Road Trips and Hike Reports

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 ...

We're moving soon to New Hampshire.  There might be more details in upcoming posts but it understandably makes us want to revisit a few favorites here in central and western NY while we still can. This county park is very impressive.  It's very large, has a large campground, a cross country skiing warming hut and an extensive ski trail network which doubles as a hiking network the rest of the year.  There is a main, blazed trail loop which is just called Sprague Brook Trail.  We followed quite a bit of that main trail again on this trip but we shaved off some little fingers that would have made the hike more circuitous and longer. Still, we walked 6.5 miles which was great.  The fall colors were enjoyable and I forgot how much of the trail was along the edges of ravines and other big drop offs.  It reminded me why this is a favorite place to repeat.  For whatever reason this hike took a lot out of both of us.  We really enjoyed our early dinner an...

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 trail...

Brian is in Vermont visiting his family.  This left me with a weekend to fill on my own.  I decided to not let the weekend to go by without getting a hike in.  Little Rock City is a really interesting geologic area near Allegheny state park but not in the park.  Today's pictures aren't the best because it is summer and there is so much green it doesn't give a lot of contrast to show the rock formations clearly. I left the house pretty early so I could get there as early as possible.  While it wasn't hot today, it was very humid and the trail surface was almost all wet with some puddling.  There were some slippery rocks here and there and I didn't get very close to the edges of any of the drop-offs since I was already antsy being there by myself.  I saw just 1 other set of people on the trail and they were on bicycles just crossing the path I was on briefly. Despite the minimal elevation gain, I found this hike more tiring than it should have been....

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 name I used for this post is what Alltrails called this particular loop.  We've been to this same trailhead multiple times and I've always called in Connecticut Hill since it's in a Wildlife Management Area by that name.  Though the trailhead was the same one we've used before and the start of the hike was super familiar, the majority of this walk somehow was different than what we've done before.  There were some really nice stacked granite type landscapes and a beautiful stretch of tinkling babbling steam in a scenic little ravine.  The last mile (which we usually actually do first) was a nearly flat walk elevated above a scenic creek. It was almost certainly and old road for cars at one point but now it's a lovely stroll with a very steep hillside on one side and another but less severe hill on the other side of the creek, complete with some minor streams flowing down the hill to join the bigger one. All that said, this wasn't a super fun hike.  We th...

It's been warm this weekend with humid days, highs in the mid 80's.  My #1 goal if were going to do a hike was to do our best to beat the heat.  So I picked out a hike that wasn't tooooooooo far away and sounded like it wasn't super exposed.  This out and back hike in the southern part of the Finger Lakes National Forest was a different part of the Interloken trail that we've used a few times in a loop with the No-Tan-Tako in another part of the Finger Lakes National Forest. The first mile or so of this hike had a lot off wet and muddy sections.  We've had rain showers for about 4 of the last 5 days.  There was almost no obvious climbing or descending on the whole 8 miles we did, just short little ups and downs that didn't seem very noticeable.   Some people on Alltrails said this was more of a solitude than a view hike and for the most part that seemed accurate.  There were 2 sections where to trail opened up enough to be in direct sun.  One...

In terms of exercise this wasn't anything notable.  It was very close to home, nearly flat and we didn't walk particularly far.  What makes this little walk notable is that, despite being super close to home and on trails we've done parts of before, this was all new scenery that we didn't know existed. The Lehigh and Auburn trails are 2 different rail trails which cross at least once here in Victor.  We've walked on both of them before but this time we started at the Lehigh Crossing park which we hadn't been to before. Very close to where we parked was a long pond with at least 5 turtles sunning themselves on logs.  Brian absolutely loves to see turtles so he was super excited.  There was also a large railroad bridge where the Lehigh crossed the Auburn railroads.  We've done several hikes on different sections of these trails and it's all very close to home and seemingly in a built up area but here was an entire section that was new to us.

Part 2 of our adventure (see previous post about Buffalo Harbor walk) was attempting to follow a guide I found on Buffalorising.com that described how to, as a pedestrian, cross the Peace Bridge into Canada.  You might think that crossing a bridge on foot would be a very obvious activity that you don't need a guide for but the Peace bridge is a major international crossing.  It has long complex ramps that funnel auto traffic then spread them out to a dozen border control booths on both the US and Canadian sides of the bridge.  Freight traffic has its own even longer more complex set of ramps that pulls them away from the car traffic.  For our purposes, the hardest part was finding a place to park near the nearly invisible pedestrian entry to the bridge complex.  Once we found parking (near the corner of Busti Ave and Rhode Island Street) we headed across Busti and walked along a series of tight fenced areas that take you through a turnstile into the controlled ...