Abby Sends Me Off

This morning, I said goodbye to Irene and Abby. Abby seemed sad to see me go.

I took the slow route to my next stop because I love driving over the hills of home. I was going to name the post that, but I've used that title before, and it turned out that only one of my pictures is much good anyway. But the geography Western NY sure calls to me.

I'll let you play a guessing game again... where am I? With someone who also like word games. We played Scrabble. We tied at 276 points each. I expcted to get clobbered because I don't play Scrabble much, and am not adept at the strategy.

Then we played Upwords. I REALLY expected to get beat on this one. I was getting walloped, but then made a great play, and went out when the other person still had tiles! So, I won again. Don't get too excited. We are both good at word games.

Then we went for a little walk. This is white snakeroot, formerly Eupatorium rugosum, now Ageratina altissima. Whatever you call it, it's very toxic to farm animals like sheep, goats and horses. If cows eat it, and people drink the milk or eat the meat they can get "milk fever," which can be fatal.

Perhaps the best find of our little walk was a green heron on the marsh.

The focus isn't quite as good on this one, but we like how it's cleaning its foot.

Tomorrow, I'll tell you where I am. Think games and birds. The answer is....

See Did You Guess Irene?

Things I Love about New York

  I love the New York Hills. This is the southern end of the Adirondacks. None of my pictures this year show the High Peaks, but I'll take what I can get.

These hills are driving south on I-88. Fast shots through a dirty windshield. But I love the views.

Here's another.

And another thing I love about New York is that it's where Marie is! Yup, we are together for two weeks. Stay tuned

In other news- we ate lunch at a restaurant, and I got an oil change. We are pretty much set up for the next few days at a campground. In case you are curious, the body does not like a day of sitting almost completely still in a car right after 4 hard work days. But we are going to fix that tomorrow.

See Adirondacks Day 5

Duck, Duck... (Walk)... Puzzle

  Cathy and I did a fast four miles between her work and my bell practice today. We started at Lincoln Lake where we saw this pair of Common Goldeneye ducks from the bridge over the lake.

Our road loop took us around to the north side of Lincoln Lake. From here, it looks small, just peeking through the trees.

The final side of the loop had us walking west toward Lake Michigan. What you need to know is that between Lincoln Lake and Lake Michigan is the private community of Epworth. I've mentioned this place a few times in the past when I was allowed inside (because of the job I had at the time). The important thing in this picture is that pointy hill. To be more precise, that pointy sand dune. I left all the urban mess in the picture to give you the scale. You can see a picture of this hill in summer in the link below, and some pictures taken from about 2/3 of the way up that hill. In the winter, you really can see the bare bones of the dune.

We did an extra block into Cartier Park (to make it to 4 miles) and returned to the more-often-seen view of Lincoln Lake where we were parked.

As for the puzzle- I finished the hard one. I thought it was going to be very, very hard. I would say it turned out to be only hard. It did take me quite a while for having only 550 pieces. But I thought the colored rocks within the Michigan shape would be tricky. They weren't. So the only really hard part was the blue. It's called Michigan Natures Gift. (Don't tell me that should have an apostrophe. I am only copying what's on the box.)

In other news: I did my class, I edited. Then walk and bell practice.

See Lincoln Lake from Above

Ontario County Park

  We discovered that the park where we are staying has an extensive trail system. I also realized that I haven't really shown you Sunny enjoying site 19 while we've been here. We set out after breakfast to take on the Black Trail, the most difficult in the park. It was 3.5 miles, but we also walked to the beginning and back, so that total walk was about 4.5 miles. Overall, the trail drops 500 feet down the side of Gannett Hill where the park is, and then climbs back up. All of their trails are nicely designed for mountain bikes, so despite the big drop it was not really too difficult to walk. Someone, probably the local mountain bike club, has done extensive stone work across muddy places in the trail. We've seen dozens of chipmunks, but this one agreed to sit still and have his picture taken. After lunch we went to town to get ice. We had to go to Lynnie Lou's for ice cream one more time! Today, I had lime sorbet and Marie had chocolate almond. We've tried new flavors every time. Haven't had a bad one yet, and it's hard to pick a favorite, but I'm chosing Maple Walnut at Shark's Ice Cream, and Marie choses White Mountain Raspberry at Lynnie Lou's. We played some games, and then decided to take another walk before eating again. This time we chose the easiest trail in the park. In one place it went through this shadowy grove of Norway Spruce. We saw this interesting white mushroom. I don't have that field guide with me, so I don't know what it is. The most interesting part was the gills. There was a second one, already broken, so I took pictures of it. I love how creamy it looks. Total hiking today, about 7 miles. I am sorry to say that Marie has to go home tomorrow, but we are going to do one more walk in the morning.

See Ganondagan Again

Bristol Hills Branch Trail - Complete

  Today, we walked 8.5 miles and completed the Bristol Hills Branch of the Finger Lakes Trail. Most of the day was spent in the Pigtail Hollow State Forest and then on Clark Hill, walking its length after we climbed up. This actually isn't where we climbed on foot. I took this picture on the road we drove to spot the ending car. It seemed odd to drive between corn that was planted right up to the road, and the road seemed to disappear at the base of the hill. Actually, it turned and angled up the face. We basically went up-down-up, but not much elevation change each time. About 300 feet. It was mostly a lovely woods walk. The only thing that made it difficult was that it was hot and humid (high 80's). We managed to get out a little earlier (read, Marie managed to get me to move a little faster in the morning), and we had a tiny bit less mileage to cover. We had lunch on the shores of Lake David, a nice little pond. I couldn't provide the premo lunch spot of a couple of days ago, but it wasn't bad. We sat on the remains of an old dock or bridge or something. There was one view from the trail in the afternoon. This is looking across the valley where State Road 53 passes, to Fritz Hill opposite. When we read the description of the afternoon's miles, we were a little mystified by this: "Cross a steep difficult gully on a ladder bridge." We spent a fair amount of time discussing what this might be, and laughing at the possibilities. We weren't sure we were up to dancing across a ladder that had been laid from bank to bank. However, it turned out to be a nice sturdy bridge with a short ladder at the end! A few minutes after 2 pm, we reached the main Finger Lakes Trail. If you can't read the sign, it says, "Finger Lakes/North Country Trail... < 375 miles to Long Path... > 186 miles to Penna Border." I've hiked all of that and more! Marie has done almost all of it. Just a quarter-mile more to the car. We got ice cream, and came back to the campsite. The water in the showers was cold all last week, but we finally found the caretaker and asked him about it yesterday. Today the water was hot. We were so filthy and stinky, the hot shower was particularly exquisite today.

