Road Trips and Hike Reports

The appeal of this hike was the description in the 50 Hikes in Western NY book. The author explains how this seems like a very unlikely location for a hike since it is basically at the highest point with the land dropping away (gently) on all sides.  The reason there is a lake here despite no obvious watershed to fill it is that while it is the highest point right where it is there are substantially higher hills nearby and that makes the area where the lake is below the water table.   In spite of this cool back story, the lake itself is not particularly grand or interesting and the entirety of the walk described consists of a short connector road from the lake out to the grid of gravel roads that make basically a square around the lake.  Even less exciting, you can't see the lake at all (at least in summer with the trees all leafed out) once you walk 500 feet from the parking spot. So I'd summarize this hike as a bore. The drive down to and from Allegheny county was...

It had been a long time since we did a hike from one of the 50 Hikes in (Central/Western) NY Books.  This one was from the Central NY book .  The hikes from these books are sometimes a let down because a lot has changed in terms of reroutes and road changes since these book were published in the mid 90's.  My goal for our day was to just grab a book, quickly choose a hike and get on the road without getting mired in decision paralysis especially since we're not always able to seize the morning and be out on the road as early as we were this day.   Getting to this hike was no great challenge but it was very remote with several miles of gravel roads.  We looked up the road (Ratville Road) on the car nav and it helped take us there very nicely.  Still, we came at the hike from the opposite end of Ratville road and the parking area wasn't really as described in the book so we weren't totally sure we were in the right spot.  Then the first few way poin...

 I thought this was someplace we'd never been but when we go to the busy parking lot at the trail head I recognized it from before. Thankfully though, this hike from Alltrails headed across the road from the one we did prior so it was actually 100% new territory. This wasn't a strenuous hike in any way but it wasn't boring or flat either and considering the barely suburban location it has a good illusion of being wild and isolated.

 This was a hike with a visiting friend from Tennessee.  A favorite often repeated spot for us.

 This was an epic long hike.  I had been to this park once, by myself in October of 2019 I think.  I did a beautiful walk from the covered bridge (which is the central part of the trail network for many) to the fire tower and back. This gigantic loop hike from AllTrails however was a huge connect the dots adventure from a big dam, to Lyons Falls, through Hemlock Gorge and a few other park features ending, unexpectedly for us, at the very bottom of the dam with 175 stairs leading back to the top near our parked car.   The weather was warm but mild and nearly perfect for the entirety of our hike.  There were quite a few cars parked at the various trailhead parking lots but the park was so large and our route so ambitious and spread out that there wasn’t anywhere on the trail that we saw more than maybe 2 families together.  All together we did see enough dogs to fill a medium size dog pound though! It seemed like every couple or family had at least open canin...