Conklin's Gully and Hi-Tor Management Area- Two Day hike!
This is a very special hike. A hike through a beautiful gully full of waterfalls and an overnighter. Definitely looking forward to this one.
My friends Chad and Mike wanted to do an overnight hike sometime in the summer. One of the weekends in August, my wife goes on a wine tour in Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes with her friends. My friends live about 30 minutes from where she was staying, so it was perfect. I will go up a day before her, so I could hike and camp out that night, then pick her up in Watkins Glen the next day on the way back. It was perfect, but I wasn't ready for an overnight hike.
One of the things you need for an overnight hike is a good backpack. I had a school backpack that I took with me on day hikes, because at the time, that's all I had and that's all I needed for day hikes. I realized that I needed a bigger and more supportive backpack to carry more weight for this trip. I purchased a really good backpack online that supports a good amount of weight and also has a lot of space for stuff like the tent, sleeping bag, food, extra water, extra clothes, ect. At the time, I only had a 4 person tent. You definitely can't carry a 4 person tent for a long hike because of the weight and its way to big for your pack. I had options to get either a one person or a two person tent. I got a two person tent in case I went on other overnighters with my wife. Its small enough to fit two people and its light enough to carry around for a good amount of time. I was ready.
The ride up to my friends house in Penn Yan is about three hours long, but I love driving. Listening to metal while looking at the surrounding small town areas is really relaxing. The plan would be to spend the night on Friday, start hiking on Saturday, overnight at the lean-to then finish the hike on Sunday afternoon. We had to drive two different cars and park at two different places because we were starting at one point and finishing at another. If we had taken only one car and had to hike back to it, it would of added a countless of miles that we wouldn't of been able to do.
On the way there I got a glimpse of a beautiful sunset:
Now the hike. We started out late Saturday evening at around 2 o'clock. The plan was to start at Conklin's Gully in Naples, NY, hike through the Hi-Tor Management Area and set up next the lean-to at the top of the mountain near the Italy Hill State Forest, then finish it off at the trail head just outside of the town of Italy. Conklin's Gully is a way different experience than the Catskills. Its filled with beautiful waterfalls and challenging areas to navigate around. I did this hike before with Chad and Mike a couple years before and I remember it being awesome. Way different than hiking in the woods of the Catskills.
Starting off in the parking area you come to a creek that leads you up to the gully. We found out before that Mike wouldn't be meeting us here but later on in the hike. When you get closer and closer you can hear the water running down the gully. The water wasn't at high level, but you can still hear it from a good distance away. Once again, the sound of rushing water is very relaxing to me. One of my favorite sounds that mother nature offers. Also, Penn Yan suffered from a severe flood a little while back so the gully was different than what we remembered before. It still offered the beauty of waterfall after waterfall but some places were tricky to navigate around. If you wanted to get your feet wet you could of just walked right through certain parts, but since we were doing an overnight hike, we didn't want to get our feet wet in case it got colder out at night. The first cascading waterfall was stunning:
This cascade was about 100ft long. Now since it's a cascade and its broken off here and there, it is not really considered a big waterfall. It was slippery on both sides and at one point Chad took his shoes and socks off so they wouldn't get wet. He also kept looking around and said that a decent amount of change has happened since the flood. Just imagine. This little flow now was probably over 30ft of fast moving water that was smashing on both sides of the gully, destroying anything in it's path. The rocks probably broke apart at places and the trees and plant life were ripped out of its roots. I understood why he would be saying that. Here are some more pictures from inside the gully:
The first picture is looking down at the part we just hiked up. It's always cool to look back and see what you just accomplished sometimes. It gives you a different view. Once again, everything was stunning. Like I said, Ive hiked this before, but the scenery never gets old.
The second photo is of Chad pulling himself up a steep section of the gully. This waterfall was about 30ft high, had a good downward slope and nowhere to navigate around so you had to pull yourself up this rope.