There is something about a completion that is highly satisfying. In the past couple of weeks we've done all of the Interloken Branch, the Montour Falls Loop, and the Bristol Branch. Officially a total of 72.5 miles. With aome side trips, it's actually been a total of about 78 miles. This is a little less than our usual 100 miles a summer. But we did a ton of visiting.

We will add a few more miles in the next couple of days, but not on the FLT. 

See Bristol Hills Branch- Day 1

Bristol Branch - Evangeline

  There were several really cool parts of today, but I'll concentrate on one of them for this blog post.

We had another perfect lunch spot if we hiked fast. We wanted to make it to the Evangeline Shelter. The Finger Lakes Trail System has quite a few shelters, all named. I'd heard this name before, but hadn't heard how it got it's name. It is indeed named for the poem of the same name by Longfellow. These quotes are on the wall of the shelter. "This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks." And "When she had passed it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music." This is meaningful to me because it was my grandmother's favorite poem. This is Granny Rowe, the one who raised me on epic poetry and stories of all kinds. The shelter itself is wonderful. Here's a long view. The little pavilion in front of it houses a block fireplace with a grill. In this picture, you can see how the inside is laid out. There is a sleeping loft with carpet! There is a table and some chairs, books, various utensils, things hikers might need (bandaids, bungie cords, t.p., etc). There was even a porch swing mounted inside that I found quite comfortable. Marie had to coax me out of it to get me back to hiking. It was a day of many hills, but most of them only in the 200-300 foot range, and unnamed. Here, we had just come down one and were starting up the next. Faber Pond, a small body of water we passed. Water features always look nice. Of course, right after that we climbed another hill. This is looking back at the hills we had just come over. The last treat of the day was the Huckleberry Bog nature loop. I'll tell you more about that another day. For now we'll settle for "the hugging trees." These two are a white pine and an oak. By their ages, someone has speculated that loggers spared them and twisted them together long ago.

9.3 miles for the day. It was hotter than yesterday, but we felt better because the humidity was not as high. It was Marie's birthday. We had ice cream!

Tomorrow is going to be another play day. Stay tuned.

See Bristol Branch - More Italy Hill

Bristol Branch - Wood and Italy Hills

  Up, down, up. That was today on the Bristol Branch. First we climbed 1000 feet up Wood Hill. Most of it was on the abandoned road that we couldn't drive yesterday (turns out we could have driven some of it). It was a little steeper than we had in mind, but not terrible. Then we headed into the woods on single-track trail. This tree attracted our attention, with the interesting bark pattern around the dead limbs.

From the top of Wood Hill we could look down on County Rd 18 at the junction where County Rd 34 goes off and angles up the far hill to the left. We had just driven up that road to spot the second car, and we recognized it. We began descending again. Saw these fresh chicken mushrooms on the way. We stopped for a break on a log, and read some of the description on the back of the map. It said to pay attention to the markings in that area because the landowner had created trails of his own with yellow, red, or blue blazes. The red was very similar to the orange of the Bristol Branch Trail. Actually, our trail was marked with two shades of orange. One is a great, easy-to-see, Halloween orange. The other is a darkish red-orange. So the map said to watch for Finger Lakes Trail round disks, to be sure we were on the right trail. When we started up again, none of the next five blazes was a disk, or the bright orange, so we walked back to the last disk, and verified we were on the right trail. It really wasn't a very long project, but it was a litte adventure.

The trail dropped back down 1000 feet. This grade was a lot steeper. Although going down that steeply isn't too much fun either, we were glad we weren't climbing that side. When we got down to County Rd 18, we could see Italy Hill across the road, our next goal. This climb was 1000 feet again, but it was very gradual, and we decided to try to make it to the shelter at the top for lunch, even though it was going to be a 2 mile climb. We made it! This is the cute, rather new, Outback Inn Shelter. Three miles to go after lunch. Saw this active wasp nest, but we didn't have to pass close enough to be worried. We reached the car just as the rain was starting. It wasn't very heavy, but we were thankful to not get wet. Total for the day was 9 miles.

On the way back we stopped to see if we could see the cut in the trees above the road junction where we had looked down from on Wood Hill. Yup! It's easily visible as a notch in the trees on the hill. Tomorrow, we mostly stay up on Italy Hill- along the top of the ridge we saw from the overlook. We won't complain about less topography.

However, yesterday we played tag with a backpacker in the afternoon, and talked with him several times. He was really complaining about the big uphill. Then he complained about the hot downhill on the road. I find this confusing. Who goes hiking in western NY and thinks they won't encounter hills? You can't really even stand still and not see hills. We like to think of them more as a challenge. Sure we get hot and tired, but it's all part of the package. If that's not what you want, you probably shouldn't hike here.

Anyway... we are planning for another 9 miles tomorrow.

See Bristol Branch- East Hill