Category: Adventure

Exploring Taughannock Falls State Park: September Light in the Finger Lakes

A September walk at Taughannock Falls reveals layered cliffs, white snakeroot, drifting clouds, Cayuga Lake, and the quiet threshold between summer and autumn.

MichaelStephenWills10 Comments

On September 14, 2026, Taughannock held itself between seasons. Summer had not yet departed; autumn had not yet claimed the gorge. The trees still wore their full green abundance. Yet, here and there, high on the rims and tucked into the ravine walls, yellow had begun its quiet work. I experienced it as hints, as first thoughts, as small flames beginning among the maples and shrubs.

The view from the South Rim Trail. From a walk around Taughannock Falls State Park, down the South rim Trail, up the North Rim Trail. September 14, 2026

The gorge opened first as architecture: a long cleft of layered stone, inhuman shades of gray, cut by water through an immensity of time. From the rim, the creek below seemed almost modest, a brown-green ribbon moving through a corridor it had patiently made. The cliffs did not appear carved so much as remembered into shape. Bed after bed, ledge after ledge, they held the ancient sea in their faces. The rock seemed written in lines, a ledger of vanished depths, pressure, uplift, frost, collapse, and flow. Trees clung wherever they could. Roots found cracks. Cedars leaned over voids. Hardwood trunks rose from impossible perches, answering stone with leaf.

An extravagant sky above all. This blue, saturated and clean, carried great white clouds across the park like slow, wandering thoughts; too soft for a place so sternly cut by geology. Yet that contrast is part of Taughannock’s power: air and stone, cloud and shale, the brief and the enduring sharing one frame. The clouds drifted without urgency while the gorge below testified to forces that measure themselves in millennia. Standing there, the human mind is pulled in two directions at once—toward the fleeting weather of the day and toward the deep patience of the earth.

Snakeroot, a poisonous perennial herb

Along the wooded trail, the eye dropped from grandeur to intimacy. White snakeroot bloomed in loose clusters, each tiny flower a small, tufted star gathered into a milky constellation above serrated leaves. Behind it, the forest glowed with the filtered green light of late summer. Goldenrod rose farther back, blurred into warmth. The plants seemed not lesser than the falls or cliffs, only quieter. Requiring a different scale of attention. The gorge overwhelms; the flower invites. One must bend inward to see it properly.

Seen from the South Rim Trail.

Through the trees, Cayuga Lake appeared like a blue promise beyond the gorge. Branches crossed the view in dark strokes, turning the scene into a natural stained-glass window: cliff, water, sky, leaf. The lake lay beyond the ravine’s mouth, broad and reflective, suggesting release after confinement. The creek that had moved through shadow and stone would eventually find that open water. There was comfort in that progression: narrowness giving way to breadth, descent becoming arrival.

Mouth of Taughannock Creek as it enters Cayuga Lake

At the lakeside, the mood changed again. The same day, the same park, but another world. A green lawn sloped toward the water, bordered by trees heavy with leaves. The lake opened between them, wind-textured and blue-gray beneath the marching clouds. The place felt pastoral after the sternness of the gorge. Here the land breathed easily: gorge cliffs were replaced by open distance, by the far shore softened with trees and scattered houses. The park became a threshold between cultivated calm and wild excavation.

I enjoy the layered effects of clouds.

Then the camera turned upward, giving the sky its own portrait. The clouds took on presence, no longer background but subject—rounded, luminous, casting faint shadows upon themselves. Below them, lake and shore narrowed into a band, as though the world had been rearranged so that sky could speak first. There is a kind of mercy in such a sky. It loosens the mind. It reminds us that even above a gorge, above evidence of erosion and collapse, there is spaciousness.

Black Swallow-wort (Vincetoxicum nigrum). Found along the North Rim Trail.

Among the cedars, split pods had released their silk. Pale filaments caught on rough branches and evergreen sprays, small scraps of flight arrested in mid-escape. The pods hung dry and curled, their work nearly done. Seeds that had been hidden were now entrusted to air. This, too, was September’s language: opening, loosening, letting go. Not the dramatic fall of leaves yet, but a subtler surrender. The season had begun to unfasten its clasps.

A view from the North Rim Trail.

From another rim view, the gorge wall rose in broken columns and pale faces, half-covered by green. Vegetation softened the precipice but did not conceal it. The cliff remained adamant, a vertical memory of water’s persistence. Far below, the creek bent through bars of exposed stone, and tiny figures on the gorge floor gave scale to the scene. The people were scarcely marks against the immensity, yet their presence mattered. They reminded the eye that wonder is not abstract. Someone stands there, looks up, and receives the place.

The visitors are on the overlook, in the gorge on the bridge and below the falls.

At the overlook, Taughannock Falls appeared framed by stone and leaf, descending in a long white irrepressible column into the dark basin below. The falls seemed both powerful and delicate, a veil and a force. Water dropped from the high lip in strands, gathered itself in motion, then shattered into mist and sound. Around it, the cliffs bore stains, fractures, alcoves, and ledges—the wounds and ornaments made by time. Layers of visitors receed in the foreground, small and temporary, held for a moment before the great amphitheater.

For this view proceed south on the North Rim Trail from the observation area parking. Did you spot the gathering of crows?

Farther along the North Rim Trail, the falls filled the vision. Sunlight touched the rim above; shadow deepened the plunge pool below. The water seemed to fall from brightness into mystery. That is often how memory works: a clear edge, a shining beginning, then a descent into depths we cannot entirely see. Yet the sound continues. The motion continues. The stream that vanishes in shadow reappears downstream, moving toward the lake.

Watch on YouTube for the best experience.

For me, what remains from this walk is a whole sequence: cliff and cloud, snakeroot and seed silk, lake and lawn, distant figures and enduring stone. Taughannock on September 14, 2026, offered no single lesson. It offered a composition of scale. The vast does not cancel the small. The flower belongs beside the gorge. The seed silk belongs beside the falls. The human figure belongs, briefly, gratefully, at the overlook.

By God’s Grace the water keeps falling.

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Drombeg Fulacht Fiadh: A Journey Through History

Join Mike and Pam at Drombeg Stone Circle to explore stone hut remains and a mysterious hearth beside the Fulacht Fiadh in Ireland’s green landscape.

