Day 134 - Letchworth State Park, NY

Lee woke up and checked the weather forecast, we were expecting some of the bad weather from Hurricane Florence to come our way, hopefully it was only going to be a little rain as the hurricane had fizzled out as it reached land fall. The weather looked like it was going to be OK until about 6pm and then it was going to rain, all night. We needed to make sure we had reached our campsite and pitched before then.

We left Niagara Falls and headed towards Letchworth State Park, also known as the Grand Canyon of the East. The $10 per day entry fee was in our opinion, good value. There was a lot to do if you had a whole day free including plenty of trails to hike, a nice scenic road with pull outs, picnic areas with grills and lots kids playgrounds and activities. The park is not a wilderness, it is areas of developed and maintained land, kind of like a park with views over a gorge. It was a little weird at times to be standing on an area of mowed lawn overlooking a waterfall, I think they should have left some feeling of wilderness in the park.

The gorge wasn’t quite the Grand Canyon as we know it but it did have 3 cool waterfalls and a surprising number of trees which had already changed colour in preparation for fall. These were scattered between the green with only a small number deciding the time had come to get ready for winter, maybe in a couple of weeks time the majority of the trees would have changed colour making the view spectacular.

We chose to drive from the North entrance to the South of the park along the main park road, stopping off along the way to look at pull outs and take a couple of short hikes to vistas and to the waterfalls. We spent about 2 hours in the park before leaving in what we thought was enough time to get to Watkins Glen in the dry but we were wrong: it started to rain at 4pm!

We arrived at Watkins Glen, pitched in the drizzle and finished just as it started to turn into massive rain drops. We had planned a hike around the gorge but given how wet it was, we decided to rain check until tomorrow. Instead we chilled out in the tent catching up on blogs, listening to music, watching Netflix and finishing off yesterday’s dinner. It was actually really nice to have a chilled-out evening.