Crazy Happy to visit 4 of New York's best state parks

We are way behind in getting travel posts published this summer because we're having too much fun traveling! So we won't be confused about when each "wandering" happened, we'll start each blog with its actual date.

September 22, 2022

Our Boondocker Welcome camp site near Cortland, New York, is just east of New York's famous Finger Lakes. We visited this area six years ago and really enjoyed it. So we wanted to make another day's stop to see some of the beautiful landscapes here. Our Boondocker host thinks we are crazy, but we are going to try to see all four of the state parks found in the Finger Lakes area. So after the rain stopped this morning, we were out the door at 9:30. Our first stop was a fruit stand to buy grapes. We are in the middle of wine country, and they are harvesting grapes right now. This is one of Denisa's favorite snacks, and the woman at the fruit stand let her taste the white, green, and purple grapes. They were all good, but purple was the preferred color for the road snacks for today. 

It was 11:00 when we pulled into Buttermilk Falls State Park. We were here in 2016, and we remember that the falls and the pool below it were completely dry that year. With the recent rains, we were glad to see a healthy waterfall and pool at the bottom of the trail.

The Gorge Trail goes up the right side the falls and continues for a mile.

We completely lost count of the number of falls as the water continues to cascade down the hill beside the Gorge Trail.

New York state parks charge a parking fee, so we paid that fee when we pulled into Buttermilk State Park. The good news is that $9 daily pass will be good all day at other state parks. So we plan to use it for three more state parks today.

It's a mile of slopes and steps to get to the top of the Gorge Trail that stays on the right side of the falls.

Then we crossed the river at West King Road, and hiked a mile back down on the Rim Trail.

Now we are on the other side of the river in the forest with fewer views of Buttermilk falls, so it was much faster hiking down the hill.

With our day-use pass, we headed towards our second state park of the day--Robert Treeman State Park. It was only a five-mile drive to get to this hidden gem of a park, and we arrived a little after noon. The Gorge trail (does that name sound familiar?) started through a narrow gorge.

We're on the 1.6-mile loop trail to Lucifer Falls that took us over stone bridges and along walkways carved out of rock.

This was a delightful walk between tall rock walls that made us feel very small. This is a "where's Waldo" challenge, trying to find Mark in his blue shirt . . .

and Denisa in her pink shirt in the next two pictures.

We feel very small in these deep gorges. We have once again wandered into another of God's wonders!

This trail had lots of elevation change as we followed the natural route of the river. 

We started the loop back towards the pickup shortly after this bird's eye view of Lucifer Falls now far below us. We made our return back to the parking lot on the Rim Trail--does that sound familiar?

The Robert Treeman State Park not only has a great hiking trail and waterfalls, but it also hosts the Treeman Mill. The mill was built in 1839, and operated here until 1916. Then the mill was donated to the state park system so people could tour its four-story building. We remember walking through the mill six years ago, so we tried to recreate the picture we took in 2016 . . .

with a new one from 2022. Mark is standing under the same carving of "Mark" on that fourth floor beam where we took the picture before. He hasn't changed a bit in those six years!

Because we love following road signs that point out free attractions along the way, we pulled into an unplanned stop. This is the Cayuga Nature Park.

We wanted to see the six-story tree house built by the graduating class of 2000 at Ithaca High School.

We also enjoyed some of the lovely flowers in the nature park.

Just three miles away was our third state park of the day. We arrived there at 2:30, and even got a little blue sky as we hiked along yet another Gorge Trail.

This is Taughannock State Park, home of the state's tallest water fall. It seemed tall even when we were a long ways away.

That blue sky had clouded up and started to sprinkle by the time we posed for this picture in front of the 215-foot tall Taughannock Waterfall.

It was a fast hike back to the protection of the pickup. Then we drove across the road to the shores of Cayuga Lake. This is one of the long narrow finger lakes that gives this area its name. There are five  lakes that were carved in a north/south direction as the glaciers slowly made their way through this valley many years ago. They look like a giant's hand scratched the lakes into the landscape, and then filled them with water. 

With a storm whipping through the lake valley, the water of Cayuga Lake was splashing over the lake shore and the dock as we watched.

The finger lakes are divided by steep terrain. We drove up the road to see Taughannock Falls from the overlook above it.

We are discovering that New York has lots of waterfalls. But at 215 feet, this is the tallest one in the state. 

Then we made the drive up the hills that separate Cayuga Lake from another finger--Seneca Lake. At the southern tip of Seneca Lake is the most famous of all the New York state parks. We arrived at Watkins Glenn around 4:00.

While this state park gets great reviews, those reviews will also point out that this is the most crowded park. We read that on a nice day in the summer, you can expect to be in a long line of walkers that make their way through this crowded gorge.

It is normally hard to take a picture without others in it at Watkins Glenn. But we can tell you that around 4:30 on a rainy September afternoon is a great uncrowded time to visit here.

Except for meeting a bus-load of Asian travelers at Rainbow Bridge, we could take way too many pictures in the gorgeous gorges of Watkins Glenn.

Even though this is the most-visited of the four state parks today, we would have a hard time saying which one was the most beautiful.

A trip through this popular gorge is a one-mile hike with an elevation gain of 722 feet on the Gorge Trail. This is our fourth 'Gorge Trail" today!

The state park brochure explains that the Gorge Trail snakes its way beside, over, and under 19 waterfalls. Personally, we lost count.

We would caution that visitors don't want to wear their new white tennis shoes for this trail on a rainy day. We spent most of the time dodging the worst of the mud even though we were wearing hiking boots.

After hiking through the gorge, we looped out the top and returned on the Rim Trail. Does that sound familiar? At 5:15 the rim trail was completely deserted. It provided nice overhead views of the waterfalls, as well as the town of Watkins Glenn in the background.

You would think that we would be finished after our nice hike through Watkins Glenn. But it is such a rare thing to have this beautiful place to ourselves at 5:30. So we just had to go back inside for our own private walk.

Where we had struggled with a picture at Rainbow Falls because of the bottleneck of people here earlier, we had it to ourselves now. Our second hike through Watkins Glenn brought our total to 3.1 miles at this state park.

It was a perfect cap to a perfect day of exploring some of New York's best state parks. Our $9 day pass allowed us to visit four different state parks, and we think that all of them were great. Now we had to drive the 45 miles back to Cortland to eat at Doug's Fish Fry that our friend Mary recommended. We tallied up our hiking miles, and found we had gone over ten miles with 1800 feet of elevation change today. Our Boondocker host was right, we would have to be crazy to try to visit all four state parks in one day. That's right--we're crazy happy we did it!