The Bicycle Adventure Club - Come Ride With Us!

Empire State Trail, part 1 - Erie Canal Heritage Trail

September 4th to September 14th

Ride Director: Chuck Feerick
Ride Co-Director: Joan Feerick
Ride Driver: Glenn Rudolph
Report by: Jim McKinley

It’s a wonderful life in upstate New York, at least in September. Our group cycled across the state from Buffalo to Albany, sticking pretty much to the Empire State Trail along the Erie Canal. The trail is popular enough that NY Parks and Rec runs an annual ride for campers, who cycle between stops with their gear hauled by truck. We had a truck too: it didn’t haul any tents. The ride began near the shore of Lake Erie in downtown Buffalo, shuffling off for daily distances of less than 50 miles on the essentially flat trail. Midway, I had the thought that there should be a rest day, but by the end I knew I was wrong; the moderate distances and low terrain meant that we always arrived by early afternoon, untired and with time to look around. We passed through the small cities and towns, whose names sounded familiar, ringing little bells from movies and stories set in what was once a busy industrial region – Lockport, Palmyra, Seneca Falls, Syracuse – and through places whose names were happily new to me – Herkimer, Canajoharie.

            Our hotels were Hampton Inns or Best Westerns admixed with hotels idiosyncratic to their towns. In Seneca Falls, after we pedaled across the bridge where Jimmy Stewart met the angel Clarence, we stayed in the Gould Hotel. That boutique hotel is in a hundred-year-old brick building whose rooms have been carefully modernized, across the street from the Women’s Rights National Historic Park. In Syracuse, we stayed at a Hilton in the U district, in a repurposed synagogue. In Little Falls, the ‘hotel’, catering to bicyclists, was upstairs in an old factory also housing a vegetarian restaurant, a bike shop, whatnot, and a staff who treated us like relatives. At Rome, we turned south and drummed along the Mohawk to Amsterdam, where we stayed at the curmudgeon-run Amsterdam Castle. It was once an armory, then a residence, and now a hotel; a cavernous structure with knights in armor downstairs and upstairs a meeting room with a grand piano and a couch where Jack Kennedy once sat (it’s roped off). The curmudgeon proved surprisingly helpful with bike storage.

            We were sometimes on the road, where honor-system stands offered ripe produce – we cooked corn in hotel microwaves. The flat trail surface was variable, including pavement and compacted gravel, usually in good, easily-ridden condition. Sections of the trail are maintained by volunteers and by local governments. For that reason, one could jump from pavement to gravel and back again over short to moderate distances. A few sections were muddied by overnight rain (it rained only at night, of course); a couple of times we were forced to stop and walk a few yards around muddy ruts. However, the trail was usually paralleled by paved roads, and it was possible to exit the trail for a mile or two and bypass the sections of lesser maintenance. Mostly, the trail was lovely whether gravel or pavement. Through the entire distance, the trailside was spotted by blooming jewelweed, yellow and red-orange flowers on green bushy growth. The weather was fine and warm, and the trail was shaded, opening onto rural homesteads, old settlements, and villages. In places, the canal was abandoned as too narrow, and the trail tracked through the quiet forest alongside. Ruined locks were present on the shallow water; where the canal was open to the sky there were kingfishers overhead and great blue herons wading at the water’s edge. In other places, the trail was adjacent to the wider working canal, which we crossed over modern locks on catwalks. Yachted people waved hello.

            The ride was well-run, well thought out, and an opportunity to see a part of the country that one would zip past in a car. It was what makes bicycle tourism a joy.