Travel-Watkins Glen Park in Upstate NY with the Road Scholars (This is a blast from the past)

November 27, 2020

Travel-Watkins Glen Park in Upstate NY with the Road Scholars (This is a blast from the past)

Getting ready to descend the gorge at Watkins Glen Park in NY. My new buddies and I were ready with cameras in hand and over 800 steps ahead of us.

So let's get started. As usual, I will have informational quotes from Wikipedia in italics...

Watkins Glen State Park/Wikipedia

Watkins Glen State Park is located outside the village of Watkins Glen,

New York, south of Seneca Lake in Schuyler County

A friend of mine looked at my photos and asked if I walked across on the log in the photo below.
The answer to that would be "No!" that did not even enter my mind:-)

The 1000-acre park's centerpiece is a 400-foot-deep (120 m) narrow gorge cut through rock by a stream – Glen Creek – that was left hanging when glaciers of the Ice age deepened the Seneca valley.

The Road Scholars are all about education. They taught us all about the types and layers of rock we would see on this journey. It made me pay a bit more attention to detail as I walked down the hundreds of stairs to get to the bottom. Do I remember what they said....sadly, very little:-)

The area's rocks are sedimentary of Devonian age that are part of a dissected plateau that was uplifted with little faulting or distortion. They consist mostly of soft shales, with some layers of harder sandstone and limestone.

The park features three trails – open mid-May to early November – by which one can climb or descend the gorge. The Southern Rim and Indian Trails run along the gorge's wooded rim, while the Gorge Trail is closest to the stream and runs over, under, and along the park's 19 waterfalls by way of stone bridges and more than 800 stone steps.