MichaelStephenWills5 Comments

A narrow path, a handful of low stone walls, and small white flowers scattered through the grass: the photographs of our exploration at Drombeg preserve details that invite a closer look. Beside the Fulacht Fiadh, two adjoining huts survive as outlines in the ground. Exploring this part of the site with my wife, Pam, gives me a way to think about the people behind the stones, even when so much of their story remains beyond our reach.

Approach to Hut A

The first photograph, one of the huts, draws the eye along a worn strip of earth toward an opening between upright stones. Beyond it, the hut’s curved boundary gathers a patch of grass into something recognizable as a space. Some stones stand prominently; others barely rise above the turf. Pale lichen marks their faces. Small flowers grow around their bases, softening the edges without quite concealing the arrangement.

Looking at that opening, I imagine the simple act of entering. It is an ordinary movement, one Pam and I have made through countless doorways together. Here, the surviving stones give that familiar action an unfamiliar setting. What would it have meant to cross this threshold when the hut was in use? The photograph cannot answer, but it makes the question feel close enough to linger over.

Drombeg Fulacht Fiadh and Hut Site The fulacht fiadh, which is an ancient cooking place and adjacent hut sites probably date to the Bronze Age and may have been in use at the same time as the nearby stone circle.
The fulacht fiadh consists of a trough with an adjoining hearth and well, which are all enclosed by a low stone bank with an entrance to the south. Water in the trough was heated by rolling stones heated by fire in the hearth, into the water. Experiments conducted during excavation of the site in 1957 showed that 70 gallons (318 litres) of cold water could be brought to the boil in 18 minutes. Meat was then cooked in the water which remained sufficiently hot for almost 3 hours. Alternative suggested uses for fulachta fiadha are bathing, industrial activities such as dyeing and even brewing!
One of the conjoined huts contains a stone-lined feature interpreted as a roasting oven which suggests that the huts may have had a food processing function similar to that of the nearby fulacht fiadh. A pathway links both.
A stone saddle quern – used for grinding grain – was found over a drain in the cooking place but probably originated from one of the huts.
Drombeg—from An Drom Beag
(the Small Ridge)

The accompanying OPW placard give us a few firm details. Drombeg has two huts adjoining the Fulacht Fiadh, with a connecting path. Hut B incorporates a rock-lined hearth that possibly served as an oven. Those few words change the way I read the scene. The low remains become places with a relationship to one another, and the path becomes a useful thread to follow through the scattered stone.

Hut B with a view of the landscape.

In the wider view, the ground slopes away toward hedges, green fields, and distant buildings. Closer to the camera, irregular stones trace the hut through grass and patches of bare earth. A broad, flat slab rests above a dark recess. Nothing in the photograph announces itself with grandeur. Its interest lies in how closely we look, and in the small connections we begin to make.

The hearth is a detail that holds my attention. The OPW placard notes are careful: it possibly served as an oven. I want to keep that uncertainty intact. It leaves room for curiosity without turning a suggestion into a fact. Even with that restraint, the possibility of cooking brings a human scale to the ruins. An oven suggests work to be done, something to prepare, someone waiting.

Can this be anything but a comfortable perch to take in the view? No, the OPW placard suggests its use as a hearth.

The closest photograph brings the hearth into sharper focus. White patches of lichen spread across the the irregular rock wall. Plants fill small gaps beneath it. The stones lean at different angles, and the trough leads the eye onward. The view holds the intimate detail and the larger setting together, allowing us to consider how these neighboring spaces might have related.

I imagine a person tending heat there, watching carefully, occupied with a task that mattered in the moment. That is an imagined scene, not something these photographs establish. Yet it helps me approach the stones with a different kind of attention. Whoever used this place had practical concerns that we can wonder about, even when their names, words, and particular circumstances are lost to us.

Approaching the Fulacht Fiadh…

The Fulacht Fiadh site contains a hearth as well.

The hearth is to the right of the rock-lined trough, a spring above.
In Fulacht Fiadh investigated there is a link to preparation activity involving heat and moisture. Found throughout Ireland, Great Britan and the Isle of Man where the sites are called “Burnt Mounds”.
In the center of the Fulacht Fiadh is a trough, a water filled pit, which at Drombeg is lined with rock. A water source, a spring to the left (not visible in this photograph), a hearth above.
The water source, a spring.

For me, sharing an exploration like this with Pam offers its own pleasure: having someone beside whom to consider what remains. I cannot supply a remembered conversation from these pictures. I can, however, imagine the questions we might carry away. How much can a surviving outline tell us? At what point does looking become imagining? How do we appreciate a place while leaving its unanswered questions open?

Here we stand behind the sping for a broad view of the landscape. The hearth is to the right of the trough.

These photographs bring back to mind a low doorway, a path, and the hearth. Together, they offer a modest but absorbing way into Drombeg. The flowers are small enough to overlook; so are some of the stones. Giving them attention becomes part of the experience. In this telling of our visit, that is what I would keep: Pam and me exploring the surviving shapes of a place, following what we can see, and letting a few careful questions accompany us.

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Frank and Rob: An Unexpected Meeting at Lamberton Conservatory

An unexpected encounter with Frank and Rob, two African tortoises in Rochester, becomes a meditation on discovery, deep time, adaptation, and the virtue of slowness.

MichaelStephenWills8 Comments

There are discoveries we deliberately seek, and others that simply wait for us to notice them. On August 26, during a visit to the Lamberton Conservatory in Rochester’s Highland Park, Pam and I encountered two creatures that belonged firmly to the second category.

We had come to a conservatory, after all—a place where one expects palms reaching toward panes of glass, orchids suspended among roots and moss, and tropical foliage crowding the paths. I was looking at plants when something considerably more substantial appeared on the level, patterned brick path.

A tortoise.

Then another.

Two tortoises interacting on a paved pathway surrounded by greenery.

They moved freely among the vegetation, seemingly as much a part of the conservatory as the plants themselves. Nothing about their progress suggested urgency. Each foot was lifted, advanced and planted with deliberation. In a world increasingly measured in fractions of seconds, they seemed governed by another clock.

The smaller of the two immediately commanded my attention. His high, domed shell was covered with intricate patterns of yellow, tan and dark brown. Individual scutes carried irregular markings that radiated outward, giving the carapace something of the appearance of an ancient mosaic.

A tortoise walking on a brick path, showcasing its textured shell and limbs.

