Road Trips and Hike Reports

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...

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 ...

I wanted to come up with an 'adventure' for the day.  Not just a hike or just a city walk but something of a combination.  I started out by looking for Buffalo urban walks online and found this trail along the harbor.  At least part of it is called the Fuhrmann trail. We got an early start on the day and had breakfast at Panera along the way.  This trail runs along the harbor and our walk started with a very strange horseshoe shaped jaunt around a strange dead end along the Union Ship Canal, a very historic but short canal that connected the harbor of Buffalo with a series of industrial works, most notably the Lackawanna steel company.  I don't think I've ever seen a canal come to an abrupt dead end like this before.  It seems like it was probably used to park ships for unloading.  The state has done a lot of work to repair and remediate the canal to make it suitable for various forms of aquatic plant and animal life.  At the very end of the canal...

I presented Brian with 3 options for getting some sort of hike in for our day.  1 was relatively close to home, one was really close to home and the third was from a brochure I had laying around in a basket of travel ideas.  The brochure was about the Allegheny area of Pennsylvania and included a decent list of hiking ideas but very little detail about each one.  Based on just a nice photo and the desire to have our adventure take up most of the day, we headed out to Bradford PA, just south of the NY border. The reservoir is a really beautiful body of water.  There are a few different trails but we wanted to walk the 'Marilla Bridge Trail' but we knew very little about it.  Though described in the brochure as a 2.2 mile trail, it actually goes on considerably farther.  It starts by going over the namesake bridge then around half the reservoir before heading off deeper into a lushly forested area.  We only went about as far as the brochure brochure said...

This hike was great.  It started at a big turn around at the end of a dirt road.  There was one van there when we arrived but it was gone when we got back and we didn't see a single person on the trail.  Anytime there is more than 100 feet of elevation gain per mile we consider it a relatively stiff hike.  While the warm weather weather and the climbing did combine to make for a good exercise hike, the trail was very well graded and most of the time the climbs were gradual and mild There wasn't too much of note on the loop but there was a very large pond with a rocky island in the middle and one section had some giant rocks in a rock garden type setting.  The weather was also good with a fairly consistent breeze to keep the sweat and humidity under control.  

This was a good vigorous hike on a part of the FLT that we hadn't done before.  Almost the entire length of the trail goes through 'Hoxie Gorge' which, despite starting almost beneath a tall bridge carrying I-81, was fairly wild feeling.  I don't know the name of the creek that we were walking along but really it a series of different little streams constantly splitting and merging.  It was hard to even keep track between stream crossings if we were crossing the same stream multiple times or different streams each time. The trail itself wasn't the most impressive piece of trail infrastructure. There were no bridges, almost no boards across muddy areas and a lot of areas where there wasn't any sort of a shelf for the trail so it was a little more tiring than it needed to be. This was also the first substantial hike with the new backpack. We bought a new backpack on our trip to Saratoga a few weekends ago with our friend Jim from Vermont.  The new backpack is the ...

Clearly this wasn't an expedition.  It was a brief stop on the way to dinner but it was a nice way to enjoy the longer days of spring.   Brian found a ring on the ground which I took back to the park the next day.