Sunday April 5th, 2026 - Franklin Gulf County Park - North Collins NY (south of Buffalo) - 4.9 miles, 480 feet elevation gain

This was a new park for us.  I don't think I'd ever looked into it before.  A gulf, in this part of the country, is a deep gorge with a creek in it.  This Erie county park is over 500 acres and, as the county's park webpage clearly states, not developed.  There are 11 named and marked trails in the park but no bathrooms, garbage service and with the exception of 1 bridge, seemingly almost no trail structures to make creek crossings easier.  The markings were interesting.  All the trails we used were color marked matching the map from the website.  Some of the trails that were only a mile or two had dozens of fence stakes with color matching, sequentially numbered little markers on them.  Still, we had to do a lot of visual scanning to follow the route because it has been very wet and in this early part of the season there weren't super obvious tracks in some areas.

We haven't been hiking that much lately so this was a good spring, get back into it type of hike.  We had to take our boots and shoes off to cross one of the creeks which was fun.  Parts of the trail network were very ordinary and dull but some had amazing views and startlingly steep walled drop offs.










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