Beside him was an altogether different animal: larger, paler and immensely solid. Her shell was sandy brown, its individual scutes marked by concentric growth ridges. Massive forelegs, armored with heavy scales, supported a body that looked almost prehistoric. If the first tortoise suggested ornament, the second suggested architecture.

I photographed them, fascinated by the contrast.

Close-up of a tortoise shell showcasing its intricate patterns and textures.

Only later did the two strangers acquire names and histories.

Nancy Mastin of Lamberton Conservatory identified the patterned tortoise as Frank, a male leopard tortoise (Stigmochelys pardalis), born in 2015. His much larger companion is Rob, a female African spurred, or sulcata, tortoise (Centrochelys sulcata), born in 2016. Both arrived at Lamberton sometime after 2020, donated by private owners who could no longer provide sufficient room for them.

That last detail transforms the encounter.

Frank’s species comes from eastern and southern Africa, where leopard tortoises inhabit savannas and dry grasslands. Their striking shells account for the name. The pattern varies enormously among individuals and changes with age, but Frank retains an especially handsome contrast of dark markings against a warm yellow-brown background.

Rob belongs to a species shaped by harsher country. The sulcata inhabits the semiarid belt along the southern margin of the Sahara, where survival depends partly upon escaping extreme heat. Powerful forelimbs equipped for digging allow these tortoises to excavate substantial burrows. They are giants among terrestrial reptiles—the largest tortoise native to mainland Africa—and their eventual size is precisely why animals purchased when small can become difficult for private owners to accommodate.

Rob is only about ten years old. Frank is about eleven. For animals capable of living for many decades, they are not venerable relics at all. They are comparatively young.

Perhaps that was the greatest surprise.

A tortoise carries age upon its back even when it is young. Its shell evokes fossils, vanished landscapes and evolutionary time. Watching Frank and Rob, I found it difficult not to imagine ancestors moving through African grasslands long before our own species began building conservatories—or cities—or anything else.

Their shells reinforce the illusion. The concentric ridges visible in my close photographs record periods of growth, although they cannot reliably be counted as annual rings. A tortoise shell is not an inert case carried by the animal. It is living anatomy: bone covered by keratinous scutes, growing with the tortoise and protecting a body intimately joined to it.

Yet what I remember most is not anatomy but pace.

Frank was still as Rob approached. Around them rose a manufactured tropics of glass, steel, soil and plants. We passed carefully, Iphones in hand. Somewhere outside, Rochester continued at the speed expected of a modern city.

The tortoises declined to participate in the hurry.

I felt a restoration while watching an animal for which slowness requires no apology. Every movement is sufficient unto itself. A foot advances. Weight shifts. A neck extends. A leaf is investigated. Nothing appears wasted, and nothing appears rushed.

Their presence also tells a quieter human story. Frank and Rob began life in private ownership. As they grew, their needs grew with them until their owners recognized that they could no longer provide adequate space. Donation brought them to Lamberton, where their lives intersected—and, one August afternoon, intersected briefly with mine.

We entered the Conservatory expecting tropical plants. I left with photographs of two African tortoises and, eventually, their names.

Frank and Rob.

That is one of the pleasures of remaining curious: a photograph leads to a species, a species to a name, a name to a history. What began as two unexpected shapes moving beneath tropical foliage became something more memorable—a glimpse of distant Africa, deep evolutionary time, and two remarkably unhurried lives being lived beneath the glass roof of a conservatory in Rochester, New York.

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A Ride to Reavis Ranch

Some history and exploration

MichaelStephenWills16 Comments

….continued from the chapter “Desert Luxuries”

After hitching the saddled buckskin, named “Nugget,” and lightly packed pinto to trees beside the trail, The Searcher climbed up to my camp for a visit. I started water for tea and soon we were chatting. Right from the start The Searcher asked for privacy. Devoted to searching the Superstitions for the gold of the “Lost Dutchman Mine,” he organized his expeditions from a staging point near Phoenix and spent nearly sixty days each year in the wilderness. Part of his preparation was a desert survival course provided by the Reavis Mountain School, conducted by Peter Bigfoot.

An Invitation from The Searcher

The Searcher described a place near Pine Creek, he called it “Circlestone,” a large, almost perfect circle of precisely fitted stone walls, on the slopes of Mound Mountain above the headwaters of Pine Creek. My sister, Diane, and I found Circlestone on backpack expeditions March and November 2006. WThe site exceeded our expectations, the walls appeared less built than patiently persuaded from the mountain itself.

Here is a panorama from March 2006, southwest from the forests of juniper and pinion on the slopes of Mound Mountain.. The southern tip of Reavis Valley is to the right, from there Arizona Trail lead to White Mountain in the distance. It was taken on a later trip, in November of 2006 when my sister, Diane, and I visited Circlestone.

Click any photograph for a larger image.

The Searcher also told of Elisha Marcus Reavis, who settled the Valley west of Pine Creek in 1874. At one point, a band of Apaches planned to kill Reavis, but were respectful of his reputation as a rifle shot. They were waiting him out across from the his dugout, when Reavis stripped naked and, with wild hair and a flaming red beard, charged their camp, knives in both hands. The Apaches rode off, wary of his insane behavior, and never bothered him again.

We talked about my prospects and plans when The Searcher offered to take me to the Reavis Valley the next day, on horseback. There is a large apple orchard there and, this being April, we’d be treated to masses of apple blossoms. The day after Reavis Ranch, I could pack out with him down the Arizona Trail, past the Reavis Mountain School, over Campaign Creek and drive back to the Lost Dutchman Park. I readily agreed.

To Reavis Ranch on Horseback

The following morning rose slowly from colorless darkness, accompanied by thin birdsong and the whitening glow of high clouds. When the Searcher arrived around 8 am he was leading the pinto, introduced as Colorado, equipped with a western saddle instead of a pack. As an absolute novice trail rider, I rode while The Searcher held Colorado’s lead rope. The reins were wrapped around the saddle horn, leaving me to hang on and enjoy the view and the swishing tail of Nugget, the buckskin.

The 2.5 mile trail to Reavis from Pine Creek is typical of the eastern Superstitions, minimally improved, dramatically uneven, littered with boulders polished smooth by decades of hooves, floodwater, and erosion. From Pine Creek there’s a climb of a 631 feet to a 5,278 foot elevation, where the trail meanders beneath a dramatic red cliff with a view of the pinyon/juniper forests on the slopes of Mound Mountain. As he picked our way, The Searcher pointed out the sights. “Circlestone is somewhere over there, a ring of stones overgrown with Alligator Juniper.” I could do little more than observe; photography was entirely out of the question. The trail twisted around the mountain like a dry stream remembering water.

