Road Trips and Hike Reports

I'm a little late posting this.  We were in Burlington visiting our friend Jim who just bought a new condo.  The weather wasn't great but we got out for this little leg stretcher with great views just a few miles from Jim's place.  It was refreshing seeing a lot of polite friendly off-leash dogs.  I usually think of Vermont as being highly regulated with lots of restrictions but on this trail off-leash dogs are totally allowed they are just supposed to be 'under voice control' as a sign says along the trail.  

This hike wasn’t super far away, about.1 hour each way.  I didn’t have an exact trail plan or even a map, I just found Rattlesnake Hill listed on a New York State website listing best NYS Winter hikes.  Luckily, once we got there I was able to download an ‘area map’ from AllTrails, a relatively new function in the app.  You used to only be able to download curated trail plots. Those downloads include  surrounding areas and other trails on the maps but now you can just zoom in on any piece of land and download the map even if there isn’t a trail plotted on AllTrails.   There is only 1 winter accessible trailhead for this WMA.  In fact, the road was plowed exactly up to the trailhead and from there, the 2 forest roads that went past that point were unplowed.  We even saw the plow driver from the town of Nunda come to where we parked and turn around. Initially I tried building a route based on looking at the map on the phone. Unfortunately, only 10 minute...