Road Trips and Hike Reports

This is another trailhead we've been to SEVERAL times and it's one of the most consistently enjoyable places to hike within 2 hours of our house.  The first few times I went here I thought for some reason that it was the Labrador Hollow Unique area .  Unique areas are an interesting land designation in New York.  They recognize areas (seemingly mostly not huge acreages) of land that stand out in some geographic or botanical way from their surroundings.  But this trailhead and the road leading to it are NOT Labrador Hollow.  You can GET to Labrador Hollow by trail from this trailhead but it's a hefty walk, one of the larger vertical elevations we've ever done as a day hike.  We did it in 2024. Previous hikes we've done from this starting place mostly went down one side of a scenic pond near the trailhead then a gentle meander through some very thickly forested rambling hills followed by crossing the road we parked on (but not near the car) and then climbing...

The name I used for this post is what Alltrails called this particular loop.  We've been to this same trailhead multiple times and I've always called in Connecticut Hill since it's in a Wildlife Management Area by that name.  Though the trailhead was the same one we've used before and the start of the hike was super familiar, the majority of this walk somehow was different than what we've done before.  There were some really nice stacked granite type landscapes and a beautiful stretch of tinkling babbling steam in a scenic little ravine.  The last mile (which we usually actually do first) was a nearly flat walk elevated above a scenic creek. It was almost certainly and old road for cars at one point but now it's a lovely stroll with a very steep hillside on one side and another but less severe hill on the other side of the creek, complete with some minor streams flowing down the hill to join the bigger one. All that said, this wasn't a super fun hike.  We th...

It's been warm this weekend with humid days, highs in the mid 80's.  My #1 goal if were going to do a hike was to do our best to beat the heat.  So I picked out a hike that wasn't tooooooooo far away and sounded like it wasn't super exposed.  This out and back hike in the southern part of the Finger Lakes National Forest was a different part of the Interloken trail that we've used a few times in a loop with the No-Tan-Tako in another part of the Finger Lakes National Forest. The first mile or so of this hike had a lot off wet and muddy sections.  We've had rain showers for about 4 of the last 5 days.  There was almost no obvious climbing or descending on the whole 8 miles we did, just short little ups and downs that didn't seem very noticeable.   Some people on Alltrails said this was more of a solitude than a view hike and for the most part that seemed accurate.  There were 2 sections where to trail opened up enough to be in direct sun.  One...

In terms of exercise this wasn't anything notable.  It was very close to home, nearly flat and we didn't walk particularly far.  What makes this little walk notable is that, despite being super close to home and on trails we've done parts of before, this was all new scenery that we didn't know existed. The Lehigh and Auburn trails are 2 different rail trails which cross at least once here in Victor.  We've walked on both of them before but this time we started at the Lehigh Crossing park which we hadn't been to before. Very close to where we parked was a long pond with at least 5 turtles sunning themselves on logs.  Brian absolutely loves to see turtles so he was super excited.  There was also a large railroad bridge where the Lehigh crossed the Auburn railroads.  We've done several hikes on different sections of these trails and it's all very close to home and seemingly in a built up area but here was an entire section that was new to us.