Day 6.351: Schoharie Creek Preserve

We've visited most of the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy properties over the last few years, so we were interested to hear of a new one. Today we visited the Schoharie Creek Preserve where there is a recently opened 1.3 mile loop trail.

The kids suggested that we were the only people crazy enough to be out hiking on a day like today, but when we got back to the car, there was another one there and the turkeys had clearly been along the trail too!

The north and east sides of the preserve are bordered by two creeks that couldn't be more different.  Leaving by the back of the parking lot and looping clockwise, the first is Wilsey Creek, a small steep stream with a series of waterfalls - not hard to see, but rather too hidden by the trees for good photographs (the two on the right are from the road after we'd reclaimed the car):

The second is Schoharie Creek itself, which here is a wide open river and the trail descends right beside it.  Today it had impressive lumps of ice on the shoreline and impressive (and apparently slippery) ice on the trail (E5N1 is hamming it up - it's not as bad as it looks!)

The trails down to the creek and back are fairly steep, but were fairly easily passable even today. It's a beautiful spot and we were happy to have taken the drive out to Esperance to take a walk there.