For quite a while I’ve been hankering to visit Watkins Glen State Park. A few months ago I was following a blog by a solo woman on the road in her RV and one of her posts was about her stop in Watkins Glen. Her photos were so beautiful that ever since, I’ve wanted to visit. I can’t really remember if I’ve ever visited Watkins Glen. The village of Watkins Glen is only a 90-minute drive from Binghamton, so it makes for a nice day trip.
We set off on a somewhat foggy Sunday morning, but within a half-hour, the fog cleared and it became a bright blue-sky, sunny day. It’s peak leaf peeper season in the Southern Tier so we had a beautiful drive through the countryside. The fall colors are not so great when looking at a big hillside en masse, but individual trees and spots along the highway were glorious.
Christine had picked out a lunch venue in the village of Watkins Glen called the Village Marina Bar and Grill. As the name implies, it is at a nice marina at the south end of Seneca Lake. It was the next-to-last day the place was open, closing for the season, so we were lucky to stop there. We had a yummy lunch and could take in beautiful Seneca Lake from a large window. After lunch, we strolled around the marina area.
We drove back to the entrance of Watkins Glen State Park. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper because there is really only one road in, through, and out of the village, NY 14. The park entrance is right in the middle of the downtown section of the village. And, this being a gorgeous fall day during the Columbus Day (aka Indigenous People’s Day) holiday weekend we and 47,000 other people had decided to visit Watkins Glen. Even though the park was really crowded, we still enjoyed our afternoon there, but, now I’m interested in going another time when there may not be so many people. The downside of all the people was having to keep moving and not being able to linger in particularly beautiful spots. The Gorge Trail is rather narrow and so it was difficult to stop without disrupting the flow of people.


Off we went up and into the gorge. It was really, really beautiful! Within two miles, the glen’s stream descends 400 feet past 200-foot cliffs, generating 19 waterfalls along its course. Of course, we started at the bottom and worked our way up all those steps!
At Cavern Cascade the Gorge Trail goes behind the falls. Other than getting kind of wet from the splash of the water on some of the railing, it was a cool sensation feeling the power of the water standing behind the falls.
Back in the 1700 and early 1800s the gorge was called the Big Gully. The Watkins family had purchased over 325,000 acres of land around the southern end of Seneca Lake in 1794. John Watkins, and later his brother Samuel, built several mills along the Glen Creek in the gorge. It was Samuel Watkins who began significantly developing the gorge. Amazingly, a very large resort hotel was built atop the gorge about a half-mile up the creek from where we started our hike. There was a bridge built across the gorge to a restaurant on the opposite side. Today, a suspension bridge hangs in the same spot as the original bridge. A newspaper man named Morvalden Ells moved to Watkins in 1856 and together with the owner of the Big Gully at that time, George Freer, they began developing the gorge as a tourist attraction. On July 4, 1863, the glen opened to the public with the name “Freer’s Glen: Mysterious Book of Nature”. Over 10,000 tickets sold in the first year. New York State purchased the glen in 1906 and continued its development. The gorge and village was devastated by the flood of 1935. The flood destroyed everything that had been built in the gorge including a train trestle over the gorge. Eye witnesses of the flood said that the flood waters had nearly filled the entire depth of the gorge. After the flood, the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) worked for several years rebuilding the infrastructure of the trails laying tons of stones for walls and steps. And now, Watkins Glen State Park was ranked one of the 30 Most Surreal and Beautiful Places in the US, by ViralNova.
It was so easy to see the work of the flowing water. The curves of the creek over time carved wonderful shapes and patterns throughout the gorge. Christine said that is many places it reminded her of what we saw in Antelope Canyon, a slot canyon in Arizona. I got the same sensation, being able to actually feel the force of the water as it passes through the gorge. You can see photos of Antelope Canyon in my post of 3/2/2016 from the archives. Interestingly, Antelope Canyon is #1 in the ViralNova list of 30 Surreal and Beautiful Places; Watkins Glen is #13.
The area around Rainbow Falls was really cool. It was fun to walk under the ledges where water was dripping from the rock above. We learned that the round pools of deeper water were areas where there were once waterfalls. That was something to imagine, thinking of the height the waterfalls had to be in order to create the round pools. The creek has carved hundreds of feet of sandstone and shale to form the gorge over time.
The Gorge Trail is really one breathtaking view after another. I wish we had had more time to sit and take everything in, and that there weren’t so many people there. But it definitely was worth visiting the park on such a beautiful fall day.