Travel Tips: The Best Places To Hike In Watkins Glen & Ithaca New York

I’ve been working my way back through our previous hiking trips with the North Rim Of The Grand Canyon, and a big trip that included the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Sedona, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Arches National Park, Canyonlands Island In The Sky District, Mesa Verde National Park & Monument Valley. Hopefully, the Travel Tips I’m providing will help you with your travel planning, and I will continue with our older trips as time allows, but today I wanted to create some Travel Tips for a hiking trip we just did last week: Watkins Glen & Ithaca, New York.

Planning:
To begin your planning for a Watkins Glen area trip, search through the Watkins Glen Track Schedule to be sure you aren’t aligning your trip with a busy weekend like we did. After booking our hotel, we realized that it would be NASCAR race weekend when we arrived. While the town is alive with excitement from the race, it’s also MUCH harder to get accommodations and much harder to go out to eat or even shop for groceries.

Accommodations:
We were very lucky to find a room for the week during a NASCAR event. We booked at the Hotel Laurel right on Route 14 just above the downtown area, AND with a great view of Lake Seneca (see sunrise photo above). The rates are comparable, the room was clean, the balcony and view were a great bonus, and the on-premise restaurant was helpful.

Shopping & Dining:
I should mention up front that I don’t eat any meat or seafood, so your dining choices may vary from mine. For groceries and snacks, there is a Walmart Super Center on 4th Street just east of the downtown area. For breakfast, we tried our hotel restaurant. They open at 7 AM (Thursday-Monday), and they were not very busy the days we were there. Their breakfast choices were good, perhaps slightly smaller than most other places, but the amount of pepper on their home fries made it our last choice for breakfast. We also enjoyed the 3812 Bistro just up the road on Rt 14 with free coffee & tea, and not very busy the day we were there. In the end, our favorite was the new Central Sip Friends TV Show-themed cafe just at the north end of the downtown area on Rt 14/Franklin St.

For dinner, we had two favorites. Up first was the Green Elephant Thai Vegan restaurant on Franklin St in downtown Watkins Glen. We loved their dinners so much we ate there four times, and be sure to get the Mock Duck in your dinner choice. In the Ithaca area, our absolute favorite was the famous Moosewood Vegetarian restaurant (One of the very first vegetarian cookbooks I ever found was from Moosewood from 1973).

Hiking:
We had a pretty ambitious hiking itinerary for one week, so your choices may vary based on the amount of time you have and the difficulty of the hikes you’re interested in. Most New York State Parks have an entrance fee or parking fee of $10. There is an NY State Park Pass; however, we didn’t purchase one because we didn’t have the time to research it, and we weren’t sure what to expect. I can tell you that if you pay the $10 at one state park, that receipt can be used at any New York State Park for free entry on the same day. Here’s a rundown of the parks we visited and the hikes we did:

Taughannock State Park: Famous for the 215-foot-tall waterfall and the access to Lake Cayuga, this park has some great hikes and amazing water views. We chose to park at the waterfall overlook parking lot and hike to the base of the waterfall from there (you can see the lower platform and bridge in the photo above). That made the entry fee free, but it is a significant hike with lots of altitude to gain when you return from the waterfall. You can pay and park down closer to the lake and hike a mostly flat trail to the waterfall if you’d prefer, but you will have to pay the $10, and the parking areas were really crowded.

Robert H. Treman State Park: This park was a real sleeper for us, in a good way. We didn’t research it much and didn’t expect much, and honestly, we just picked a nearby park to use our entry fee from another park that day…and we were impressed. We did the Gorge Trail from the main parking lot and returned on the Rim Trail. This was a challenging hike with lots of elevation gain and steps. The views were amazing, and if you love shaded waterfall trails with tons of amazing stonework and stone bridges, then Robert H. Treman is your spot. If that’s not enough fun, Robert H. Treman has a really cool swim area where you can picnic, swim, soak up some sun, and even jump off the diving board. There are lifeguards on duty (we were there on a Sunday afternoon), and the water looked clear and inviting. There are two entrances to the park. I would recommend the East Entrance, especially if you’re interested in swimming.

Buttermilk Falls State Park: This was another surprisingly cool state park and was much better than we expected. We hiked the Gorge Trail and Rim Trail (you’ll see there are a lot of trails in the area named “Gorge” or “Rim”). This park also includes some cool gorges with waterfalls, rock steps, rock walls, and some cool rock bridges. We even crossed a cool old dam that forms what looks to be more of a swamp than a lake. There was a bridge washed out at the top of the loop that required some road hiking, but the detour was minimal. We recommend going clockwise so you end at the swimming area at the bottom of the gorge. This swim area was much smaller than Robert H. Treman, but still a really nice place to spend a hot summer day.

