It is the week after Thanksgiving. We spent all of the Thanksgiving weekend working on this blog and website trying to get it synced with Google and adding security and backup possibilities. We didn’t have too much time to do much else. We took two short hikes during the weekend. One to our favorite cemetery that is filled with squirrels. And another to our favorite County Park which is close by and has a beautiful big waterfalls. You can check out that video here. (Hiking in the Snow After Turkey Day)
This week is filled with a lot of stuff to do for work. So I probably won’t get a Thursday video out. However I’m headed to Lake Placid for Thursday and Friday, so I hope to have some decent video from the Adirondacks. Depending on the snow levels and the amount of activity in the Adirondacks. I wonder how many people have been to the Adirondack Olympic Sites around Lake Placid. Having lived on three sides of the Adirondacks, and spending a lot of time there since I was 10, I guess I take it for granted that everybody knows what it is. I’ll try to put together some good video on what’s around Lake Placid and all the Olympic venues that are there.
I was going to leave the blog with just the above, but then I decided I probably should put down some more significant information about this weeks video. For more information about the cemetery you can watch one of my early videos here. (Oakwood Cemetery, Syracuse NY)
But I guess I should explain to you a little more about the county park we hiked around in, Pratts Falls. I have actually collected several videos on the park but have not released them yet. But like most county parks in Onondaga County, New York, this was a homestead that was abandoned and was taken over by the county. At one time there was also a mill on the stream that was a sawmill and then turned into a flour Mill and so it has this nice little pond feeding into the waterfalls. There is also the “Original”(?) Sawblade displayed next to the falls. There are a number of streams in this park. Many people think they are all the same stream but there are actually three major ones, and five or six little ones. The main waterfalls is huge, I believe it’s almost 140 foot tall, comes off the middle stream. The upstream distance isn’t very far, so this hill must have some pretty good springs popping up just a little ways from the park. This park also has a good deal of wildlife. We have seen: foxes, coyotes, raccoons, muskrats, deer, hawks, and owls. And, of course, there are tons of chipmunks and squirrels.(or the boys would not come) Down a little service road from the main parking lot, is an archery range that used to have three targets. To one side of that archery range used to be a field and gorge course that had 36 targets along a 1 mile trail. I helped build the trail when I was around 10 or 11 years old. It has not been maintained in the last 20 years, but we built it so well that you can still follow the trails and find the old butts not too bad shape. And people still bring out targets and put them on the butts, or in some places put three-dimensional targets. Like deer and hogs. So 50 years later it is still used !! 🙂
Down the hill from the archery range and trail is a picnic shelter that has a full commercial kitchen and enclosed dining hall. It also has its own playground and bathroom facilities of course. They call this camp Brockway. And it used to be extremely reasonable to rent it and use it. I’m not sure what it costs today, but I’m told that it is reserved out two years.
Way on the other side of the park, there are other picnic shelters that are also quite a ways away from the main parking lot. And a little beyond that there is some old farmland that they have turned into a series of trails for cross country skiers or runners. I’m not sure of the possible total distance if you ran or skied all the trails, but it’s a good bit more than I could do today. And when we hike them it gives the boys a pretty good workout. So that’s a pretty complete detail of Pratts Falls County Park in Onondaga County New York.