Road Trips and Hike Reports

We both took this day off.  We celebrate October 30th as our anniversary because it marked the date of our first date. Our wedding anniversary is in November and was many years later than when we met of course.  There were a bunch of errands including voting but for the hike I chose a place that was in the same direction as the bagel shop we were headed to for breakfast for anyway. Mendon Ponds park is large rural park in Monroe county (same county as Rochester).  Though it's pretty close to where we live it isn't a park we go to very often.  It was a good fit for this Wednesday morning since it wouldn't be busy. The trail was really nice with quite a bit of wetland and pond facing trail and also some areas that really looked like an African Savannah.  The leaves are mostly down from the trees but there are still hints of color to spruce things up.  It felt like a great peaceful start to our quiet special day off. The deer (send to last picture) was very a strange encounter

Chestnut Ridge is one of the most talked about hiking areas in Western New York.  It's most famous for the 'eternal flame', a natural gas seep which feeds a small flame that people relight in the rare times that it goes out.  I've always wanted to visit the park but it's basically in Buffalo and I knew it would be pretty busy so we've avoided it until now. Since we got a nice early start on this Sunday morning I got on I-90 and made short work of the 70 mile drive.  The park's front parking lot was pretty full.  There were a few other lots farther back but we parked in that first lot and walked in from there.  Thankfully, it quickly became obvious that 90% of the people were there for the eternal flame or to a lesser degree maybe just a generic road walk through the scenic grounds.   We departed the paved park road and instantly we were all alone on the 'Boy Scout Orienteering' trail.  This trail weaved up and down through a few different variations

This was a chance to get another weeknight hike in and in fact is the location we originally planned to go to last Wednesday.  This delightful little park is one piece of land but it's fairly crisply divided into 2 landscapes.  There is a low lying section with a lot of wetlands and stream side trail and there is a very hilly hardwood tree covered part.  Especially right now with the last bits of fall colors spicing the view up, I'm a lot more excited by the hilly area than the flat area.  Getting to our arbitrary 3 mile minimum for a 'qualifying' hike requires hiking the ENTIRETY of the perimeter of this park and even then it comes up a tiny bit short of 3 miles. With that in mind, we started off going up the very thickly covered hill leading up from the ever popular Pickle ball court.  We then walked the yellow trail which isn't very long but, unlike most of the trails, this beautiful trail goes down a ravine and circles a scenic knob with a picnic table on it.  I

I'm mot remembering exactly why we ended up at this hike.  I think I just wanted something that wasn't super far away since we didn't get a good early start to the day. The trail network at this park is pretty extensive  At some points we were along creeks, at other points it was a lot of mowed paths with wetland brush on both sides.  I wouldn't say it was the most remarkably scenic area but the park is large and you can put together whatever size walk you need there. The park was very clean and I appreciated that the roads almost all had a little trail that paralleled them but on the other side of a brush hedge so it never felt like you were walking along a road.

Oh, it started off so simply.  Brian worked from home and we thought we could head out at 4 pm and get in a quick 3 miler at Fishers park near our home.  Then google maps said traffic was a lot worse than normal so I thought we could investigate a park I took note of on a drive recently, Pumpkin Hook Park.  That park, as best as we can tell, isn't really a hiking destination, mostly a sports field.  So I pulled out the Alltrails app and quickly selected a 4.1 mile hike in Fairport near the Erie Canal.  We'd been to this trailhead once before but did just a minor little walk.  This time we started out walking parallel to a small but deep stream or mini canal which itself ran parallel but not super close to the Erie canal.  Later the trail made a long leisurely jaunt away from the water and followed the edge of a series of BIG fields.  Where the trail headed away from the stream (to the right) I sort of noticed that our trail appeared to loop at this point and that we probably wo