Sunday October 27, 2024 - Chestnut Ridge County Park - Orchard Park NY (Buffalo) - 6 miles, 600 feet elevation gain

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 in landscapes and took us by several other park entrances and access points.  As we got near each access point we could tell which way the flame was by the ant like stream of people heading in that direction.  Using the All Trails map we were able to skirt the edges of the flame area and have a fairly peaceful hike.

I'd like to revisit this park after a good wet spell to see if the addition of more water makes the landscape more interesting.  It was a perfectly lovely place to visit as is and for a free county park just 2 miles off the US-219 expressway it's popularity is not a surprise.  That said, being very popular and 70 miles from home it isn't a place we're going to go more than once a year.













Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Image
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  almos
Read more

July 27, 2024 - Canadian Cruise Vacation Day 8 - Bar Harbor, Maine

Image
Bar Harbor was a gorgeous place to drop anchor.  And since it was the only port that was too small for us to directly dock at, we literally did drop anchor there. Unfortunately, the health issues continue to plague our group and I was the only one well enough to go on shore.  I enjoyed the shuttle trips both ways.  It’s really weird to walk from a very large boat to a relatively small one while neither is anywhere near a dock.  The trip TO Bar Harbor I was on a contracted dinner cruise type boat (good sized) but on the way back to the ship I was on one of our ship’s own tenders which are really fancy lifeboats but somewhat better equipped.  For lunch I ate at West Street Cafe and had a spicy chicken sandwich and coleslaw.  Though there are a few deep fried items on the ship, they seem few and far between so it hit the spot as did the blueberry mule.   Other than the trips to and from and the lunch, Bar Harbor wasn’t my favorite.  Far more than any of the Canadian cities we visited, Ba
Read more

Sunday March 24th - Saturday March 30th 2024 - Work trip to Las Vegas - many miles of walking but no ‘walks’

Image
What a week this has been.  At work I’ve been one of the more vocal team members advocating for a cautious and measured journey into the cloud hosted future.  For over a year it has been a rollercoaster of hearing that we were probably going to do a huge forklift style cloud migration then a few weeks later hearing we’d just stay at our current awful managed provider and then a few weeks later that we would probably buy and host our own server farm.  This decision cycle repeated a number of times and I did my best to be as  blasé  as I could be about it since it seemed like the process would go on forever. Then, with surprising rapidity, the decision was made and a lot of money spent buying our own equipment which we are going to operate out of a Las Vegas based datacenter that the West coast half of the pre-merger company has been using for a few years. This week was the week when the parts finally all shipped (there were a lot of delays from HP) and the trip to implement it all was f
Read more