Pedaling In A (mostly) Gravel Wonderland

   A few weeks ago, Sue asked me if I might have any place in mind where we could get away for a few days. She suggested it might be somewhere fairly simple for planning and not too far away. I had been keeping the Rochester area in mind for a while, mainly because I had heard about the incredible development of rail trails in the region.
   I am very familiar with upstate New York, as the Finger Lakes were a favorite vacation spot for my parents, and my brothers and I accompanied them on many camping trips to Seneca Lake. Years later I took my own family on a couple nostalgic trips there and then “upgraded” to wonderful cabin stays on Cayuga Lake when my boys were older.
   Over the years, I have learned even more about the geography and history of this region through my interest in railroads. I’ve previously mentioned my model railroading interests, and my two favorite companies, the Lehigh Valley and Erie Lackawanna (previously the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western) both cut through this land on their respective routes from NYC to Buffalo.
   However, I have also become aware of the growing popularity of the Finger Lakes as a vacation spot and the unfortunate, associated rise of costs for accommodations in the region in the past decade. Through some research of locations a bit farther out, we found that Rochester itself had some very pretty neighborhoods with attractive Airbnb options, both visually and financially. A great thing about being near the small city would be various things to do/see, especially if used as a day-trip base to the lakes or Niagara.
   An added plus is that Rochester wouldn’t involve a ton of driving time, and we wouldn’t have that “travel guilt”, feeling pressed to do something since “we came all this way”. We could relax if we liked, and the comfort of the home-like surroundings would allow us to just sit around, read on the porch, watch a movie or take a nap.
   We selected an apartment in a lovely large house (photo below) within the Park Avenue section of the city, southeast of downtown and about a block west of the well-known Cobbs Hill Park. The house was also within walking distance of the shady trails around Pinnacle Hill, where we enjoyed hiking, despite a couple brief showers, during our first afternoon in Rochester.

   We found the city to be very cycling-friendly during a casual spin later that day, as it has relatively light traffic compared to the east coast cities in which we’ve become accustomed to riding, and there are usually on-road bike lanes on the major arteries. We took the Genesee Riverway Trail (GRT) a few miles south on what was mostly a former Lehigh Valley Railroad corridor, then crossed the river near the University of Rochester. The bridge was a wonderfully re-decked girder structure that once carried Erie Railroad trains over the Genesee, and the trail on the west side follow that company’s roadbed back downtown.
   These paved trails were spotty, as far as condition, with some sections showing severe cracking and upheaving from flooding and nasty winters, but Sue and I were riding our trail bikes, which deal with rough surfaces much more easily than skinny-tired road bikes. During our handful of rides, we mostly saw folks riding hybrids or even mountain bikes, so the residents must know better…and really, in cities you tend to see less of the racing-style bikes, anyway.
   After watching Saturday morning’s Tour de France coverage, I set out on a big, roughly-triangular 50-mile route I had preplanned at home. It was going to take advantage of the many gravel rail trails in the area, much of it involving railroads in which I am most interested.
   This time I took neighborhood streets to meet the GRT near the U of R campus. Just a short distance down the river I crossed the Nielson Bridge, which is just north of the crossing the Erie Canal makes with the Genesee.

In this image, the Genesee runs from upper left to lower right,
and the Erie Canal is lower left to upper right

   Shortly after crossing the canal on a high-arching concrete bridge, I veered right on the Genesee River Trail. I passed an interesting airport fire training facility, then there was a bit of an on-road connection. Using NY Routes 383 and 252, I eventually met the Genesee Valley Greenway (GVG), which is actually a continuation of the former Pennsylvania Railroad line that we followed on the River Trail out of Rochester. I was now just south of what was known as Genesee Junction, where the east-west New York Central Line connected with the PRR north-south line, as well as parallel Baltimore and Ohio tracks just a short distance to the west.
   In fact, before I made the turn onto 252, I was stopped by a CSX freight train on that former NYC line. Normally I would enjoy watching a train or two, but this was an incredibly long train of rather boring intermodal cars, and I was out baking in the sun after already working up a good sweat!
   Thankfully the GVG was a wonderful shady “tunnel” of incredibly well-groomed, crushed stone which had to be about 15 feet wide! I imagined this might be a bit of a snowmobile highway in the winter, and later found out the trail, which is actually a state park, does in fact allow such use in designated sections.
   I learned later that this corridor was also shared by the Genesee Valley Canal, part of a network of waterways that ran from Rochester to Mount Morris (near the current-day Letchworth State Park) and beyond to a connection with the Allegheny River at Olean. At one point I passed a marker near the remnants of the canal’s No. 2 lock.