Once again, looking back is always cool to do. In the picture you can see a guy sitting on the edge of the gully. That is where we just pulled ourselves up the rope. Also, you can see the section after that looked fairly slippery and we had to pull our selves up another rope on the left to get us to the upper part of the falls. Chad said that he doesn't remember some of these parts and that they must of changed because of the flood. He never had to pull himself up a rope after the large falls. Its amazing how much can change after mother nature has a couple of bad days. After that, the falls start tapering off and you get to a flat rocky area. Now, if you wanted to keep going on you would come to other set of falls. But we had to take a turn to get on the trail that would lead us to the lean-to. Here's a picture of the last waterfall you come upon while hiking Conklin's Gully. I took this on one of our previous hikes.
This waterfall probably has a name, but we called it 'The Wall'. 60ft of slippery, steep rock. There is no way up it unless you backtrack and go up a less steeper side of the creek. After taking the turn to get onto the trail you come to this overview of part of the gully. It shows you how steep the gully is!!
After that awesome view you start on The Finger Lakes Trail, or otherwise called FLT. The FLT has very many branch trails that totals in over 1,000 miles of hiking in New York and some of Pennsylvania. I have hiked sections of the FLT located in the Catskills so i guess it's pretty cool that I've hiked both different sections of the FLT. We met Mike a little further up the trail were the trail met the road. He hoped out of the car and joined us on the trail and we were on our way to the lean-to. I had no clue where we were going so I didn't ask any questions on how much longer or how many more miles, because that would probably just stress me out. After a little bit we came to a viewpoint where you can see wind turbines in the distance. This trail also led through some thick sections of golden rods which had bees and butterfly's all over the place.
After that, we came to another viewpoint that showed us the small town of Italy, NY.
Continuing back on the trail we started to finally descend down the hill and onto a flat area which looked like a privately owned area. There was a beautiful large house to the left and open farm land all over the place. Different parts of the FLT are privately owned property, but the owners let the trail continue through there land. We thought about pitching our tents off to the side of one of the fields and having them shielded by the trees so no one would see them, but we didn't know if this was private property or not. So we kept going on the trail towards the lean-to. The sun was getting close to the top of the mountain now so we new it would start getting dark soon. We crossed a road and started to head past a barn and up a hill. Now this hill wasn't the steepest hill, but it had a nice grade to it and it slowed us down at times. Also, we kept thinking that we didn't have much further to go to the lean-to, but every time we thought that, we we wrong.
Before we knew it, it started getting dark and we were tired. Since I was in better shape(sorry guys) I told them that I would start going faster and they could wait to see how much longer we had till the lean-to. I went up a good amount of the hill and found nothing, but I knew we were close. I got back down and told them that we were close and that we would be there soon. We finally got up to the our campsite and started pitching our tents before it was totally dark. We could barely see anything but they were equipped with head lamps. Me? I had a flashlight. It wasn't easy pitching your tent while holding a small flashlight in your mouth!!(that's the only way I could hold it while using two hands)
It was about 8:30-9 when we finally had our dinners. We were all ready with our freeze dried meals(freeze dried meals are ready to eat meals that you have to add boiling water to) and chad had an amazing utensil to use to boil up the water. It was called a Jetboil and it looked like a gas stove the size of about three fingers. It had a place to put your pots and pans to heat up your water or food. I was blown away! I thought we would have to start a fire and keep maintaining it to boil our food but Chad had this awesome little devise that heated up your water in less than three minutes!! After enjoying dinner, we started a campfire and enjoyed a nice bottle of watermelon pucker. The stuff is so smooth we went through it in no time!! We went back to our tents and wished each other a good night and passed out in our tents.
Of course I was the first one up and the guys wanted me to wake them up by at least 7. I woke them up and we went back to the lean-to to cook breakfast. I had a nice freeze dried meal of scrambled eggs. Sooner than you know it, we were putting away our tents and back on the trail. This last section we had to do offered a lot of up and down hiking. Nothing steep at all, but back and forth, up and downhill short areas. It wore us down and because I think we didn't have coffee, we were all dreading this. We finally came across a private road where Chad and Mike knew we were getting close to the end of the hike. When we saw Chad's car we we all in relief. Two days, Twelve miles later and we were done. Definitely can't wait to do this again!!