Hiking - Waterfalls and Wildflowers

Having biked for the past 3 days, and seeing today dawn pretty windy yet again, I was not inspired to get out and do the 50-miler I'd been planning. So, at the risk of becoming multi-dimensional, I went and did something else.

The Plotterkill Preserve is just west of Schenectady, and only 15 minutes from home. It has miles of trails, and some pretty rugged terrain. It's often the scene of late-night rescues of lost wanderers, and even an occasional steep-terrain rescue call. It's best known for its 3 large waterfalls, the largest of which is shown below. I didn't get to the bottoms of any of the falls today, and that's much easier to do in winter when the stream is frozen.



I hiked the North Rim and South Rim loop, shown as the red trail on the map below, from the westernmost trailhead. It made about a 4-5 mile loop, with plenty of ups and downs, some relatively steep.



I also detoured on a couple of the yellow side trails to some favorite cascades deep in the bottom of the gorge.



Along the way, I indulged another long-neglected love, that of wildflower photography. There weren't a lot of flowers on the North Rim, but the South Rim had a much better selection.






All told, I was out for about 3 hours and got a pretty good workout. This was cross-training at its best.