July 24 – To Letchworth State Park

Today we moved a little west and a little south to our last destination before we head to the cottage to spend some time with family. We will be here for 5 nights.

Letchworth State Park surrounds a gorge on the Genesee River. The park brochures call it “The Grand Canyon of the East”. It is pretty impressive but I am not that sure I would go that far.

The park is about 1 1/2 miles wide and 13 mile long.  If you follow the park road end to end it is more like 20 miles as it follows the twists and turns of the river.

When we entered the park there was a sign saying that the campground was full. I had booked our site back in February.

Check in time here is supposed to be 3 pm but I had to leave the last campground before 11 so I got a warning at the park entrance and at the campground entrance that I was 3 hours early. I am not sure what the problem is because checkout time here is also 11 am. There was no one in our site and no one else trying to come in to our loop so we could take our time unhooking without any pressure.

As usual, when picking the site, I had used the dishpointer.com website. It overlays a line of sight to our TV satellite on a Google map of the campground. Most of the sites are heavily treed but I found an open area on the map and a site that overlooked it in the right direction.

This is the picture from the website.

And here is our view towards that satellite.

I am pretty sure that the field is the septic bed for the nearby washrooms but there is no smell.

After we were setup and had lunch we wandered down to the park visitor’s center to get some info and pick up a trail guide. Our campground was a 5 mile drive from the north end of the park. The visitor’s center is a further 9 miles south.

On the way back we stopped at some of the viewpoints overlooking the gorge.

There were some large birds circling near the far wall but the only way we could tell was from their shadows against the rock.

Most of the viewpoints could have used a bit of weed whacking on the other side of the wall.

The next viewpoint is looking back from around the above corner

We passed a few viewpoints that were now completely overgrown and useless.

At our final stop we were north of the really steep part of the gorge. You can see a bit of the river, dead center in the picture below.

The weather forecast tomorrow is calling for a good chance of rain in the afternoon. We may try to sneak something in during the morning or may just be lazy and take the day off.