A cliff along the trail to Reavis Ranch offered the ledges and shadowed cover preferred by cougars. In daylight it posed little danger to mounted riders, and attacks against horses were rare. In all our years in Arizona, neither of us had seen more than the tip of a tail slipping behind brush.

This had been a lush April after a wet winter, and small game was plentiful. Only a sick cat would have been desperate enough to stalk horses. The darker possibility—a cougar infected with rabies after encountering a diseased animal at a water source—was a thought neither of us lingered on for long.

Eventually, the path descended steeply to Reavis Creek, the valley floor and intersected with the Reavis Ranch trail. Heading south the Reavis Ranch trail passes the site of a long abandoned ranch. What remained of the adobe and stone ranch house stood on a level bench overlooking what had once been the corral and a broad open meadow.

Open field at near the juncture of the trail from Pine Creek with the Reavis Ranch trail.

Apple trees in bloom sween from the former site of the ranch house. There used to be a pond near this spot. With a little imagination, the trail from Pine Creek can be seen on the far ridge.

Reavis Ranch Trail, foreground, traverses the valley length north to south. The Arizona Trail from Pine Creek following below the red rock cliffs in the distance.

The US Forest Service razed the building after it “burned to the ground” Thanksgiving 1991. I would not call what is left “a foundation,” it is a platform where the house stood. In the photograph, the surviving tiles still suggest the modest warmth of a lived-in home. I’ve seen old photographs of the structure with a large pond to the left of this view, a door and simple porch face east and the pond used to hold irrigation water. The leveled ruin possessed the melancholy geometry of abandoned human hope.

Turning from the ruin, another structure came into view. Built into the western slope above the valley floor was a hexagonal adobe foundation overlooking the remains of the ranch house across the trail.

My interpretation rests partly on the surrounding terrain. South of the structure runs the shallow trace of an excavated canal, suggesting that water from upper Reavis Creek—or one of its tributaries—was diverted into a catchment basin before being stored or directed toward irrigation.

Whatever its exact purpose, the site commands sweeping views of the central valley and is a beautiful place to watch evening settle over the orchard.

Turning from the ruin, another structure came into view. Built into the western slope above the valley floor was a hexagonal adobe foundation overlooking the remains of the ranch house across the trail.

The Searcher led me to a place a few hundred yards south, in a narrowing of the valley, where he let Colorado and Nugget roam free. The horses appreciated the level, open spaces and I enjoyed the Ponderosa pines on the west valley slope. We sat on the smooth trunks of fallen trees, 4 feet in diameter, near Reavis Creek.

Colorado took this opportunity to bolt, headed south. We took off after him into and through a thicket of locust trees where The Searcher cornered Colorado to regain control. “He was abused by a previous owner and can be difficult at times” was how The Searcher put it.

We were close to the end of Reavis Valley where Reavis Creek originates from the drainage of White Mountain, to the west.

We headed north here, back to the ranch house site, to the lush new grass of the apple orchard.

Nugget in Horse Heaven

Nugget grazed, tethered with plenty of slack, with the calm assurance of an animal that knew it had arrived in horse heaven. This photograph of the pair shows their personalities, Colorado edgy, Nugget content to feast while the grass is available. The orchard grass rolled in waves around their legs like green water beneath anchored boats.

Colorado on the alert while Nugget grazes, typical of their personalities.

Click me for the next post for photographs and more history of this Apple Orchard in the Superstition Wilderness.

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McLean Bogs in Early Spring: Pitcher Plants, Skunk Cabbage, a Quiet Walk with Grandchildren

A quiet early spring walk through McLean Bogs reveals pitcher plants, skunk cabbage, and the subtle beauty of glacial wetlands shared with grandchildren.

MichaelStephenWills14 Comments

The path into McLean Bogs begins without ceremony, a narrowing of the world. The road falls away, the trees gather closer, and the ground softens underfoot, remembering water. You arrive at a threshold. The air seems altered, quieter, carrying a faint mineral stillness, as though the glacier that shaped this place has not entirely withdrawn its presence.

McLean Bog, Tompkins County, New York State part of Cornell Botanical Gardens

The pond holds the sky with patient fidelity. Its surface is dark, reflective, contemplative—mirroring a band of bare trees and the pale sweep of early-spring cloud. Nothing disturbs it. No wind, no bird, no ripple of urgency. It is the kind of water that asks nothing of you except attention. And in giving it, you feel the pace of your own thoughts begin to slow, as if they too must match the bog’s ancient tempo.

At the edge, grasses stand in muted gold, last year’s growth bowed but not broken. They frame the water as do an unfinished sentence. You can imagine how, in another month, this quiet will be interrupted by green—by the rising insistence of life. But today, the landscape is held in suspension, between endings and beginnings.

On the boardwalk, my grandsons, Sam and Rory, find what the place offers most readily: evidence. A small gray pellet of fur and bone delicately assembled and then discarded. Nearby, a twisting length of scat, marked with the unmistakable language of survival. These are not the symbols we teach in books, but they are legible all the same. The boys lean close, curious, unbothered by what adults might turn away from. To them, this is not unpleasant—it is a clue, a message left behind by an unseen life moving through the same narrow corridors of forest and marsh.

There is something honest in that exchange. The bog does not disguise itself. It offers no curated beauty, no ornamental flourish. What it gives instead is continuity—the quiet assurance that life persists in forms both delicate and stark. And the children, without pretense, receive it as it is.

Deeper in the woods, a small structure of branches rises against the trunk of a tree, a lean-to, improvised and incomplete. Its architecture is simple, almost instinctive, a tentative answer to the question of shelter. Sam and Rory stand before it, boots sunk slightly in the soft ground, their bodies close together in that unconscious gesture of kinship. One leans into the other, not for support exactly, but for connection.

Behind them, the forest extends in gray and brown, a lattice of trunks and fallen limbs. It is not the lush abundance of summer, but something more revealing—a stripped-down anatomy of place. Here you see the bones of the landscape, the structure beneath the surface. And in that exposure, there is a different kind of beauty, one relies on form, on persistence, on time itself.

