Letchworth State Park

Letchworth State Park is a New York state park located 35 miles (56 km) southwest of Rochester and 60 miles (95 km) southeast of Buffalo in Livingston (towns of Leicester, Mount Morris, and Portage) and Wyoming (towns of Castile and Genesee Falls) counties. The park is roughly 17 miles (24 km) long,[2] covering 14,350 acres (58 km2) of land along the Genesee River.[2]

Within the park, there are three large waterfalls on the Genesee River and as many as fifty waterfalls found on tributaries that flow into it; the gorge formed by the river, with rock walls rising up to 550 feet (170 m) in places and which narrow to 400 feet (120 m) across above the middle of the three falls, prompted the area’s reputation as the “Grand Canyon of the East”.[3]

The park is named after William Pryor Letchworth (1823-1910), an industrialist who in 1906 bequeathed the 1,000-acre (4 km2) estate that forms the heart of the park to New York State.[2] There are park entrances near the towns of Mount Morris, Perry, Castile and Portageville, New York. A modern, well-maintained two- or three-lane road follows the west side of the gorge, allowing many scenic viewpoints for the geologic features.
The three major waterfalls — called the Upper, Middle, and Lower Falls — are located in Portage Canyon, the southern section of the park. The Seneca called the land around this canyon “Seh-ga-hun-da”, the “Vale of the three falls”;[4] the Middle Falls (“Ska-ga-dee”) was believed to be so wondrous it made the sun stop at midday.[2]

The only trail bridging the Genesee River across Portage Canyon crosses a stone bridge just below the Lower Falls. The Middle Falls is the highest, and the Upper Falls has an active railroad trestle crossing immediately above it, providing an even higher vantage immediately above the falls.
The highest waterfall in New York State is located in the park. It is a spectacular ribbon waterfall that is located on a tributary creek a short distance east of the Inspiration Point Overlook, 0.4 mile (640 m) west of the park visitor center. Known as Inspiration Falls, it has a total drop of 350 feet (107 m). While impressive in its height, it is seasonal and often appears as only a water stain on the cliff. The falls faces to the south-southwest and has a crest that is only one foot (300 mm) wide. (215-foot (66m) Taughannock Falls, 100 miles east of Letchworth in Trumansburg is generally recognized as the highest waterfall in New York as well as in the entire Northeastern United States).

The bedrock that is exposed in the gorge is Devonian in age, mostly shales, with some layers of limestone and sandstone. The rock was laid down in an ancient inland sea, and many marine fossils can be found. The landform of the section of the Genesee River valley represented by the park is geologically very young, caused by a diversion of the river from the old valley by the last continental glacier, forcing the river to cut a new section of valley.

http://nysparks.com/parks/79/details.aspx
http://www.letchworthpark.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letchworth_State_Park

The Smells of the Geenese Valley

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A few weeks back I was in the Genesee Valley at Letchworth State Park, poking around some of the little farm towns. The Genesee Valley has long been the joke of little kids and remarked upon by the authors of books for the smells of the dairy business – the sweet smell of the chopped silage and freshly cut hay, the sour smell of spoiled silage and cow manure, being stored than returned to the fields to bring nutrients back to the land.

The Genesee Valley and even some of the uplands around it are some of the great agricultural regions of our state. Once the bread basket of the nation, wheat blight and the Great Plains replaced it as did the high cost of living, leading to specialization largely in the dairy industry. Cows have to be fed year round and dairies produce milk and year round by carefully planning calving so there are always calves and milk being produced. That means farm families get milk checks year round from their processors.

Apparently The Best Grass Is On The Trail

The valleys and areas with the best soils have the biggest and most modern farms, often with hundreds of not thousands of cows complete with modern free stall barns and slurry holding tanks that allow the farms to apply manure only when it’s most likely to be uptaken by crops and not washed away as pollution.

It’s easy to root for the small marginal dairy up in the hills with a hundred or so milking head. The truly small business with a tie stall barn that has old fashioned gutter tracks and hay storage up above. But the truth is that the large dairy, run by a family and their employees probably is a better stewart of the land with their scientifically driven CAFO plan – even if the kids yell our – what’s that smell.

I really didn’t spend all that much time in the Genesee Valley, heading back to Allegany County hills where most of the farms are small. Where the occasional smell of petroleum from the century old industry, still stripping a little high quality oil from the land remains, often situated on the same farms that produce the crops that feed the cows that produce the milk I like to drink.