Road Trips and Hike Reports

This was more enjoyable than I expected it would be.  We walked up one long ridge and then made a little loop at the end of it before walking back along the bottom of the same hill.  It felt natural and forested even though it's really quite suburban.

This hike is actually very close to the one we did last weekend.  The Fair Haven State Park and Sterling Nature Center park are just a few miles apart by road.  We've gone to this park about 5 different times but this is the first time we went since the new visitors center opened.  It's a perfectly lovely building and I bought a T-shirt in support but there isn't really much in the building to see or do.  I was pretty surprised this is a Cayuga county park .  I assumed, based on the appearance and the general low-key nature of the park, that it was a private foundation or land trust that owned it. Now that the visitors center is open I was able to get their official little trail map .  While we have tried to explore some of the trails to the left side of the parking lot (if one is facing Lake Ontario), the majority of the trail network, especially the interconnected part, is to the right of the parking lot.  Normally we walk the Dogwood extended trail ...

Chestnut Ridge is one of the most talked about hiking areas in Western New York.  It's most famous for the 'eternal flame', a natural gas seep which feeds a small flame that people relight in the rare times that it goes out.  I've always wanted to visit the park but it's basically in Buffalo and I knew it would be pretty busy so we've avoided it until now. Since we got a nice early start on this Sunday morning I got on I-90 and made short work of the 70 mile drive.  The park's front parking lot was pretty full.  There were a few other lots farther back but we parked in that first lot and walked in from there.  Thankfully, it quickly became obvious that 90% of the people were there for the eternal flame or to a lesser degree maybe just a generic road walk through the scenic grounds.   We departed the paved park road and instantly we were all alone on the 'Boy Scout Orienteering' trail.  This trail weaved up and down through a few different variatio...

After a disappointing weekend (weather, work etc) I made the unusual request to take Monday off suddenly as a mental health day.  I just wouldn't have been at my best and thankfully I didn't have any deadlines that day so it was relatively low impact.  I contacted our friend Fred to see if he would like to join me on this walk.  Ontario county park is near Fred's house and a good place for extra fall colors since it sits at the top of a very steep good sized ridge.  The drive up is actually one of the steepest roads by far in the entire Finger Lakes area. The fall color was good and we enjoyed semi randomly wandering the extensive trail network.  Initially I hoped to follow the Finger Lakes trail down to the lean-to that Fred has never seen but there are some hunting season trail closures so we couldn't get there. Compared to being at home cranky, this hike was a good move for both Fred and I.

We've been to Sprague Brook a few times, it is one of my favorite hiking spots in New York.  For a county park it's an astonishingly extensive destination with a good size campground, numerous picnic facilities, playgrounds AND an enormous trail network with plenty of wild feeling trails and some un-bridged stream crossings. The other times we've been here we always did the same 8+ mile loop and I assumed that loop was probably the only or most obvious long hike you could put together at this park.  I downloaded a Sprague Brook trail map from Alltrails and was surprised when this trail route was mostly different than the route we had done before.  I opted to shave a little bit off what would have been closer to 8 miles by taking a slightly less circumferential route than the one uploaded to Alltrails. It was actually a little rainy during most of our hike but the dense foliage kept us almost completely dry in spite of the rain.  There were lots of different landscape...

This was an unusual hike in that it was suburban and close to home but over 5 miles long.  We’d never been to and I had never even heard of Gosnell Big Woods Preserve but it came up on AllTrails and seemed like a good way to get a satisfying hike without a long drive.  We’re traveling to Vermont next weekend so extra driving didn’t seem like a great idea especially since it was supposed to rain later in the day.  On the way we tried eating at Original Steve’s Diner in Penfield.  They are opening a Steve’s in Victor and I was curious to see what we can look forward to. This hike had a variety of terrains from nearly flat creekside trail to woodsy and undulating with some intriguing hills with dips and little valleys.