Thurdsay October 15th 2026 - Trails 9 and 10A at Letchwork State Park - Near Castile NY - 4.2 miles, 760 feet elevation gain

With the move coming up, both my work and personal life has been full of extra tasks and interruptions.  I saw a day with decent looking weather coming up and I had no appointments on my calendar so I told by coworkers I wanted to take Thursday off since I have a fairly involved set of things to do for work Friday night and Saturday.

Letchworth Start park is one of New York's premiere state parks and certainly the most well known park in this part of the state.  The majority of casual visitors come in through the main gated entrances to do the most well known gorge trail or a few other family friendly trails on that side of the Genessee river.  There is one other trailhead that I knew about that is outside the gated area that leads to some more primitive trails.  This trip was with my friend Fred who has lived in the area for 20+ years.  He went down 'River Road' near Mount Morris and there are about 10 different small trailheads scattered along that road which runs on the opposite side of the river from the main parts of the park.  Surprisingly, several of these trailheads had more than a handful of cars at them even on a fall Thursday morning.

The weather started off cool and drizzly.  I was excited about cool, less so about drizzly.  Thankfully, while it rained on the way to the trail, it was dry during our actual hike.  I found a loop on Alltrails that gave us about a 4 mile loop on these 2 trails.  Part of the trail paralleled the river but high above it. Other parts of it went away from the river, by some CCC era cabins and along a high ridge.  It was an interesting enjoyable hike.  I was wondering why I was so tired after the hike but seeing that it was over 700 feet of elevation in just 4.2 miles, it makes sense.  As a rule of thumb we consider any hike with 100 or less feet of elevation gain per mile to be pretty easy.  Anything more than 100 feet per mile is anywhere from a little more to a lot more strenuous. 

It's funny that it took until the last month living here to find out about this huge array of alternate trailheads that put so much more of Letchworth's 14000 acres accessible.