a.k.a. V.J.

Last summer, Jen and I spent most of our weekends making daytrips around Central New York and adjoining regions. After a couple months of trekking around the Finger Lakes, the Thousand Islands, the Adirondacks, et. al., it occurred to me that daytrips for an upstate New York resident are essentially the process of leaving one’s own hometown, with its collection of wooded areas, lakes, rivers, historic sites, maybe a canal, and a tired-yet-still-quaint main street shopping district and driving an hour or two to visit another place with wooded areas, lakes, rivers, historic sites, maybe a canal, and a tired-yet-still-quaint main street shopping district. The odd thing is that realization didn’t reduce my enjoyment of such trips or my desire to keep forging ahead with more of the same.

A category of attraction that could be added to that list of familiar upstate landmarks would be waterfalls. As I have noted in past posts, I don’t have to travel very far in any direction to see a waterfall. I don’t even have to leave the city limits of Fulton — although our falls aren’t exactly anyone’s idea of Instagram-able. That said, there are a lot of waterfalls in the area I’ve never visited. Jen and I have spent the past couple years trying to rectify that by including them in our daytrip rotation.

Today, we visited Tinker Falls, which is about an hour’s drive to the south for us. Tinker Falls is located in a nature preserve called The Labrador Hollow Unique Area. Labrador Hollow is a valley that, like so many of the geological features of Central New York, was formed by glaciers. The area straddles the border between Onondaga and Cortland Counties, with the falls being just a smidge over on the Cortland side.

Our drive to Tinker Falls was lovely, taking us through the hilly region just south of Syracuse, which is home to farms, apple orchards, ski resorts, and remote hamlets that seem to permanently exist in a bygone era. The falls and the trail leading to them were worth the trip. We were enchanted by this sylvan enclave so close to home, yet a new discovery for us both.

Here are some shots from today’s hike: