Friday October 25, 2024 - Fishers park - Near Fishers NY - 3.2 miles, about 200 feet elevation gain

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.  It's the most concentrated scenery in the whole park but it doesn't really go anywhere, it's just a little loop.  After that we went down another trail to the wetland area and looped back towards the pickle ball parking area.  Since we mostly avoided the lower area this wasn't nearly enough mileage so we headed back up the leafy hill.  We decided to try the connector to the Lehigh valley trail.  Personally, I find the name of this rail trail to be very strange.  On the one hand, it is named after the Lehigh Valley Railroad which covered a long distance including going through this part of New York.  On the other hand, the Lehigh Valley is decidedly in Pennsylvania and I would think they could have called it the Lehigh railroad trail or something that doesn't make it sound like they think we're in the Lehigh valley. Maybe I'm overthinking it all.  The connector trail was attractive and led through some quiet light industrial areas.  We then walked maybe half a mile on the rail trail until it came to 'Old Dutch Road' which was not a road I've heard of despite it being in the same town we live in and it was also utterly devoid of even a single car driving down it which seemed odd for 6 pm on a Friday night.

So, this was our way of making this frequently repeated park fresh again.  It was a nice after work walk.











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