Indian Ladder Trail at Thacher State Park

 We had an outdoor adventure this week with our RV friends Eric and Ginny, and we thought it was worth a blog, so here it is.

We drove up to Schenectady on Tuesday, October 13 and checked into a hotel near their new apartment.  Happy Hour was on order, and we spent our first evening just catching up on events since they last visited us at 20 Summers.

Wednesday morning we were up early, searched out some good lattes, and took a stroll along the River Loop Trail into downtown Schenectady.  We haven't explored the city since 2012 when we biked into downtown Schenectady from our RV Park on the Mohawk River.   This time we got to explore the bike trail on foot.

After serving us a scumptious dinner Tuesday night, Eric prepared us a marvelous breakfast and we prepared to set out on the day's adventures. 

 Our main goal was to hike the Indian Ladder Trail at nearby Thacher State Park.  We had never hiked it before, although Ginny and Eric consider it a favorite and have visited it over the years.  However, they hadn't revisited it since they left Schenectady to be full-time RV'ers for 14 years.  We were all excited to check it out.

 Perched atop the dramatic Helderberg Escarpment just 15 miles southwest of Albany, New York, John Boyd Thacher State Park offers one of the most geologically significant landscapes in the eastern United States. The exposed limestone cliffs display over 400 million years of Earth’s history in clearly visible rock layers, making this park a living geology textbook and a paradise for fossil hunters, nature lovers and hikers.

The Fall color this time of year really set the mood --

 

-- and we wasted no time getting to the trailhead, where we took the obligatory trailhead selfy:

Kathy led the way down the stone approach path, noting the interesting rock formations at the top of the escarpment that greeted us:

The Indian Ladder Trail is a spectacular 1.5-mile path that traverses the base of the Helderberg Escarpment along a narrow limestone ledge. The trail descends via steel staircases to the cliff base, where hikers walk beneath massive rock overhangs, past dripping waterfalls, and through a corridor of 400-million-year-old marine fossils embedded in the cliff face.  The Helderberg Escarpment is one of the premier paleontological sites in North America. The exposed limestone layers contain an extraordinary variety of Devonian-era marine fossils.

The entire length of the trail gave us a close look at the geology of the Escarpment and the layers of sediment that contain the many fossils.  Eric mentioned to us that, over the years, they have found fossils just by picking up rocks along the trail. 

The views from the trail were magnificent, made all the more dramatic by the leaf color:

 

The trail had a lot of character, offering close interaction with the geology of the Escarpment!

Kathy took this great photo showing the Escarpment from below:

There were many overhangs and caves.  Most of the caves were either too difficult to reach, or, if otherwise accessible, roped off by State Park officials.  Still, the trail gave us access to some large overhangs:

The trail took us out into a large open are against a headwall, where a waterfall tumbled down and the trail wound behind it.  Here, Kathy took a photo of Eric and David through the falling water:

Here is a video of a waterfall on the trail from David's perspective.

Nearing the end of the trail, we could get a view of the Escarpment from above, looking back toward the Visitor Center:

 

We returned to the Visitor Center via a clifftop path on the edge of the Escarpment.  Kathy caught this colorful view of the nearby forest, looking north toward Schenectady:

We ran into a number of other hikers, including a school group, and several families walking dogs.  In fact we also bumped into a couple of fun guys as we finished our hike:

We rounded out our adventure day by visiting Indian Ladder Farm, where we purchased pumpkins, apple cider doughnuts (David couldn't resist a peanut butter cookie) and other delicacies -- stopped by a local brewpub for lunch, and finished with a stop at Oliver's (the Brew Crew) in Albany so that Kathy could pick up some sample dunkel bocks for her upcoming homebrew club meeting.

Dinner was an absolutely exceptional experience, with a walk to Tara Kitchen, where we enjoyed some rich Moroccan dishes and wound up bidding fond goodbyes to Eric and Ginny, knowing that there will be other adventures together at one place or another, since we've all landed so close to one another.

Happy Autumn! 

A Good Paddling for the Fourth

It's been quite a while since we've been out on a bloggable adventure -- a bike ride from Bartram Gardens into Center City Philadelphia a little over a year ago, in fact -- and (!) February 2023 since we blogged about a paddle.  True, we did take the family paddling on the Brandywine River when they visited this June, but that didn't make the blog, so I don't know whether it can be counted or not.

Anyway, it felt good to get at it, all in, again. Blue Marsh Lake, north of Reading, Pennsylvania, is our favorite local paddling destination. We last paddled it on May 21, 2020.

A month or two ago, we scouted suitable launch sites when we took a hike along the shore of Blue Marsh Lake, and decided that a picnic area on Church Road was the best.  This morning, we packed up the kayak stuff and, for the first time, loaded into the back of our new purple Jeep Gladiator, Barney (that was a whole separate adventure), and unloaded to set out onto Blue Marsh Lake:

It was only 8 am, but picnickers were already setting up, and there were several kayaks and paddle boards already in the water.  Fishermen dotted the near shoreline, so we decided to start our paddle along the far shore.  This was the better choice anyway, because that shore had many coves and inlets for us to explore.  A number of them had bird boxes.  We saw no birds, so we don't know which species likes these:

It being early July, the one flower we saw blooming was David's favorite, the daylily, and there were two or three large clusters:

Even early in the morning, it was already 80F, with a clear blue sky, and the turtles took the opportunity to sun themselves on their favorite logs.  If you paddle, you know that turtles are extremely shy and will slide off their rock or log into the water if you get very near.  As a consequence, the photos are few, but we did get one good one:

Another advantage of the shoreline we chose is that it was generally the southern one, and so we had intermittent shade to cool us as we paddled leisurely along.  Kathy was particularly interested in the fish situation, and she spotted a number of large rises.

She even spotted this huge bass lure hanging from a tree, abandoned by some unlucky (or unskilled) fisherman working the shoreline from a trolling boat:

David, on the other hand, examined the flora, and found a few pretty specimens:

Herons and raptors are always the grand prize in our paddling hunts, and we were not disappointed.  We saw several great blue herons and smaller (probably green) herons.  We got to watch one great blue kick another one out of his favorite fishing spot.  The victorious bird eyed us suspiciously as we paddled past:

For the most part, the day was very bright, which made it difficult to get photos with silhouettes, but, as we turned one direction, we found a submerged fallen tree that was in the right light for a profile image:

After an hour, we stopped for a snack and then turned around.  We paddled back along the opposite shore, which was generally less shadowed and made for fewer photographs, but we were able to catch another shot of a pretty clump of daylilies:

And David, ever alert, got lucky to catch fetching flora and fauna in one foto:

As we neared the end of our trip, a solid 2 hours, David remarked that he hadn't seen any ducks, which is unusual in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Kathy agreed, but recounted that she had seen some very cheeky geese at our launch spot, begging scraps from the early picnickers. Sure enough, as we returned to the beach where we began, the flock of geese stood guard, making sure that no one would pass without paying a toll:

We had nothing to pay, but the boss ganders let us pass, probably because their bellies were already full from all the paddle boarders, jet skiers, kayakers and partiers that had arrived at the beach since we had set out. The day was getting hot, the beach noisy, the parking lot full, and we made haste to leave before we got hot, irritated and parked in.

Not bad for a long-delayed paddle adventure.  We had a lot of fun and have started planning our next -- possibly a fishing/paddling/hiking/camping trip to Promised Land State Park.  Stay tuned!