Watkins Glen State Park

Yesterday we went to Watkins Glen State Park to hike up the many falls until we reached the top. This is where we started, at the bottom, where this water eventually makes it way into Seneca Lake.

And when I turned around, I saw the beginning of the awesome sites we were about to see:

We started out on the Gorge Trail, and as we climbed to the first bridge, we saw the first waterfalls which is at the bottom of a series of waterfalls that fall in steps. This waterfall is really cool because the water goes through the narrow curves really fast:

The stone walls drip with water and are covered with all kinds of plants, including liverwort! Excuse my excitement, I’ve never seen liverwort in person that I know of:

I absolutely love how the water has cut through the rock in this next photo:

And speaking of love, my heart belongs to. . .

Is that awesome how the water has cut the rock into a heart shape! This is at the foot of the next waterfall:

At the next waterfall, which we walked behind (but no pics because my camera doesn’t know how to swim), the early morning sun was shining on the water just right for us to see a rainbow – see it?

Once we walked behind this waterfall:

We had to climb up the spiral tunnel staircase built within the rock wall. We saw tons and tons of ferns, including Maidenhair Spleenwort (another favorite of mine):

Trees were hanging on the sides with their roots for dear life:

The wildflowers were gorgeous:

The roses smelled wonderful:

Check this out! These ripples on the walkway were actually ripples of sand at the bottom of an ancient sea!

They also are in the streambed:

There’s lots of moss along the stone walls. Here’s an interesting one that’s a little longer than the rest I saw there:

Here’s the next waterfalls we encountered:

This is the same waterfalls looking down from the stone bridge:

At this point there are several pools, called the Glen of Pools, such as this one. Oh my, I could have dove right in the water looked sooo refreshing!

The next waterfalls we saw are the Rainbow Falls. You have to be there just at the right time of day to see a rainbow here. What I love here is the waterfall coming down the side of the wall, too:

Here’s a better view of the waterfall coming down the side of the rock wall:

Oh, and now we saw the wall full of ferns. I’ve never seen so many ferns like this on a rock wall!

There are several fractures, or joints, along the rock walls:

These joints were caused by a great continental collision between North America and Africa three million years ago that pushed up the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania and the Allegheny Plateau, a large area that includes the Finger Lakes region. The tremendous pressure of the continental collision fractured the rocks of Watkins Glen and the rest of southern New York State and lifted the land up.

Here’s another pool which I think is really cool:

Here’s another waterfall we encountered.

Looking back once at the top of the waterfall, we saw more beautiful curves of the watercut stone:

And after climbing all of the stairs (I’ve heard there are 800 stairs on this trail), we decided to go the top along the Indian Trail:

The thing I like about the Indian trail are no stairs! We climbed up and down trails. Here’s where we tested out my hiking / trekking poles for the first time. My brother suggested that my Mom buy a pair since they’re going hiking in Yosemite, so she wanted to try them. She took off like a bat out of hell going up a hill with them, so I had to try them out, and I took off. They really work!

On Indian Trail we saw an interpretive sign that said it takes 25 years for the water we saw here in the glen to make its way out to the Atlantic Ocean! That blew our minds.

We also saw many different species of trees, including Chestnut Oak.

At this overlook on Indian Trail, we had come down the hill a ways, but still, I took a photo of the same hill as I show in the first photo, and you can see we were up and far into the glen quite a ways!

Here’s another one of those faults (joints) I mentioned earlier:

And another view of the first waterfalls.

I took a ton of photos, and what I’ve shown you are just a few of them. I hope you enjoyed them, and I hope you can make it to Watkins Glen someday! It was very refreshing to breathe in the fresh air there, and to smell wonderful smells of wet dirt and water.