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

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  almost to Watertown (near the Canadian border and farther North than Rochester), I wasn't totally surprised to see more roadside snow as we went up I-81.  Once we exited I-81 and got on some side roads, they were covered in sand and some of them were about half snow covered especially anytime they went up a hill.  By the time we got to the trailhead we were driving on 100% pure lightly traveled but mostly packed snowy road.  It was a little intimidating backing into the little turnout provided for 2 or 3 cars to get off the road for parking.  I ended up just going for it at Brian's urging and thankfully the snow, while deeper than on the road, was still pretty firm and nothing scraped much on my low slung car.

This hike started out crossing the road we parked on and then almost immediately getting mired in a bunch of tree fall.  You can see in the plot that the trail we were following actually went to the left and made a little balloon before getting to Cascade Falls but the trail was hopelessly blocked by numerous downed trees and going cross country for a few hundred feet was the only option I could find.  Brian REALLY hates being off trail and came close to aborting this hike.  Thankfully, there weren't any major obstructions on our brief bushwhacking and surprisingly, I only remember only maybe one tree we had to climb over on the rest of the hike.  As soon as we got to the real trail near Cascade Falls, the scenery was STUPENDOUS.  Those contour lines represent a very deep gorge that the 'Gulf Stream' runs through and from what I can deduce from the topo lines, it's about 150 feet down from the rim where we were walking.  There was one very shallow set of snow shoe prints and 'snowshoe guy' had a canine companion but otherwise it was pretty much untouched snow in a lot of spots.  The elevation gain was modest for this hike but there were a few sections that were as steep as I could imagine them being without having snow spikes which we didn't have with us. Thankfully the snow traction was really awesome since it was the perfect middle, neither soft nor icy.

The Alltrails posting we were following would have had us turn around about 1 mile past Cascade Falls at a spot where the trail moves more inland from the showy gorge.  Thankfully Alltrails maps showed other trails that we were able to use to make a total loop and we actually came back on the same side of the road as the car via a power line trail and a cross country ski trail.  This added variety, avoided going back through the blow down zone and helped make up for the mileage we lost by cutting out the downfall zone.  Despite barely making it to 3 miles, this hike was very exciting and took considerably longer than a typical dry flat hike of the same mileage would.  It was the best wintery hike so far this season and the weather and conditions were perfect. The snow was quite firm but not icy so our feet rarely punched through the snow pack and nothing was wet but temps were just barely below freezing with no real winds.  Absolutely lovely and well worth the long but peaceful drive.