On our Road Warrior Trip (hauling our pop-up camper and making our way from Virginia up to Niagara Falls – and all the way back again!), we stopped at Letchworth State Park in New York.
I had envisioned our road trip as a leisurely exploration, taking time to stop and see less-famous sites, to discover some secrets, to follow some whims. But, for many reasons, it didn’t work out that way at all (a full article processing our trip, my recommendations, and all the good, bad, and the ugly is still to come so be sure to sign up for emails). But we did spend time at Letchworth State Park, and it was a moment where we experienced the kind of divine surprise I had been searching for.
Stopping at Letchworth was a convenience stop at first. When I was putting together our itinerary, we knew we didn’t want much more than four hours of driving on any given day, and Letchworth seemed like a good spot to stop to break up our drive from Niagara Falls down to Hersheypark. We only had one night planned in the area so this was a (planned) stop where we would not be using our camper (unplanned stops where we didn’t use our camper due to complications will be shared in the tell-all article coming soon).
Since we wouldn’t be using our camper for the night, I found a nearby cabin to stay in. But we did not enjoy that experience, so I’ll not link to the property. There are campsites available inside Letchworth State Park if you plan to camp there.
Why Visit Letchworth State Park?
The draw of Letchworth State Park? Besides its location for our road trip, I began to uncover fantastic reviews and awards all related to this particular state park.
It calls itself the “Grand Canyon of the East” (admittedly, though, a lot of places try to claim that and I haven’t seen any official designations).
So when we rolled into the state park on a summer afternoon, with maybe only a dozen other cars in the parking lot, we were eager to experience this place.
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Letchworth is over 14,000 acres, with 66 miles of hiking trails. Here, the Genesee River has carved a deep gorge as it hurls down three large waterfalls. In some places, the gorge is 550 feet deep.
The land originally belonged to the Seneca nation, who were forced out after the Revolutionary War, under the auspices that they had sided with the British and no longer had rights. The park exists today because rich Mr. Letchworth bought the land back in 1859, after seeing it from the train. He kept the land for his personal use, hiring famous landscapers to weave paths through the acres and continuing to purchase surrounding acres. His purchase supposedly kept the river from being used for hydroelectric power and thus preserved the landscape.
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Having just seen Watkins Glen, a hugely visited gorge in upstate New York, we couldn’t help but contrast our experience here with there.
According to official statistics, Letchworth State Park doesn’t see that much less in numbers each year on average than Watkins Glen (with Niagara Falls State Park being the most visited New York state park). Letchworth sees around 990,000 visitors a year while Watkins Glen sees around 1,000,000 (Niagara Falls State Park is close to 9.5 million). Yet Letchworth felt significantly less crowded for us.Â
So many things can affect that – time of day, weather, day of the week – but I think the crowding at Watkins Glen is partially due to the single-track trail that funnels every single visitor in the same direction, in a very narrow space. At Letchworth, there is far more room to spread out.
There are a significant number of hiking trails in the park (see the full map here). This post is a great overview of some of the top hikes in the park, with what to expect.
We meandered along the Gorge Trail for a few miles, making it an out-and-back. We made it to Inspiration Point and were glad we did. But once we got just past the lookout, the trail began to hug pretty tightly to Park Road, with car traffic, and we weren’t enjoying it. You can get to just about every major view there is to see in Letchworth by car and parking lot, so hiking the Gorge Trail too far felt a little anti-climatic as we sweated walking uphill while others popped out of their car, fresh and dry.
The best moments of travel are the moments where magic finds you. It can’t be planned, you can only open the door to the opportunity.
Sure, magic can find us at home and in our daily lives, but we’re usually so intently focused on the to-dos and the chores that we don’t look for it, we don’t open our hearts to it. But when we travel, we allow ourselves the opportunity to slow down and look for those moments.
As we walked up to the final waterfall in Letchworth State Park, the sun hit the fall spray and spit out a perfect rainbow.
It was a moment where everything was perfect. It was a moment where you want to take all the photos you can but you know that a photo can never capture the feeling in your heart of absolute awe and gratitude.
So for our family, we’ll continue to go out of our way to explore the lesser-known parks, to find the Grand Canyon of the East, and to explore the unknown.
Letchworth State Park was a necessary pit stop on our Road Warrior Trip, but it was also one that gave us so much more than we expected.
For more on Letchworth State Park visit: parks.ny.gov/parks/letchworth