Hiking

Camping and Trails At Watkins Glen

danaelizabethx Camping, Hiking, Interesting Places, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , ,

I can not say enough great things about this campground and State Park – I love it here.  This trip was not the first and certainly won’t be the last time I will visit.  The campsites are large with a picnic table, fire ring and room to park your car.  There are flush toilets, warm showers and electric in the bath house.

I brought my friend Cathy with – this was her first camping trip and she LOVED it.  We were driving up right after work so I called and told them we would most likely get there late.  They told us that wouldn’t be a problem, just to set up when we got there and check in in the morning.  We ended up arriving at 9:30 which meant unfortunately it was dark.  Setting up the condo (as my tent is lovingly nicknamed) in the dark is a pain – actually setting up the condo in the day time is sort of a pain because it’s so huge and old.  As we were putting it together we noticed one of the tent poles was missing the hollow metal end that fits into the peg attached to the tent – bummer!  We couldn’t find it anywhere so we ended up rigging that side of the tent up with extra stakes and the ring attached to the tent that the stakes go through and trying to jam the pole in the hard ground – hey it worked – even if it was a bit lop sided!

 

it held!

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Watkins Glen State Park

danaelizabethx Camping, Hiking, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

Watkins Glen State Park is one of my favorite places to visit.  The campgrounds are wonderful, bathrooms are clean with flush toilets and running water, and the hiking trails are great.  The best trail is called the Gorge Trail and is the one that everyone comes to hike.  The trail is carved right into sides of the gorge and goes up over 800 steps over about a mile and a half.  It goes over, under and through 19 waterfalls along the way.  Although the waterfalls weren’t flowing as much as I have seen in the past, it was still an extremely beautiful place to visit!

the bottom of the gorge trail
natural heart

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Bar Harbor/ Acadia National Park

danaelizabethx Hiking, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

After getting rained on at Baxter State Park we decided to head to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park.  The weather was only slightly better, but we had a hotel instead of a tent!  We decided to drive the loop road and drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain first.  It was so foggy and misty that there were no views at all.  There was a camera man at the summit taking videos for the 100th anniversary of the park – watch HERE – you can’t miss me with my bright pink rain jacket – LOL!  I’m taking the photo you see below left.

summit of Cadillac Mtn
FOGGY

We decided to come back the next day because the weather was supposed to be slightly better.  There was really no point in driving the road when you could only see a bit in front of the car because the fog was so thick. We ended up heading to our hotel to shower and then went to grab something to eat.  We were pretty tired so we settled into the hotel and hoped for better weather the next day.

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The Fair-Weather Highpointer

danaelizabethx Hiking, State High Points, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , ,

First, let me start this post by saying I GOT TO MEET THE SUMMIT CHICKS!!! I GOT TO MEET THE SUMMIT CHICKS!!!!  🙂

Let me backtrack:  I have been using the Summit Chicks’ blog for quite some time as a reference for my own high pointing road trips.  I was so surprised and excited when they contacted me shortly after I started my blog and asked if I would want to hike a highpoint with them – ummm YES!!!!  🙂  They found me because I left a comment for another blogger who was starting out highpointing and I suggested she check out their blog.  After chatting back and forth we decided Katahdin in Maine would be the peak we would go after – how exciting!  The Summit Chicks (Raina and Jill) put together the whole trip – it was in the works for MONTHS because you have to snag a campsite about 4 mths ahead of time for Baxter State Park.  They have a ton of crazy rules and the girls did a lot of research to figure out what would be the best option to hike Katahdin.

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Conestoga Trail Section B: Part 1

danaelizabethx Conestoga Trail, Cycling, Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Since the weather has been so nice I decided to try to finish biking the on road section of the Conestoga Trail.  I asked my mom if she wanted to go with me because we would be going through a few more covered bridges and I knew she would like to see them – but she is very uncomfortable riding on the roads.  We decided to have my dad drive the route so we could see just how busy the roads were.  When we got to the end of the on road section we decided to bike back to Oregon Dairy (which is where I stopped my ride last time) and meet my dad there for lunch.  It seemed like we would be going down more hills than up.  There was a short on road section that we skipped because it was pretty busy, but we found a good place to pull over and jump on our bikes to start our journey!  Although some of the roads had a bit of traffic, for the most part we saw very few cars because we were on back roads in Lancaster County.  We actually saw a bunch of other cyclists and some horse and buggies!

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My 2nd Trail Run

danaelizabethx Hiking, Running, Uncategorized , , , , ,

I signed up to do a local trail run for a charity event with my sister and a friend Tracy on Sunday – we woke up and arrived early to register the day of the event and I knew the parking lot was small so I wanted to make sure we got a decent spot.  The run was going to be a 10k – what I didn’t know was that the route would take us up every single steep incline that was in the forest.

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Charles Mound – Illinois State Highpoint – Road Trip Day 9

danaelizabethx Hiking, State High Points, Uncategorized , , , , ,

They were calling for rain again so we headed out as early as we could.  Again we put ourselves within about an hours drive of Charles Mound, the highest point in Illinois so we could snag it first thing in the morning and then continue our drive home.  I was expecting there to be a lot of people there as well as this highpoint is on private property and only open a handful of days during the year.

I typed in 688 West Charles Mound Rd, Scales Mound, IL and my GPS took us right to the gate.  It was closed with a chain around it, but there were signs directing us to park and continue on foot.  My dad parked off the road as far as possible and as we were putting on our hiking shoes a truck pulled up and a man inside warned us to be careful because where we parked there was a big drop off that was hidden in the tall grass.  He also stated it looked like it was gonna be a busy day – it was around 8AM or so and there were already a few cars parked besides ours.  The man in the truck turned and drove down the lane next to the gate for the highpoint so we are assuming it was Mr Wuebbel who owns the property but he didn’t introduce himself so I am not sure.

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The Sensory Trail and the Sunflower Cemetery

danaelizabethx Hiking, Uncategorized , , , ,

SUPERBOWL SUNDAYYYYYY!!!! As I know absolutely NOTHING about football (is that un-American?) I decided I would much rather spend the day outside.  I called up a friend, grabbed JoJo and off we went to explore Blue Marsh Lake.  There are many trails around the lake, but the map is very basic and doesn’t have a lot of the connecting trails on it.  I love kayaking at Blue Marsh, but am not very familiar with the hiking trails so we decided to be adventurous, pick a trail and see where it would take us.  We drove around almost the entire lake before we found a spot where we could park – a lot was blocked off for some reason or had a ton of snow piled up in the parking areas.  We finally found a place to park and according to the map there was a loop trail near by called the Sensory Trail.  We walked over to check it out and saw the trail was only 1/4 mile long – bummer!  So we did the loop twice and sort of explored around the area a bit but it didn’t take us long at all.  We hopped back in the car – determined to go for a longer hike than that and found a parking pull off that was clear of snow.  We got out and started hiking, following the tracks of others.  The snow is only a few inches deep now as we had a warm spell and most of the snow from the blizzard has melted away (no snowshoes needed for this trip!)  We wandered around the trails and came to some fields – we started around the perimeter of one and came to an area covered with dried up sunflowers – I hiked part of a nearby trail in the summer that had TONS of blooming sunflowers – I never knew they were there before and it was so amazing to see.

What the area looks like in the summer – so pretty! 🙂

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