The boardwalk carries you out into the open bog, where the ground gives way to water and moss. It is a narrow path, elevated just enough to allow passage, and it bends gently, as though respecting the terrain rather than imposing upon it. Rory walks ahead, small against the expanse, following the curve without question. There is trust in that movement—the simple faith that the path will hold, that it leads somewhere worth going.

The path is flooded
Your task: find pitcher plants in the middle distance

Around you, the bog stretches in subtle variation. Patches of standing water reflect a green that seems almost improbable in this season, the work of mosses and algae that thrive where others cannot. The vegetation is low, dense, textured—a mosaic rather than a meadow. And here and there, like small embers against the muted field, the pitchers rise.

The pitcher plants are both beautiful and unsettling. Their deep red forms, veined with intricate patterns, hold themselves open to the world. They are vessels, yes, and thresholds, invitations with consequence. Insects, drawn by color or scent, enter and do not leave. It is easy to think of them as passive, but they are anything but. They are active participants in the exchange of life, taking what the poor soil cannot provide.

You kneel to look more closely, drawn in despite yourself. The interior of the pitcher is a map of intention—every line, every curve serving a purpose. And yet, there is an elegance to it, a precision that feels almost artistic. It is not cruelty, exactly, but necessity rendered with a kind of quiet grace.

McLean Bog, Tompkins County, New York State part of Cornell Botanical Gardens

Elsewhere, the first signs of skunk cabbage emerge, their dark, curved forms pushing through saturated ground. They are early risers, indifferent to cold, generating their own heat to break through frost. They do not wait for spring; they create their own version of it. Scattered across the forest floor, they resemble a field of small, listening shapes—each one a declaration that life does not always arrive gently.

And so you move through the bog as a participant in its slow unfolding. Sam and Rory run ahead, then return, their boots muddy, their hands full of nothing in particular. They do not need to name what they have seen. The experience is enough.

As we return to the preserve edge, this sign stands—formal, declarative, assigning significance in the language of designation: Registered Natural Landmark. This place is important, rare, worthy of protection. But the words feel almost secondary after what you have just walked through.

McLEAN BOGS has been designated a REGISTERED NATURAL LANDMARK

This site possesses exceptional value as an illustration of the nation’s natural heritage and contributes to a better understanding of man’s environment.
National Park Service, United States Department of the Interior 1973.

Because the true measure of McLean Bogs is not in its classification, but in its effect. It changes the rhythm of your thinking. It draws your attention downward—to the ground beneath your feet, to the subtle movements of water and growth, to the quiet negotiations of life that continues with or without witnesses.

And perhaps that is what Thoreau meant, though he said it more simply: that heaven is not only above us, distant and abstract, but also here, immediate and tangible, woven into the fabric of the earth itself.

In the bog, that idea does not feel like metaphor. It feels like observation.

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Where Winter Yields: Skunk Cabbage, Pitcher Plants, and Milky Ice at Malloryville Preserve

A late winter walk through Malloryville Preserve reveals milky ice, emerging skunk cabbage, and hidden wetland life—seen through the curious eyes of grandchildren.

MichaelStephenWills9 Comments

The morning began in that quiet register peculiar to late winter in the Finger Lakes—when the calendar insists on spring, yet the land, still half-claimed by frost, speaks in a more cautious dialect. At the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, the woods held both seasons in tension. Snow lingered in shaded hollows, while the exposed ground, damp and rust-colored, breathed with thaw.

Sam and Rory—boots muddied almost immediately—climbed atop a great, weathered stump, its cut face fanned with the geometry of years. There is something about a stump that invites children upward, as though it were not a remnant but a stage. From their perch they surveyed a kingdom of bare trunks and quiet trails, their laughter momentarily lifting the stillness. Behind them, the forest rose in gray-brown columns, and beneath them, the history of a tree—rings like a clock no one can wind backward.

We moved downslope toward the seepage-fed lowlands that give this preserve its particular character. Here, the ground softens, water gathers, and winter lingers longer in pockets of ice that seem reluctant to relinquish their hold. The ice itself told a story—not clear and crystalline, but cloudy, milky, almost opalescent. This opacity is the signature of trapped air, minute bubbles frozen in suspension as water repeatedly melts and refreezes. Each cycle interrupts the orderly lattice of ice, scattering light and transforming transparency into a pale, diffused glow. It is ice that remembers its instability.

Threading through this ice were narrow rivulets of meltwater, tracing paths around moss-covered hummocks. These islands—bright green even in winter—rose like miniature continents in a frozen sea. On one such hummock, we found this skunk cabbage. Its mottled spathe, deep maroon flecked with yellow, pushed upward through the cold, its form both alien and ancient. I pointed out to the boys that this plant generates its own heat—a metabolic furnace capable of melting the surrounding snow. It is one of the earliest heralds of spring, though it announces itself not with color alone, but with scent—a pungency that walked with us that day.

Nearby, nestled in the sphagnum, were the pitcher plants—Sarracenia purpurea—their tubular leaves tinged with winter’s reds and greens. Even in dormancy, they held their form, each pitcher a small reservoir. I explained how these plants supplement the nutrient-poor conditions of the bog by capturing insects, their modified leaves forming a subtle trap. The boys leaned in, curious, perhaps imagining the unseen dramas that would unfold here in warmer months.

The North American genus Sarracenia are the trumpet pitchers, which have a more complex trap than Heliamphora, with an operculum, which prevents excess accumulation of rainwater in most of the species.

The wetland was a place of plants and textures. The ice thinned near the edges, revealing water beneath that reflected the vertical lines of trees above. Droplets fell intermittently from branches, punctuating the quiet with soft, irregular taps. It was a landscape in transition, each element negotiating its passage from one state to another.

Along a tangle of shrubs, I noticed an unusual growth—a dense, broom-like cluster of twigs protruding from what appeared to be a highbush blueberry. This “witches’ broom” is often the result of fungal infection or other physiological stress, causing the plant to produce a profusion of shoots from a single point. To a child’s eye, it might seem like a bird’s nest or some deliberate construction, but it is, in fact, the plant’s own altered architecture—a distortion that nonetheless becomes part of the ecosystem, offering shelter to small creatures.

