Tag: Cayuga Lake watershed

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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Cornell Botanic Gardens’ Monkey Run: History, Geology, and Scenic Fall Creek

A contemplative walk along Monkey Run where Fall Creek writes the valley’s history—sycamores, bridges, and Devonian stone speaking across seasons in Cornell’s living classroom.

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

On a morning in late March, when the hills about Ithaca still hold the night’s frost in their shaded folds, I took the path called Monkey Run and went to see how Fall Creek spends its winter earnings. The air had the bright sting of thaw, a kind of vernal austerity that keeps a man honest in his steps. Along the high bank the sun spilled its coin onto the water, where it broke and flickered like a school of silver minnows. A rim of snow clung to the shale ledges, and the leaves of last year’s oaks—curled, fox-red, and faithful—whispered as if to keep the woods awake until spring fully claimed them.

Sunlit bend of Fall Creek viewed from a high bank at Monkey Run in early spring.

Monkey Run is one of the outlying parcels tended by Cornell Botanic Gardens—once called the Plantations, and now, more fittingly, named for the living charge it keeps. These gardens do not end at beds and borders; they encompass the wilder rooms of the county, more than a thousand hectares of glens, pastures, and ravines where the university’s first and oldest teacher—nature herself—still holds class. Fall Creek is one of her principal lecturers. Rising beyond the high country of Cayuga Heights and slipping under stone and snow, it shoulders its way across the campus, idles a while in Beebe Lake, and turns turbines of memory at Triphammer Falls before shouldering on toward the lake that receives nearly everything here—Cayuga—long, deep, and glacial in its thinking.

Tall white-barked sycamores leafless against a blue March sky at Monkey Run.

If you would learn a valley’s mind, walk a meander. The creek here composes with easy cursive, laying down a bar of gravel, nibbling at a bank of clay, then sweeping back to consider its work from the opposite shore. The geologist says the rock is Devonian, pages laid flat and damp with time, and the ice of ten thousand winters ago scoured them into the open. A creek is a patient mason, working without rest and never in anger. I admired these sycamores—their clean bones shining through the leafless canopy like the ribs of an old cathedral. Winter reveals their whiteness; summer grants them shade. A stand of white pines keeps a dark counsel in the background; on the muddy edge, green tongues of skunk cabbage push up, pledges made by the swamp to keep faith with the sun.

Rust-stained steel pier above calm water on Fall Creek along Monkey Run trail

I came down to the water near an old steel pier, a bridge remnant, hanging on each end without purpose. It wears graffiti the way a boulder wears lichen; human wishes, briefly rooted, coloring what they can. The river accepts it all, the pilings and the scribbles, the cast limb and the bottle’s glint, and continues its one unarguable gesture downstream. That is the old instruction of Fall Creek: use, refuse, endure. Before the university drew students from every quarter, the creek turned wheels and powered the small ambitions of a frontier town. Even the name Triphammer speaks of iron struck to purpose. Now the water powers something quieter: the studies of herons, the almanacs of kingfishers, the quick arithmetic of minnows over limestone.

Looking back while climbing the steep bluff

Steps cut from logs ascend the bluff, each tread pegged with iron, each rise a short confession of breath. I climbed to the ridge, paused halfway, and through the gray lace of March branches saw the creek shining at a bend far below. A man cannot help but measure his own life against such a course. The path goes up and down in obedient red blazes, but the water keeps its own counsel. Where the bank slumps the river shoulders through; where the bottom rises it lays down a mirror. In my youth I wanted the straight run, the short work. Now the curve pleases me. To go with the current and not be carried away—that is a lesson suitable to the grey in my beard.

Clear, shallow run of Fall Creek with shale bottom and pine stand in distance
Bluff overlooking Fall Creek in summer

When I returned five months later, on August 23, the same path had forgotten the word austerity. The cathedral of sycamore was fully leafed, the white pillars now vanished behind a nave of shade. The pines perfumed the air without trying. A new footbridge—clean timber arching like a bent bow—spanned one of the wet flats. Its braces, black-bolted and handsome, looked as if they would hold the weight of an ox team or a file of schoolchildren. Such crossings are a kind of promise from the present to the future: we found a way through here; may you, too. Below, the floor was upholstered with moss, oak leaves, and a scatter of pinecones—the slow currency of the woods accumulating interest.

Arched wooden footbridge in summer forest on Cornell’s Monkey Run trail.

Summer makes a confidant of every plant. Ferns unrolled their scripture at the bridge abutment; jewelweed held its tiny lanterns along the seeps; a kingfisher rattled downstream, blue lightning with a bill. The creek, glassy over its shale pavement, showed every wrinkle of its stride. I waded a little, feeling with the sole what the eye could not—where the current took an extra thought around a stone, where it forgot itself in a warm eddy. Trout lingered in the dimmer reaches, quick as commas; a great blue heron lifted off with that surprising tidiness of wing, ungainly only in our imagination.

In all seasons the trail carries two histories: one written in rock and water, the other in the footfall of people. Cornell’s founders, Ezra and Andrew White, believed the university should place the hand near the thing studied; here that principle is plain. Botany students take their lectures in leaf and bark; geologists read the creek banks as if the pages might soon turn by themselves; children learn the oldest calculus—how long a stick will float before it catches in the weeds. The caretakers from the Botanic Gardens mark, mend, and interpret, but they do not overtalk. The woods speak enough.

Moss, grass and pinecones on an overlook of Fall Creek

As the afternoon eased toward evening, I climbed once more to the bluff. The light had gone honey-colored and the leaves of the maples, those careful accountants of September, were just beginning to weigh their green against gold. I looked down on the bend where I’d stood in March—cold, bright, expectant—and felt the year’s circle gently close. As John Burroughs wrote, “The power to see straight is the rarest of gifts… to be able to detach yourself and see the thing as it actually is, uncolored or unmodified by your own… prepossessions… that is to be an observer and to read the book of nature aright.” Monkey Run obliges that humility. The creek moves as it always has—glacially taught, mill-forged, campus-wise, and freedom-loving—and the trail, with its modest stairs and honest bridges, invites us to walk beside it, to match our breath to its turnings, and to leave, if we can, a lighter trace than we found.

References

Ways of Nature (1905), “Reading the Book of Nature,” pp. 275–276 (The Writings of John Burroughs, Riverside ed., vol. XIV, Houghton Mifflin)

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