2024-01-01 42 -78

Location

Allegany State Park, in the woods off Coon Run Road

Participants

Pedalpusher
J

Expedition

After a quick expedition to the Mall, I stopped in West Seneca to pick up J from her Mom's place and we headed for ASP. It was a mostly uneventful drive, but once we increased our elevation a bit, we got to see all the trees and fields covered in a very thin layer of snow making everything look very nice.

Once in the park, I drove into the central part of the Quaker area and parked at the western end of the Bear Caves trail and across the road from where Coon Run hits the main road through the park. We hopped out and started walking up the road and I turned on the GPS so we could avoid trouble if it had a hard time picking up a signal before we got close. I was surprised it was still searching for more locks to calculate a position even after we had 5 or 6 satellites locked in, but shortly after that, I had our position and saw we had about 1 KM to go.

It was pretty much the entire way on the road and I noted where the North Country Trail crossed the road (where I passed by last year on my backpacking trip) just before we had to turn off into the woods for the last 100+ meters. Fortunately, the woods here were pretty open and we had no trouble walking up the hill to locate the hash. I had a very quick GPS dance and got a good reading pretty quickly. After taking the pictures, we headed back to the car to drive to another trail I haven't yet completed. Otherwise, we probably would have just set a timer and walked on the NCT for a while.

Back at Quaker Lake, I found the road to the Beach and the fork to the Campsites blocked and closed so we parked in a little lot next to the new bike path and walked that to the beach area. I hadn't looked at the map before we came and I thought the trail used to go along the road here to the beach. I assumed they had paved over the trail and turned it into a multi-use trail. We even saw a small ramp up to the road a bit further in where I thought the old trailhead used to be. I planned on walking back up there on the way back to confirm this, but we enjoyed our walk along the lake despite the cold breeze in our faces. Getting to the Beach Area, we walked to the parking lot because I wanted to check out the sign there and see if it mentioned the old trail.

As we were walking through the parking lot, I looked up toward the road and saw another little kiosk that looked like it could be the actual trailhead. If so, we definitely weren't on the trail. I asked J if she minded walking over there to check it out and sure enough, it was the Flagg trailhead. Good news was it is not a loop trail, and it had a bit of an elevation change going over the hill behind the beach, but came back to the other road and wasn't too far away from where we parked. J was amenable to walking back on the trail and I was finally able to check this last official hiking trail off my list for hiking all the trails at ASP! The only thing left now is one last section of a Horse Trail on the other side of the park.

At the end of it, we walked about 4.5 Miles/7.2 KM for a nice New Year's Day. It felt great to get out for a good long hike because we haven't done that in a long time. On the way back, I dropped J back off at her Mom's so she could pick up her car and we headed for home.

Photos

Made it!
Accuracy.
View East from the Hash. You can't see it in the picture, but we could just barely see the road from the hash.
View North.
View West.
View South (toward PA). If I had looked at the map better, I probably would have suggested walking to PA on the road after the hash.
Standard Stupid Grins at the hash.
View of the hash on the little mound in the middle.