Tuesday, July 17, 2007
photo slideshow
Legs didn't feel up to a run yet, so Ann and I took our ATBs out for a ride, first up at Turning Point Park and along the Genesee Riverway, and then over across the river along the Rochester Running Track railbed next to Seneca Park.
We started at Turning Point and went down on the boardwalk along the edge of the river that I ran and we rode back at the end of June. Once again we saw lots of turtles, the swans and their cygnet, ducks, and the heron. While we were there, a tugboat was pushing the cement boat down the river toward the cement company dock.
On the way back to Turning Point, we got to see a kingfisher swoooping around (he even landed briefly on the boardwalk railing just ahead of us) and Ann spotted a black rat snake curled up on a patch of reeds. After walking the bikes up the short steep hill, we headed into the woods and rode over to Red Falls. Riding through the shady woods was nice after being out on the boardwalk!
Originally I had planned to leave the car at Turning Point and ride the Riverway down to the Pure Waters pedestrian bridge across the river into Seneca Park. Between the somewhat shady characters hanging out at the Turning Point parking lot and all the sidewalk we'd have to ride between there and the bridge, we decided instead to drive over to Seneca Park and ride the east side out of there. After parking in one of the zoo lots, we rode down to the pedestrian bridge and up the long hill to the rim of the gorge on the other side, then back the way we came. The last time we were at the bridge, we watched deer walking around in the wooded area far beneath the bridge - this time the only thing to see was the view of the gorge in either direction.
From there we headed out of the park and onto the old railbed... this is one that hasn't been resurfaced, so it's definitely for the rough-and-ready. Lots of rocky ballast stone made for a bumpy ride in some spots, as did a certain amount of overgrowth. Along the way we passed the Seneca Park Zoo, where we caught glimpses of the wallabies, a tiger, and a rather sad-looking elephant. (I generally think it's a shame to see these lovely animals penned up in zoos... but I think it's an even bigger shame that for some of these critters, being in a zoo is the best chance they have to survive... it's a horrible thought that someday the only african elephants left may be the ones in zoos.) We also startled a number of birds, including the usual robins and goldfinches but also some birds I hadn't seen before - I've since identified them as yellow-shafted Northern Flickers, and apparently they were down on the trail because they love to eat ants.
photo courtesy of Ken Thomas
I had originally hoped to ride almost all the way to the Lake, but about 3/4 of a mile past the park we hit a bad washout that left a major gap in the railbed, and it didn't make sense to try to walk to bikes to the other side just to get in a little more riding. So we turned around an headed back to the trailhead, shaving a few minutes off the return trip by squeezing through a narrow gap in the fence between the railbed and the park just a hundred feet or so from where we'd parked the car.
JMH