   At Route 251, I made a short detour east to reach the former Erie Railroad station at the town of Industry. The building was now the site of the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum, which featured vintage locomotives and rolling stock, as well as passenger train rides.

   I returned to the GVG and in a few miles I reached Wadsworth Junction and my turn eastward onto the Lehigh Valley Trail. This 14-mile segment of gravel was to be the highlight of the ride for me, as I knew nearly all the names of the little towns along the way from years of railroad research. The large iron truss bridge that once carried the Valley trains over Erie tracks at the junction had been long-ago dismantled, but I was soon crossing high above the Genesee River on a similarly impressive structure.

   The Lehigh Valley Trail was not of the quality of the GVG, but that wasn’t really a bad thing. The trail was mostly a path of fine stone dust but often became dual tracks of hard dirt, which I pedaled over quickly on my Bianchi. The trail was following the course of the Honeoye (pronounced “honey-oy”) Creek, as I soon reached Montesano’s Pizza, which is in the former LV station at Rush.

   I was a bit sad when I pedaled across another large truss bridge and neared Rochester Junction. The site was once occupied by a unique, two-sided station that served the east-west main line and the branch north up to the city. Unfortunately, the station burned down in the mid-‘70s and all that remains is the triangular concrete foundation. I’m thinking of coming down here using the Rochester Branch of the Lehigh Valley Trail later in the week.

This 1971 photo by Paul Templeton shows the passenger platforms on both sides of the Rochester
Jct. Station, the left serving the main line, the right serving the Rochester Branch

   The peacefulness of this trail segment reminded me of one of the reasons the Lehigh Valley and Erie Lackawanna were abandoned, as it is really secluded out here beyond the Binghamton-Elmira corridor at the PA/NY border. In contrast, the former New York Central main line followed the thriving communities along the Erie Canal, and cities like Albany, Syracuse and Rochester provided necessary business for Conrail, the only surviving entity of the collapsing northeastern railroad scene during the 1970s.
   After entering the town of Mendon, I turned back towards the northwest on the Auburn Trail, part of the Pittsford Trails system. This was once the Auburn and Syracuse Railroad, nicknamed the “Auburn Road”, which later became part of the Rochester and Syracuse, then eventually was a branch of the NYC.
   Although the pathway was nicely built on fills that easily crossed terrain that otherwise seemed unusually hilly for this area, the sloggy surface was what appeared to be recycled asphalt. There were larger broken chunks of road material strewn in with a stone that was the perfect size to get lodged in the tread of my tires and provide a constant pinging as pieces annoyingly kicked into the underside of my bicycle’s down tube. Although I didn’t enjoy the idea of paint chipping from my frame, I did laugh later when I took off my helmet and discovered a couple pebbles falling out of my helmet. I knew exactly where they came from!
   The riding was definitely slower in this thicker surface, and I actually welcomed a couple spots where the trail development had been interrupted and I had to detour onto smoother neighborhood roads. Near the busy crossing of the Erie Canal near Pittsford, I made an error and missed the not-so-obvious connection back to the Auburn Trail via the tiny Frog Pond Trail, but it did give me the opportunity of seeing the canal’s Lock 32 in operation!
   I was at first disappointed to find the trail surface wasn’t too much better on the north side of the canal, though it did have an obvious reduction in the big asphalt chunks. However, the last couple of miles of the Auburn Trail that paralleled Interstate 590, between Allens Creek Road and Highland Avenue, were a wonderful, wide and smooth-paved lane that rivaled any of the rail trails on our regular home routes.
   It seems that I had narrowly avoided a pop-up shower, as the roads around Cobb’s Hill Park were puddled. Luckily, I didn’t get a lot of road spray, since there were plenty of dry spots under the trees that lined the streets back to our Park Avenue apartment – boy, that sounded posh!

More to come…