Road Trips and Hike Reports

This hike was a rare return to the 50 Hikes in Central NY book.  It's an old book and we often have some challenges following the directions to the trailhead and today wasn't an exception to that rule.  We did eventually find the starting point along a narrow dirt road.  Finding an unobtrusive place to park the car that wouldn't be in the way of the road and not in mud took a few minutes.  When we got out of the car we realized that the hiking boot bag only had my boots in it.  When I picked mine out I didn't think to grab Brian's and apparently he didn't either so Brian did the hike in his street shoes. There wasn't really much to see during the first mile or so. It was just a series of trail blazes leading through a scrubby, maybe harvested a few years ago, forest.  There were quite a few wet spots and puddles but thankfully after the first mile there were almost no wet spots the entire rest of the way.  The scenery also improved with some narrower b...

We previously visited this very beautiful county park last year.  Fall color is still pretty strong here right now but the leaves are dropping fast.  We finally had 2 days with substantial rain Thursday and Friday so everything was wet but that also meant the creeks and falls had a useful amount of water in them now. We actually did 2 separate trails here, the North Rim Trail and the West Branch trail.  The North Rim was very hard to navigate because this park insists on using little colored trail blazes at junctions.  Unlike East Coast standard blazes which tell you (from the color) which trail you are following and (from the arrangement of the 3 blazes in the color you are looking for) which direction to turn and where the trail ends, these little markers just vaguely reassured you that you were on the right trail but not very directly which was to turn.  Many times we walked up to the marker from the back side (just seeing a stick in the ground) and had to in...