Further along, a fallen log bore the layered forms of shelf fungi, each bracket extending outward like a series of pages half-opened. Their colors—muted tans and browns—blended with the wood, yet their structure was unmistakable. These polypores are the quiet recyclers of the forest, breaking down lignin and cellulose, returning the substance of the tree to the soil. I ran my fingers lightly along their surface, feeling the fine texture, while the boys, less cautious, tapped them as though testing their solidity.

On the bark of a nearby tree, we encountered a patch of what looked like pale, fuzzy insulation—the egg mass of the spongy moth. I explained that each of these masses could contain hundreds of eggs, waiting for the warmth of spring to hatch. It was a reminder that even in this subdued season, the next wave of life was already prepared, concealed in plain sight.

As we made our way back, the boys’ boots squelched in the soft ground, their earlier perch on the stump now a distant memory. Yet the morning had offered them—and me—something more enduring than a climb. It had revealed a landscape in flux, where ice is not merely frozen water but a record of change, where plants defy cold through chemistry, and where even decay participates in renewal.

Late winter, in a place like Malloryville, is not an absence of life but a study in persistence. It asks for attention, for patience, and for a willingness to see beauty in transition. Walking with Sam and Rory, I was reminded that discovery does not wait for spring. It is already here, written in ice, moss, and the quiet industry of the forest.

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Lucifer Falls in Winter: Traversing Ice Chutes Along Ithaca’s South Rim Trail

A careful winter walk along the South Rim reveals Lucifer Falls transformed—ice chutes, frozen veils, and flowing water beneath stone, inviting patience, attention, and quiet awe.

MichaelStephenWills15 Comments

January pares the gorge to essentials. Color withdraws, sound sharpens, and the land reveals its underlying grammar—stone, water, cold, and time. Reaching Lucifer Falls by the South Rim Trail on a winter morning feels less like an initiation, a careful passage through ice-chutes and shadowed ledges where the creek rehearses its ancient work in a new key.

Wintertime scene along the South Rim Trail of Robert H. Treman State park. The trail is solid ice. Ithaca, Tompkins County New York State

The trail begins quietly, a soft crunch underfoot where snow thins to leaf litter. Hemlocks hold their breath. The gorge opens in increments, not all at once, and the creek’s voice arrives in fragments—first a whisper, then a steady insistence. Winter edits the landscape with a clean hand. The clutter of summer understory is gone; what remains is structure: stratified shale stacked like a book left open to a single, patient chapter. Every footfall demands attention. Ice slicks the stone where seeps cross the path, and the trail teaches a winter gait—short steps, weight centered, the quiet confidence of traction earned rather than assumed.

As the rim narrows, the air cools perceptibly. The gorge walls rise higher, their layered faces stippled with frost and snow. Icicles form a punctuation along ledges, commas and exclamation points caught mid-sentence. In places, the trail descends into ice chutes—steep, polished corridors where meltwater has glazed the rock. Here, the body listens more closely. Boots test, then commit. Hands brush the cold bark of a leaning tree, a borrowed handrail. There is pleasure in this concentration, the way winter insists on presence. You cannot hurry. You cannot drift.

Below, the creek widens into a quiet pool, its surface a muted mirror. Thin plates of ice drift and collide, sounding a faint porcelain clink. The sound carries upward, amplified by the gorge’s acoustics, a delicate counterpoint to the deeper hush of falling water. The trail curves, and suddenly the falls announce themselves—not in full view, but as a white presence beyond the bend, a brightness lodged between walls of stone.

The trails this day were solid ice. I arrived via the South Rim Trail, the only way to access this site. Robert H. Treman State Park, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State

Approaching from the South Rim offers a measured reveal. First the upper cascades appear, water fanning across rock that has become a winter canvas. Ice has claimed the margins, building ribs and curtains that thicken day by day. The falls do not stop in January; they change. Water threads through ice, slips behind it, emerges again in translucent veils. Gravity persists, but its expression is altered—slower, more deliberate, sculptural.

At the base, Lucifer Falls stands transformed. The familiar plunge has become a tiered architecture of frozen flow, a stepped amphitheater where icicles hang like organ pipes and snow pillows settle into hollows. The water still moves, a silver ribbon finding its way down the left flank, while the right side has grown into a cathedral of ice. The gorge walls close in, amplifying the sound—a low, resonant murmur that feels as much felt as heard.

The cold sharpens every sense. Breath fogs, then clears. Fingers tingle through gloves as the camera comes out, metal biting through insulation. Framing becomes an act of translation: how to honor motion when much of it has paused; how to suggest the hidden currents beneath the frozen skin. A short video will later catch what stillness cannot—the soft shiver of water behind ice, the way the falls breathe even in winter—but for now, the eye lingers on texture and line. Shale layers echo the ice’s striations. Time repeats itself in different materials.

Standing there, it’s impossible not to feel the weight of deep history. These rocks remember glaciers and warmer seas; this creek has been at work since before memory had a word. January merely adds a chapter. Snow feathers the ledges. A stray sunbeam slips into the gorge, briefly igniting the ice, and then is gone. The falls return to their monochrome palette, as dignified as an old photograph.

The return along the rim is lighter, the path now familiar, confidence earned. The ice chutes yield more easily on the way back, as if acknowledging the careful passage. Above the gorge, the forest resumes its quiet, and the trail leads out into the open day. What lingers is the sense of having witnessed something intimate and exacting—a winter conversation between stone and water, conducted without haste, inviting those willing to slow down and listen.

January asks little and gives much. Reaching Lucifer Falls by the South Rim is a reminder that beauty is not diminished by cold; it is clarified.

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Winter Walking at Taughannock Falls: Finding Connection and Quiet Along the Gorge Rim Trails

Winter distills Taughannock Gorge to stone, water, and silence, where careful footsteps along icy rim trails reveal deep connections between landscape, memory, and quiet joy.

MichaelStephenWills35 Comments

Winter pares the world down to its essential lines, and nowhere is that more apparent than on the rim trails of Taughannock Falls State Park. On a Wednesday afternoon walk, a three-mile pilgrimage, the gorge revealed itself as a living corridor of connections—between water and stone, past and present, effort and joy. The season sharpened every sensation: the crunch and slip of ice underfoot, the hush of leafless woods, the long exhale of the falls echoing unseen below.

From the overlook, the gorge opens like a vast stone book, its pages written in shale and time. Taughannock Falls drops away in the distance, not so much seen as felt—its presence announced by scale and gravity. Even before stepping onto the trail, the walk establishes its rhythm: pause, look, breathe. Winter insists on this slower tempo. Ice dictates caution, and caution invites attention.

