Saturday January 3 2026 - NYS DEC trails - Rattlesnake WMA near Dansville NY - 4 miles, 380 feet elevation gain

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 minutes into the first segment of that hike, Brian put his foot through some ice into a wet area under the snow.  He decided that he could and would push on hiking but we backtracked to the unplowed road near the car and tried a different path, this time more directly heading to a published loop route through the WMA.

The snow was quite deep, between probably 8 inches almost everywhere but more than a few areas with 18 inches or more.  It was also completely unbroken trail.  The first 2.5 miles or so of the walk were at least occasionally blazed with red NYS DEC markers.  It was kind of fun constantly scanning where the next blaze was since there weren’t obvious signs of the trail in most places except sometimes a little gap in the trees suggesting a pathway.  I had to check in on the app a few times he when we lost track of the blazes.  The terrain was gorgeous with lots of little ups and downs and it all felt far more wild than it probably is since we didn’t see anybody else the entire time and there weren’t any footprints anywhere.  Overall it was fun and interesting but slow going with the deep snow.

At about mile 2.5 we came to a lean-to.  From there until almost back to the car there were suddenly zero blazes.  So we had to rely exclusively on the app to try and follow the path.  It was very challenging because there were a lot of areas where the intuitive path following skills that animals and humans rely on just didn’t work in this section.  So I was constantly course correcting and trying to get back on trail while avoiding brushy sections, overly steep areas and a pond that wasn’t shown in the app.  It was basically cross country hiking in deep snow.  The amount of energy this took (physically and mentally) to do was really high and Brian was carrying the backpack which added to the strain.

After the really tough and hilly section that required constant course corrections we walked through a very wide treeless corridor that took us back to where our loop started.  That just left a short walk on the unplowed forest road back to the car.  We were kind of shocked it totaled just 4 miles because it was 13 thousand steps and took over 2 hours, both high values for 4 miles.

The depth of snow and the level of way-finding we had to do (plus Brian getting his foot wet) were all boundary pushing elements to our hike but I really enjoyed it.