4.6 miles | 892 ft gain | Difficulty: Easy | Rating ★★★★★

Letchworth State Park. The Grand Canyon of the east. And apparently USA Today’s top state park in the United States. The Genesee River runs straight through the park, with waterfalls as high as 600 feet in some places. It’s not prime for challenging hikes, but accessibly and effort bang for your buck, it’s way up there.

Up in the Finger Lakes for a late October weekend with the family, we were a pit concerned we’d be past peak foliage. To our surprise, we picked the perfect weekend. We suffered most of the weekend in clouds, but once the sun came out, the fire colors were on point.

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We entered through the Portageville entrance and parked by the visitor’s center. From there we took a short path to get onto the gorge trail. The trail was in no way challenging, but did offer a beautiful scenic view walking along the gorge with closer and closer views of the lower falls, upper falls and rail bridge. The most challenging part of the gorge chair might have a been the series of stone steps, wet and slippery from the spray and fall leaves. You’re able to get right up to the lower falls – Inspiration Point – but stay too long and you’ll be soaked!

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Once at the top of the falls, we trekked back down Park Road for a bit before turning left into the woods and stumbled upon the council grounds, a series of old buildings on the grounds of the former Caneadea grounds.

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After taking some time to explore, we made our way back down to Park Road, across to Middle Falls and followed the gorge trail back to our car.

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