Saturday October 3rd 2026 - Kinsella park trail and Crystal Hills Trail - Corning NY - 3.2 miles, 400 feet elevation gain

As members and supporters of the Finger Lakes Trail Conference, we get their magazine covering trail projects, stories about through hikers and members who have made substantial time and effort commitments to the organization.  The last issue we got talked about a new piece of trail that connects Kinsella park (a city park in Corning NY) to an existing part of the Crystal Hills Trail.  The CHT is about 45 miles long and, based on my minimal research, connects from the PA state line to a junction with the Finger Lakes Trail in NY.   It is also part of the 'Great Eastern Trail' which is a developing long-distance trail network that spans the Eastern US from North to South.

The article was really about the news of the little connector trail between the city park and the existing CHT segment and also that a piece of the CHT now goes through Corning Glass lands which eliminates what used to be a road walk.  It wasn't a how-to or even a why-to on using the new trails.  So I thought it would be fun to go there and check it out.

The logistical details aren't very interesting.  We tried but at first failed to figure out where this connector trail was.  We then drove to where the article said the other end of the connector trail was going to be but it looked like it was temporarily blocked by a construction project.  We couldn't find parking near the Crystal Hills Trail marker so we drove back (all of 1/2 a mile) to Kinsella and walked the sidewalk back up to the CHT trail start.  The first bit of the trail is a little brushy and not particularly interesting.  Once it gets up a hill a bit and closer to the Corning factory buildings it gets both more open and more interesting.  It's super cool that Corning worked with the trail conference to come up with a hopefully permanent route to allow trail users to cut through their heavily wooded corporate campus.  We didn't walk very far but it was surprisingly steep.  There was some nice fall color.  I mostly just enjoyed looking at the glassy tall Corning plant we were walking by.

On the way back I realized that the little connector trail was actually open. It took a meandering pleasant route down to the river near where we drove into the park originally.  It needs some better markings and maybe some more use so it looks like a real trail but that is to be expected since it's very new.

As an adventure day it was a good outing.  As a hike it has possibilities but we didn't really go very far on the CHT.