We visited Ganondagan again, Marie hadn't seen it before, and Ruth met us and acted as guide. I was there one other time, in the winter, with Ruth and Dan. In the summer, the museum is open. Ganondagan is a state historic site, and arts and cultural center for the Seneca Nation. They also have an extensive trail network.
This is a reproduction of the wampum belt which depicted the five nations of the Iroquois confederacy. Left to right the symbols stand for the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas (keepers of the central fire), Oneidas and Mohawks.
We hiked from the museum to the top of the Fort Hill where the corn granary was located when the Senecas lived here. Nice view. About 3 miles round trip.
What is Ruth looking at?
It's a Tiger Swallowtail on Joe Pye Weed.
They also have a full size reproduction of a bark house which would have been occupied by about 40 people of the same clan. Here's the interior. The lower shelf was used for sleeping, and the upper one for storage.
I love all the interpretive signs. Some are history, and some are "ethnobotanical" like this one, with the symbol for a plant, the Seneca word, and then why it was important. This one is White Pine.
We only hiked about 3 miles, but looked at the signs, and then Marie and I stayed longer and went through the museum. Did some grocery shopping and then came "home" and played our game. Nice day.
 | See Ganondagan |
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.
We hadn't as yet explored this campground very far from the trailer. So we all took a walk. I guess Marie was wanting to fly in.
There's a nice little pond, but no swimming allowed.
The Joe-Pye Weed was a bright purple, somewhat unusual. It's usually a duskier pink
The views from the top of the park are pretty impressive.
Just one of those pictures one takes to show that we were there. We went out to dinner, and now Marie and I are going to play our game. Back on the trail tomorrow.
This is meaningful to me because it was my grandmother's favorite poem. This is 
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.
Although there was still plenty of forest walking, there were also rural spaces. I had to take a picture of this really old tractor.
The Finger Lakes Trail is fairly continuous, without too many road walks because they work hard at creating agreements with landowners to allow the trail passage, often along the edges of fields.
This was our other big down and up of the day. We dropped another 200 feet on this road, and then climbed back up again.
Marie was teasing me that I wasn't going to be able to live up to providing a premo lunch spot when we began looking for a place to sit to eat. What a laugh we had when a bench materialized in the woods! It was most welcome.
The afternoon heated up a bit, and the humidity climbed. An unexpected steep hill was briefly daunting, but we arrived back at the car at 3 pm. We did 9.5 miles today, then came back "home" to Sunny and had potato chips and cold drinks!
We saw another brown and gold garter snake, and a really dark (almost black) toad, but he didn't want his picture taken.