Cascadilla Gorge & Cornell Botanical Gardens: These two trails were a bit disappointing. Cascadilla Gorge is pretty much in downtown Ithaca, so parking is a challenge. Add in that the historic bridge is damaged (see the above photo), so the trail is closed a few hundred yards after you start the hiking. It’s pretty, but with the trail closed, we’d skip it. Cornell Botanical Gardens are spread out in Ithaca, and we chose the Lighthouse Point Trail. You park in a golf course parking lot and walk along the 9th hole before making a left to go out to the lake. The hike was short with a cool jetty scramble at the end. One warning: When you see there is a white substance all over the trail, it’s not fertilizer or weed killer…it’s bird poop! Look up and you’ll see all sorts of nesting birds in a dead tree above the trail, so walk quickly in that area!

Watkins Glen State Park: This is normally an amazing park, and it’s still worth the visit, but the construction going on in the lower falls area has made this a challenging park to visit. The parking cost is $10, and the gift shop and information building are a really nice feature right in downtown Watkins Glen. Because of the construction, access to the famous Gorge Trail has a detour. To get to the Gorge Trail, you climb the North Rim Trail stairs to the top and follow the detour signs. With just under 400 steps (389 to be exact), the North Rim Trail is no joke, and on a hot day, we saw plenty of people changing their minds. Once you reach the detour and drop down into the Gorge Trail, the ups and downs are much smaller; however, the crowds are significant, even on a Tuesday morning at 9 AM when we went. Pack your patience since the trails are narrow and there are a lot of people stopping to take photos. We did finish the Gorge Trail and followed the North Rim Trail back to check out the suspension bridge, the South Rim Trail, and the Finger Lakes Trail on the south side of the gorge. Again, most of the South Rim Trail is closed for construction too, and while the Finger Lakes Trail was interesting to get up to the railroad bridge that crosses the gorge, there really isn’t much to see on either trail. We did hike another trail or two that we had to drive to on the west side of the park, but nothing I’d say was a must-do.

Harriet Tubman House: With rain in the forecast, we decided to stay indoors and visit a park we were excited to see, the Harriet Tubman House in Auburn, NY. This is about a 75-minute drive from our hotel, but the drive is beautiful and the destination is inspiring. The house and tour are amazing, and when you meet the one-man tour guide and historian, you’ll see why. The grave of Harriet Tubman is nearby and worth the stop. We also stopped by the Montezuma Nature Preserve to check out the cool wildlife on the scenic drive home.

Lechworth State Park: As you can see by my featured image above, Lechworth State Park was one of my favorite parks on this trip. It is about 90 minutes from our hotel, but again, the ride up the west side of Seneca Lake and through Geneva was beautiful. The park features Upper Falls with a railroad bridge above it (see featured image for this post), Middle Falls, and Lower Falls. We hiked the full distance from the Upper Falls parking lot, but you can drive to several waterfall overlooks to minimize the altitude gain on the hike. The waterfalls are amazing, the views are incredible, and the trail is beautiful, taking you from rocky ledges to woodland scenery. This is a must-visit park!

Chimney Bluffs State Park: On our final hiking day, we decided to drive another 90 minutes and get up to Chimney Bluffs State Park on the shores of Lake Ontario. We chose to hike the trail loop counterclockwise, starting on the beach and going west from the parking lot. If you love cool rocks, then the beach walk is amazing. I would caution you that the last half-mile or so has a lot of blow-down, so traversing the trees and choosing between scrambling over them or getting wet to go around was a challenge…and before you say just cut into the woods, we found that even at the actual trail into the woods, there was a significant amount of Poison Ivy, so watch where you put your hands and feet when you transition from the beach to the trail. If you go clockwise, the trail begins with a bunch of steps you have to climb, and when you finally hit the beach, you’re immediately faced with tree after tree across the beach. Going counterclockwise gets you down to the beach immediately, so if you decide to bail out when you hit the downed trees, at least you saw most of the beach. I’d recommend starting early since the beach can get busy with sunbathers and swimmers by noon.

Summary: We were really pleased with almost every hike we did in the Watkins Glen and Ithaca areas. As I said, Lechworth State Park was my favorite, but almost every other park was a close second. We were there for a week, arriving and departing on a Saturday. We chose to spend Sunday and Monday in Ithaca to avoid the NASCAR crowds, and that worked out really well. We wouldn’t bother with Cascadilla Gorge (only because of the closed trail), and perhaps Montezuma Nature Preserve (we live on a lake, so we see all sorts of birds and waterfowl), but beyond that, I’d recommend every park we visited.

If you do try this trip, be sure to let us know how it went in the comments…and if you have some suggestions that we missed, by all means, please let me know and I’ll update the post.