Sunday December 1, 2024 - Sterling Nature Center trails, Sterling NY - 4.9 miles, about 360 feet elevation gain

This hike is actually very close to the one we did last weekend.  The Fair Haven State Park and Sterling Nature Center park are just a few miles apart by road.  We've gone to this park about 5 different times but this is the first time we went since the new visitors center opened.  It's a perfectly lovely building and I bought a T-shirt in support but there isn't really much in the building to see or do.  I was pretty surprised this is a Cayuga county park.  I assumed, based on the appearance and the general low-key nature of the park, that it was a private foundation or land trust that owned it.

Now that the visitors center is open I was able to get their official little trail map.  While we have tried to explore some of the trails to the left side of the parking lot (if one is facing Lake Ontario), the majority of the trail network, especially the interconnected part, is to the right of the parking lot.  Normally we walk the Dogwood extended trail (trail 9?) and sometimes we have done parts of the Lake trail (3?) and gone to the Beaver Pond.   What the online map doesn't show is the description of each trail.

This time we started out on the Heron trail (6?), did the Beaver Pond trail then back to Dogwood and walked  all the way out to trail loop 4.  Loop 4 was interesting and included a little viewpoint of the 'vernal pool' which is really the same pool you see from the Beaver Pond trail but on the other side.  It was a surprisingly big loop.  THEN we (or rather I) said lets to trail 5 since we're here.  Ugh. Trail 5 was such a mess.  There were multiple downed trees and in one spot two trees fell down across each other and OVER a small ravine.  Because the trees were crossing there was no way to just climb over one or the other and the ravine was full of prickly bushes so a quick bush whack wasn't really possible.  Brian ended up walking on one of the trees across the ravine. I get nervous with any heights (if I'm walking on an unsure surface) so I made my own awkward path and got pricked multiple times by bushes.  Then the trail's path was also that of a small muddy/icy creek for a quarter mile or more.  I was so annoyed by the condition of Trail 5, especially because the rest of the park is very groomed and family friendly.  When we made it back to the visitor station I talked to the ranger about trail 5.  He said they are considering either abandoning it or marking it as a primitive trail.

We didn't initially imagine we'd find almost 5 miles of walking in this little park on the lake but we did and there are other trails like the Bluff trail (Trail 2) that we still didn't check out.













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