Saturday August 22nd 2026 - Spruce and Shackham Ponds - Tully NY (near Syracuse) - 4.2 miles, 470 feet elevation gain

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 ridge on that side of the road before returning to the car by following that ridge back towards the pond but of course ending up on the other side of the access road.  Today's walk started off by going along the side of the pond just like before but quickly turned left away from the pond rather than walking right along the 2nd side of that pond.  I was tickled to see there was a whole section of this preserve we had never been to and it was beautiful.  Though this is only about 70 miles from our house, once you get east of Syracuse (about 50 miles from home) the landscape quickly becomes hillier and more deeply forested.  It is hard to explain because the Finger Lakes area isn't, by any reasonable standard, lacking in hills but East of Syracuse things just feel more folded up and dramatic than they do near where we live or west of here towards Buffalo.  It was also overcast and much cooler than it was on the drive there which was a bonus.  The first 2.5 miles or so of the hike were really beautiful.  We saw a 2nd pond that we haven't seen before.

There was a substantial road walk back for the last ~1.5 miles including a long uphill slog but it was a very quiet forest road and we only saw 1 car and zero foot travelers on the entire hike once we got past the first popular pond section.  As plotted on Alltrails we would have walked right by the car and done a second shorter loop around some other pond to make a total of 6.3 miles but we were in easy agreement that while we were enjoying our walk, 4 point something miles was enough for today.