Road Trips and Hike Reports

Our friend Jim was in town visiting from Vermont.  Despite the lousy cold weather we did make it out for a little walk along the Ontario Pathway which runs along Flint Creek.  Not much to report, it was just a nice little leg stretcher.  

This was a bit longer than our earlier winter hikes.  We've visited this same trailhead about half a dozen times.  It's not a popular or well known place yet this one trailhead serves a wonderful network of different trails that combine in various combinations.  Several different itineraries are named after international locales such as the Spanish Loop, Swedish Loop, Ukrainian Loop and the Stockholm shortcut.  Most of the loops utilize the Finger Lakes Trail for part of their loop and then have some independent piece of trail going the other way of the loop. The trail was barely broken and it was challenging walking but otherwise conditions were good, it wasn't windy or icy.

Continuing with the theme, another beautiful and snowy short hike.  This one is at a gorgeous (pun or no pun, your choice) park in Quebec not far from Brian's parents.  I've gone a few times but it's never worked out for Brian and I to hike there together until this trip.  The park is very groomed and structured and it has a stiff 9 dollar per person fee but it's really a nice facility. There is 1 main trail that they maintain very specifically for winter hiking. Most of the park is snow shoeing or cross country skiing but this one 'mountain trail' is wonderful.  It makes beautiful nice switchbacks up a slope then goes through forest, first hardwood then mixed hardwoods and evergreens.  Over the course of the hike it goes along some ridge lines and eventually comes back down not far from where it started but it is a perfect loop with no tail.  There are several 'stations' to rest, some of which have interpretive displays.  This wasn't a challenging h...

Another short but adventurous winter hike.  This trail , named after an area resident who did a lot of volunteer work, was covered in many inches of nearly unbroken snow.  In places it wasn't clear which way the trail went but between the Alltrails app and a lot of scanning for trail blazes we managed to make our way back to the gorge.  The road (Williams road, pictured below) that led to the trailhead looked passable with our snow tires but it was surprisingly soft and slippery. We ended up parking at the junction of Williams road and walking in.  The Inman Gulf is a dramatic canyon of gulf with a creek running through it.  It was partially the same trail we did last year but it felt very different and I think covered different parts of the trail network. Brian was just recovering from being sick and I was just a few days more recovered than he was so we ultimately didn't cover a lot of distance.  What we did cover was spectacular and very deep with snow....

As so often happens, 2024 and our goal of 52 hikes went out with a whimper.  Brian and I both got sick, the weather went to pot and we ended up at 47 or 48 qualifying hikes together for 2024. We're both not totally over the creeping crud that we've been fighting for weeks but it was definitely the first weekend in 3 or more when we both felt almost normal.  We headed out to Buffalo to visit the Science Museum early in the morning.  To be honest, the history museum was pretty disappointing.  I'm glad it was a 'museums on us' weekend from Bank of America because if we each paid 19 dollars to get into that glorified McDonald's PlayLand, I'd have been really bitter.  There were just so many kids, many toddler age or younger and very little for an adult to really dig into.  Buffalo HAS a Children's museum, why does the science museum have to be basically a children's museum too? After the museum I semi randomly drove around looking for a place that might...