4 cars in the large main parking log.  We headed off in the opposite direction from our previous trip which meant going through the woods and valleys first rather than starting off along the bluff above the lake. We also TRIED to walk around the lake this time, something we didn't attempt the other time we were here.   Other than the Lake trail, everything was in great shape and very easy to walk along.  The Lake trail was intimidating from the moment it left the other trail we had been on. It clung to the side of a hill with a very narrow indistinct (in the snow at lea

 Link to our Alltrails plot. This was a new trail for us.  The parking situation causes a lot of confusion for this trail. The Alltrails file correctly takes you to a small parking area and the Fingerlakes trail heads out directly from that point but at least for a few months in the Winter, the trail is closed with a no trespassing sign.  To do the hike we chose you actually walk along the road a little bit then head up the hill on the opposite side of the road from the parking area. This trail relentlessly but gently climbs up from the very start almost to the very end.  It was exceptionally steady in grade with only small difference between the steepest and less steep areas.  Considering the elevation gain this seemed very easy.  When we looked off to our left (on the way up) it was clear how much elevation we were gaining.  There was 1 really impressive creek/waterfall crossing. It actually was a tiny bit intimidating because the water was flowing over a pretty wide area and it was