After Hours

Tanner and I made the short drive over to the new Chimney Bluffs State Park tonight, a breath after 2000. I had been there before--on a hot day for a picnic on Jess' birthday a few years ago--but never to hike on the trails. That day, chocolate-covered strawberries had been a tasty idea but an altogether messy situation.

I briefly studied the trail map posted on the park kiosk by headlamp and then drifted toward the "Bluff Trail" without really having decided on it. Normally that trail is 1.25 miles long, terminating at the staircase to Chimney Bluffs. Tonight, however, Tanner and I followed the Bluff Trail for a shorter distance, finding ourselves stranded on a short bluff at the trail's newest terminus. It appears that Lake Ontario's reach has already eroded some of the park's northernmost trail since the development of the West Entrance in 1999.

Traveling the Bluff Trail did require climbing over and under recent blow-down, and in the dark it was difficult to tell if the trail has been maintained at all.

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