Sunday February 18th 2024 - South Hill Recreation Way - Ithaca NY - 4.6 miles, 200 feet elevation gain

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 Recreation Trail is 3.4 miles long.  We ended up at a trailhead and parking area at 2.3 miles.  We went up the berm and looked around to confirm that it was, as it seemed, the end of the trail and we saw no evidence of the old rail bed continuing on.  Some maps of the South Hill Recreation Way include a trail that started across the street from where we parked.  There was an obvious path over there but it was more like a sidewalk and went both uphill and curved around in a way that no train track could ever achieve so it doesn't seem like part of the same trail.