Gorgeous

Middle Falls from Inspiration Point

Friday, August 2, 2013

Today was spent entirely in drinking in the views of Letchworth State Park. The Genesee River flows through the park, and has cut a gorge which is as deep as 600 feet in some places. The park is known as the “Grand Canyon of the East” and although it is not as red and of course not as huge, we could see why it got its name. Instead of those red rocks you see in Arizona, we found green everywhere except on some of the steep gray cliffs cutting away down to the river below.

We spent the day driving slowly down the length of the park from north to south, stopping at overlooks, walking on trails, and just enjoying the beauty around us.  The waterfalls in the park are really exceptionally beautiful and I took multiple photos of all of them.  

 

Middle Falls closeup

 I was a little peeved by the park’s brochures and parking lots, however. The brochures we got were really not very helpful—it was difficult to read the maps and no real information was provided. So we would see that there was a building, for example, but other than the name, we had no idea what it was or why it was important. More annoying was the complete lack of RV parking in any of the parking lots. Many of them were not very big, but even in the Visitors Center lot, there was not one space for an oversized vehicle. We had to be very careful wherever we went to find a parking place that wouldn’t block someone else, and would not box us in. This made me cranky J But we didn’t have any major problems with it—it’s just the principle of the thing!

Rainbow

 

 

Upper Falls with Railroad Trestle

In the evening we stopped by the rafting concession to see about signing up for a trip down the river tomorrow. No one was there, so I ended up doing it on the phone. We went back to our site around 6pm for a quiet evening. This time we have neighbors on each side (two beagles and one German Shepherd) but it wasn’t terribly onerous.  We have zero connectivity—and didn’t have much during the day either, other than every once in a rare while when suddenly my phone would ding and a few messages would suddenly get through. So I am now two days behind on the blog. The nights have been so lovely to sleep through—cool and quiet. But I want to get us out earlier tomorrow so we can go to the Stone Tool show north of us, before heading down to the south end of the park again to go kayaking.

Downriver... Kayaks come through here!