Heading along the Rim Trail my progress became deliberate. The path, glazed in places with solid ice, turned each step into a negotiation. Yet this was no impediment to pleasure. Slowness allowed for noticing the quiet labor of the park maintenance crew, whose careful clearing and repairs spoke of spring already anticipated. Their work stitched the present moment to the coming season, a reminder that parks, like stories, are maintained through this unseen devotion.

The gorge itself is a system of thresholds. A bridge crossing the creek marks the transition from North to South Rim, but it also frames one of the most dramatic views in the park. Standing above the chasm, one senses connection: water flowing beneath, trails diverging and rejoining, human passage layered lightly atop geological endurance. The gorge is a conversation between forces, ongoing and unresolved.

Gorge Road, early November
Gorge Road, early November
From the South Rim Trail. Taughannock Falls, New York State Park, Ulysees, Tompkins County, Finger Lakes Region.
Click any photograph for a larger image

Ice eventually nudged my walk onto Gorge Road, which parallels the South Rim Trail like a quieter narrative strand. Here, the landscape shifts from wild drama to human memory. A curve in the road reveals a farmhouse, modest and fragile beside its outsized barn. In winter, the absence of leaves makes the scene stark and honest. The farmstead buildings do not ask for nostalgia; they simply stand, bearing witness to lives tethered to this steep land. The structures emerge gradually as I walk downhill, as if the land itself were choosing when to reveal them.

Overview of this small cemetery overlooking Cayuga Lake

A short detour leads to a small cemetery perched on a shelf above Cayuga Lake, near the Taughannock Farms Inn. In winter, cemeteries feel less like places of mourning and more like rooms of quiet conversation. Headstones rise from frozen ground, their inscriptions softened by time and distance. From this vantage point, lake and sky merge in pale bands, and the lives commemorated here feel gently folded into the larger story of the landscape. The dead, too, are part of the park’s web of connections.

Another detour brings the lower falls into view—a more intimate expression of the same water that plunges dramatically upstream. Here the sound is closer, the movement more conversational. It is easy to imagine this water traveling, moment by moment, linking ravine to lake, winter to spring, memory to presence.

One of many Rim Trail overlooks. That is the Gorge Trail, below.

Rejoining the rim trail for the final climb north, the gorge offers repeated overlooks where the Gorge Trail can be seen threading below. These moments collapse distance: walker and walker, above and below, bound by the same route at different elevations. Over the course of roughly three miles and almost 600 feet of cumulative elevation change, effort becomes its own reward. Two hours pass not as measured time but as a sustained attentiveness, a gift winter offers to those willing to meet it on its terms.

Walking these trails in winter is about entering a conversation with the land—listening to ice, stone, water, and history speak in a quieter register. The joy lies in connection: trail to trail, gorge to road, past to present, and walker to place. In winter, Taughannock invites, gently and honestly, those who are willing to walk slowly enough to see.

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Fens, Bogs, and Flowing Water of Malloryville Preserve of Freeville, New York

Discover Malloryville Preserve in Freeville, New York—a hidden Finger Lakes wetland of fens, bogs, and flowing water where glacial history and rare plants meet.

MichaelStephenWills6 Comments

Water defines the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville long before we see or hear it. At first, it is only a dampness in the air, a coolness at ankle level, a dark sheen between sedge tussocks. In the space of a half-hour walk, we pass through fen, bog, marsh, and swamp, each distinct, yet bound together by the same slow, persistent flow.

Here we are traversing a swamp, our steps buoyed along on planking made from recycled plastic. The boardwalk floats visually above pools the color of tea, edged with moss and skunk cabbage. It’s easy to imagine what this crossing would have been like before the planks were laid—boots sinking, knees splashed, delicate plants crushed. The modern walkway is a quiet compromise: we may enter this saturated world without trampling it, a human gesture that matches the preserve’s ethos of protection and restraint.

The Malloryville wetlands lie in a low pocket along Fall Creek, a landscape shaped by the last ice age. As the glacier that once covered this region melted, torrents of water tunneled through the ice, depositing braided ridges of sand and gravel known as eskers. Today, more than a mile of these ancient riverbeds winds through the preserve, narrow wooded spines rising above the surrounding wetlands. From an esker crest, the pattern of water reveals itself: dark channels of open flow, pale pools rimmed with sedge, patches of sphagnum floating like cushions, and, farther off, the straight silver of Fall Creek.

But the story of Malloryville’s water begins far from these pools. Rain falls on the uplands as cool, slightly acidic water. It sinks through glacial till—a jumble left by the ice—and begins a long, blind journey underground. As it moves, the water reacts with the minerals it encounters. Where it brushes limestone or other carbonate-rich layers, it is slowly neutralized and picks up dissolved calcium and magnesium. By the time it resurfaces in low spots, it may be transformed from sour, soft rain to mineral-rich groundwater.

Those subtle chemical shifts are written onto the land. In some hollows, where water still mainly reflects its origin as rain, the environment becomes a bog—cold, acidic, nutrient-poor. Here, sphagnum moss knits a floating carpet, and only specialists such as leatherleaf and cranberries can endure. In other pockets, where groundwater welling up from below brings minerals, we find fens: lush, lime-touched wetlands offering niches for orchids, sedges, and the carnivorous pitcher plant. Marshes and swamps round out the spectrum, their standing water and wooded shade forming still more microhabitats.

In this small preserve, all these wetland types coexist side by side, threaded by water that often moves so slowly it appears not to move at all. The stillness is deceptive. A slight difference in elevation—barely the height of your boot—can determine whether water spreads and stagnates, seeps outward in a fan, or concentrates into a narrow, unseen channel. Hydrologists studying the area have shown that a water-table mound of only a few inches can redirect the underground flow and, over time, steer the evolution from open fen to peat-filled bog.

Human history here is entwined with that quiet power. The founders of the preserve, themselves from a dairy farming family, came to understand that the springs, seeps, and wetlands feeding Fall Creek were vulnerable. Gravel pits on nearby land had already bitten into the valley; another such excavation on this side would have severed the veins of water that sustain the fen and bog. Their years-long effort to protect the property culminated in a Nature Conservancy preserve whose very purpose is to safeguard water and the uncommon communities it supports.

