We break camp silently in the dark. Not daring to use the flashlights, we go by touch alone, wincing at every accidental tent pole clink. We're on the trail by 5:30, and soon emerge into a field to catch our first real dawn:
We're still on brand-new trail, with lots of fresh blazes but very little actual path. One tries to imagine where the trail creators intended the path to be, and treads there. If enough people pick the same route it will get easier over time.
Eventually we re-connect with the old trail, and are relieved to find that the re-route has not cost us too much time. Today will be long (20 miles or so) but we started early, so it should not be beyond our abilities to make it to the cabin tomorrow. We navigate an elaborate maple syrup farm with a vast grid of sap lines and cute sugar shack, lunch at pretty pondside leanto in a boyscout camp, slog through blistering hot spell on roads and corn fields in the noonday sun, and climb though a hillside forest full of "odd dips and ridges." That's the map's description, pretty much right on though I'd add, as usual, "thick mud and brambles." Fighting through the brambles is just another fact of life on an underhiked trail. Sometimes, of course, they fight back...
We descend into the Genesee River valley and follow it upstream to the little village of Portageville. This town isn't right on the trail, but only about a half-mile detour, and we need to pick up some food. Not a lot here, just a single gas station convenience store and a really excellent tavern/bowling alley called the Letchworth Pines. Highly recommendable, wish we'd had time to bowl. Deb would like to add the specific note that the food here is significantly better and cheaper than what's served at the Red Coach Inn in Niagara Falls.
I confess to drinking Yuengling when by rights I should have had Genesee. This is a good table, by the way, because it's right next to an outlet and good for charging up the phone. That said, I'm not totally sold on the benefits of hiking with the smart phone. The cellular service is good enough at this point that the machine works... usually... if you walk a quarter-mile uphill, holding it aloft. It would be handy in an emergency. It's nice to have a location-aware weather forecast available. (By the way, weather forecasts in New York State are far and away more accurate than in Ontario, just sayin'.) And now we've gone and started to use it for Airbnb, a whole new kettle of fish there, we'll see how that shakes out. But being in touch with and reachable by the real world definitely breaks the spell sometimes. Not to mention the added duty of scanning for an outlet in every town situation.
Sensing my mixed feelings, the charging cable decides to call it quits right there at the Letchworth Pines, with the battery at a measly 12%. This is actually the second cable that's broken; the first I replaced in Canada. They sell super-tough cell phone cables at the hiking stores now, but wow, that would just feel like a bridge too far, eh? Optimistically, I dash off a quick line to our Airbnb host hoping to borrow a cable for tomorrow night, and power down.
The evening's hike takes us across the Genesee and up the ridge on the east side -- a grueling but gorgeous climb, with a pleasant view of the hilly farms and forests on the west side of the river where we'd been all morning. Just before dusk we make our destination, the Hesse Lean-to, generously shared with trail users by the Hesse family, whose land has hosted the trail for many years. Thanks Hesses! It's relaxing to be sleeping in an authorized manner again.
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