Road Trips and Hike Reports

Where to start this story...  This hike starts at a gorgeous overlook right off of NY-15A.  The Nature Conservancy built 'Rob's Trail' a few years ago and it leads from the trailhead down hundreds of feet to the lake level of Hemlock lake.  We've done the Hemlock Lake hike about 3 times, once with our friend Gene .  We even tried doing this connector trail one other time but it was a very hot and humid day and to be honest, my mood was so awful that I should have just stayed home that day . Originally we were going to head relatively far from home for a 6-mile-long hike with modest elevation gain.  Brian suggested we revisit this lake to lake trail closer to home which was a good idea since we spent plenty of time in the car Saturday.  The first quarter mile of the trail is shared with the Hemlock lake trail (called Rob's trail).  Then there is a split and the Canadice Lake trail heads back towards and eventually crosses NY-15A before going down toward...

 Weather forecasts in Rochester are, in my opinion, notoriously, unusually useless.  This hike was planned with a friend and as late as Friday afternoon I looked at the forecast and it was to be a cold but dry day after some modest snow Friday.  Cue waking up this morning to the sounds of a snow plow working its way through the apartment complex.  We probably got 3 inches cold fluffy easy to move around snow last night to go with the maybe 3 we had Friday.  Thankfully, to his credit, our friend Gene didn't even flinch or ask if we still wanted to do the hike.  He arrived a few minutes before us at the empty but very snowy trail head parking lot.  The roads close to Victor were mostly plowed well etc but NY-15A (which we were only on for 5 or 6 miles) was very snowy and icy.  I flung the car into the snowy lot relying on momentum to get through the 6 or 8 inches that were mounded up at the entry to the parking lot, probably accentuated by whatever ...

 This was a revisit to Rob's trail which leads down to Hemlock Lake.  We noticed the other time we were here that there is a junction, not very far into the trail, that leads off to Canadice Lake.  Canadice lies just East of Hemlock Lake and is considerably smaller.  The connector trail let us back up the little bit of hill we had gone down and then veered back towards the same road we were parked along (unsurprisingly) to get to the other side.  Unfortunately, on the other side of NY-15A, the trail was more grass than dirt and instead of forested it was more of a set of scrubby fields.  The grass was wet and there were multiple unlabeled junctions.  We muddled around for a little bit but I was hot and sweaty and not in the best mood. Finally we came to a junction where it appeared one trail went down to the lake immediately and the other was a mystery. We opted to take the mystery trail and it eventually curved around and rejoined the path we'd alread...

It was going to be another hot day but we still managed to get up and head out on a good hike.  This was not a hike I'd looked at before but it was right along Hemlock lake which is apparently one of the least developed of the Finger lakes.  Interestingly, the trail head for this hike WAS somewhere I'd seen before. In fact I tried to take note of it when I was driving the moving van almost exactly a year ago.  But I didn't write down the location and our previous travels never took us past this particular spot on NY-15A. This was a favorite hike for both of us.  The setting even at the start is gorgeous.  There was almost no traffic noice, the lake had only a few quiet boats on it and there are no houses or obvious signs of human influence along the whole trail.  The first mile leads steadily down from the top of the valley down to a beautiful overlook that will probably be full of water some other time of year.  Even absent the water it was a nice s...