The boardwalk under our feet is part of that story. Its recycled-plastic planks do not rot in constant dampness, and their smooth, slightly hollow sound reminds us with each step that we are guests in a place where soil never truly dries. At the edges of the walkway, tamarack and red maple lift their trunks from hummocks, their roots anchored in peat built grain by grain from centuries of water-logged plant remains. In the open patches, we can seek out pitcher plants, their flaring, water-filled leaves digesting unwary insects to make up for the nutrient-poor conditions.

Everywhere, water moves almost invisibly. It rises as a cold trickle at the base of the esker, fans through the moss as a thin sheet, and gathers again in dark, tannin-stained channels. It rarely speaks aloud; only in spring flood or after hard rain does it murmur against roots or tap lightly at the plastic planks. Yet its influence is written in every texture and color—emerald moss, rusty sedge, the silvery bark of birch leaning over a pool.

To walk in Malloryville is to learn to read this subtle handwriting. We begin by noticing the obvious: the wetness, the boardwalk, the glimpses of standing water. By the end of the walk, we are tracing gradients—how the plants shift with elevation, how the ground feels underfoot, how the air cools or warms by a degree or two. We sense the long journey of water from sky to stone to peatland to creek, and onward to Cayuga Lake and the wider world beyond.

Water, flowing quietly, almost soundlessly, with powerful effect: Malloryville Preserve, that power is persistence. It is the power to carve a valley, to build a peatland one stem at a time, to sustain rare communities of plants and animals in a modest corner of New York. To honor such water is to move carefully, speak softly, and remember that our presence, like our boardwalk, should allow the flow beneath to continue its ancient work.

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Exploring Malloryville Preserve: A Hidden Glacial Wetland Gem in New York’s Finger Lakes

Explore the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, a hidden Finger Lakes wetland where glacial eskers, kettles, and springs reveal the deep story of ice and water.

MichaelStephenWills20 Comments

In the heart of upstate New York, the Finger Lakes region stretches out like a handprint left by the last great ice sheets—long, narrow lakes aligned north to south, their steep-sided valleys feeding into a lattice of creeks, waterfalls, and wetlands. It is a landscape defined by water and time: glaciers grinding south, then melting back north some 12,000 years ago, carving deep troughs, piling up ridges of gravel and sand, and leaving behind a terrain that is anything but simple.

The O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, near the small village of Freeville, is one of the quiet places where that story is written most clearly on the land. It doesn’t shout like Taughannock Falls or Ithaca’s famous gorges. Instead, it whispers—through the curves of its hills, the softness of its ground, the unexpected appearance of a spring at the base of a gravel ridge. Here, in a relatively compact area, you can see how ice and water worked together to shape the Finger Lakes region we know today.

Overflow from a Kettle Pond threads through a meadow before feeding Fall Creek. The O.D.von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville.

By the time the preserve officially opened in 1997, the name O.D. von Engeln was already familiar to anyone curious about local geology. His classic book on the Finger Lakes helped generations of readers understand that the scenery around them was not random, but the result of powerful, understandable processes. Reading von Engeln, the rolling hills and quiet valleys near Freeville become more than background—they become evidence: of buried ice, rushing meltwater, and the slow settling of sediments into the forms we walk on now.

Malloryville is an outdoor classroom for that lesson. The preserve is built around a cluster of glacial landforms—eskers, kames, and kettles—that create a three-dimensional mosaic of ridges and hollows. Eskers, those long, winding gravel ridges left by rivers that once flowed inside the glacier, snake through the forest like frozen currents of stone. Kames—steep, irregular hills of sand and gravel—rise suddenly from the surrounding lowlands. Kettles, the depressions left behind when buried ice blocks melted away, now cradle wetlands and pools.

Beneath and between these features, groundwater is constantly on the move. It seeps through layers of sand and gravel, emerges as cold springs at the foot of slopes, and spreads out into swamps, fens, and marshes. In the Finger Lakes, water is always telling a story; at Malloryville, it’s simply easier to hear. Follow the trail and you move through a succession of wet worlds: a seep-fed fen with delicate mosses and sedges, a shrub swamp where skunk cabbage thrusts up in early spring, a cattail marsh that hums with birds and insects in summer.

For my family, the story of Malloryville began even before the preserve had a name. We lived nearby along Fall Creek, itself a thread in the larger fabric of the Cayuga Lake watershed. My son and I camped for the first time on top of an esker just beyond our front door, our tent perched on what I would later learn was the remnant of a stream that once tunneled through the base of a glacier. At the time, it was simply a magical narrow ridge in the woods. Only later, with von Engeln’s guidance and the preserve’s interpretive signs, did that ridge become a sentence in a much older, longer narrative.

That is one of the great gifts of the Finger Lakes: the chance to move from simple admiration—“this is beautiful”—to understanding—“this is how it came to be.” The steep slopes along Cayuga, Seneca, or Skaneateles; the drumlin fields near the north ends of the lakes; the hanging valleys and waterfalls; and the quiet wetlands of places like Malloryville are all chapters in the same glacial chronicle. Once you learn to read one place, you begin to read them all.

Walking into the O.D. von Engeln Preserve, you enter that story at a small, intimate scale. The parking area and trailhead give way quickly to a world where the ground feels different—sometimes firm and gravelly, sometimes soft and yielding underfoot. Wooden walkways and narrow paths thread through shady forest and open wetland. Each bend offers a subtle shift: a new plant community, a change in water clarity or flow, a small sign explaining what lies beneath your feet.

Fall Creek meanders through the esker fields of the Malloryville Preserve. Here is the view from an abandoned railroad bridge. The preserve is near Freeville in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

This is not grand scenery in the postcard sense; it is something quieter and deeper. Malloryville invites you to slow down and notice. To ask why a particular ridge is so narrow, why water emerges here but not there, why one hollow is filled with shrubs and another with moss and sedge. In learning those answers, you gain not only an appreciation for this modest preserve but also a richer understanding of the entire Finger Lakes region.

The Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) is named for the mottled brown leaves resembling marking on trout.

In the end, the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville is a lens—a way of seeing. Through it, the familiar landscapes of central New York—valleys, hills, streams, and lakes—come into sharper focus as the lasting work of ice and water. Stand on an esker, look across a kettle wetland, listen to the quiet trickle of a spring, and you are standing inside the very processes that shaped the Finger Lakes.

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