Genesee Greenway:
by Jack Bradigan Spula
Our Valley, Up Close and Natural
first published in City Newspaper (Rochester, NY)
Reprinted by PermissionAs the early sun struggled through a residual mist, the wide cinder path ahead seemed made for misapprehensions. And I saw a few, in the form of a dozen foot-wide craters dug --- exploded? --- at the fringe of the trail. I got off my bike and leaned back against the frame, wondering what had done this work. Then one of the craters began to twist and crackle. It turned out to be a female snapping turtle laying her eggs. I'd almost overlooked her bulk --- a ten-inch shell and a body twice that long --- thanks to her survival camouflage. Not wanting to be a disturbance, I remembered one teacher's advice: Don't just do something; stand there. This very minor drama played out during a typical morning rush hour. And I was actually on a sort of commute from the Scottsville area, heading north toward downtown Rochester at a quicker pace than most of the road traffic. But things were not quite "normal." I was seeing the Genesee Valley countryside --- and smelling its fragrance, hearing its earthiest sounds --- as I never had before.
The Genesee Valley Greenway was the conduit for these experiences. I had ridden sections of our premiere hiking-biking trail many times before. But my recent trip --- a few days in June spent going up the valley as far as northern Allegany County, then retracing the route back home to Rochester --- was a different level of immersion. The Greenway has certainly established itself a local identity as a refuge for non-motorized recreation (never mind snowmobiling, which is allowed on the Greenway in season). But many of the trail's most wonderful features are little known. A thumbnail history provided by the not-for-profit Friends of the Genesee Valley Greenway fills in some of the blanks. Basically, the Greenway follows the route of the old Genesee Valley Canal from the Southern Tier to Rochester's backyard. From its construction in the 1840s till obsolesence and abandonment two decades later, the canal carried farm produce and consumer goods between the Great Lakes and the Allegany River watershed, and served as economic liaison between the booming oil fields near its southern end and the evolving transportation mainlines to the north. The canal was meant to piggyback on the success of the longer Erie Canal, to which it was connected in Rochester. But the GV canal simply came along too late in the game. It was put out of business by train service, which solidified into a branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad and ran within the canal corridor until as late as 1963. Eventually, Rochester Gas & Electric Corporation became owner of most of the old canal bed and rail right-of-way. And there things sat until around 10 years ago, when the New York Parks and Conservation Association asked RG&E about using the rail bed for recreation. Soon other players were involved, including some Mt. Morris-based volunteers who in 1992 opened the first two miles of usable trail to the public. Today, thanks to the joint efforts of the Friends of the Genesee Valley Greenway, the state Department of Environmental Conservation, and the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, the Greenway is open to travel for most of its length. The land title has been cleared up, too: This past February, New York State bought 80 miles of right-of-way from RG&E, and now the whole Greenway --- 90 miles long and 60-200 feet wide --- is a genuinely public property. The Greenway, graced with old stone aqueducts (such as the double-arched masterpiece over Black Creek in Chili), cut milestone locks, and nearby cobblestone structures, is loaded with history. But the trail is very much a work in progress, too. Many Rochesterians have seen this up close, at the trail's northern end in Genesee Valley Park, on the west side of the river where the newly invigorated Erie Canal cuts across west-to-east. Here the Greenway is quite civilized. It's freshly paved, for one thing, most generously on a section near the firefighter training facilities off Scottsville Road (Route 383). Then it takes to the highway briefly: a detour onto Scottsville and Ballantyne roads, around some industrial sites and a CSX rail yard just north of Black Creek. It's at Black Creek that the Greenway gets interesting. And that's where my three-day travelogue begins.
I hit the trail just after a weekend of solid rain. For some reason, I expected to see a bunch of warm-weather commuters on the Greenway near home. But there were only a few, and they were beyond hailing distance. I consoled myself with watching the tour boat Sam Patch chug down the river as I whizzed by on the bank. Here the Greenway lurks practically on the fringe of the Greater Rochester International Airport, and things are straight and predictable. I moved along easily, picking up the cadence on the Scottsville Road section, just to get it over with. But when I turned off Ballantyne Road south onto the now unpaved Greenway --- a surface of fine, packed black cinders and infiltrated mud which used to be railbed --- I plunged into another world. This is the "tunnel" section, produced by two phenomena: First, the trail here is impossibly straight and level (and yes, you can see far enough to make out the "light at the end" of you-know-what). Second, by arrangement, the state DEC clears the vegetation from a semi-cylindrical swath, 12 feet high and 12 feet wide. The visual effect is simple and breathtaking, especially in low light. Half-lit shapes far away seem to be animated --- they could be people, or wandering pets, or woodchucks, or deer --- but the trail is unmoved, monotonous in an attractive way, compelling, oddly comforting, enclosing. I didn't have to do much physical work on this section; the pedals almost turned themselves. This gave time for watching the canal bed beside the trail. Over the years, the old canal has grown into a major linear wetland, full of swamp trees like silver maples, skunk cabbage, cattails, and unfortunately an occasional piece of farm equipment left to rust away. Some signs of human intervention are easy on the eyes, though: Take the old canal lock near Morgan Road, now high and dry and shorn of the large trees which until recently obscured the stonework. The Greenway is bordered by working farms and is regularly crossed by access drives to cultivated fields and out-of-the-way homes and outbuildings. But my expectations of meeting a farmer at work didnít pan out. I did run someone who was not exactly recreating, though. As I came out of the long "tunnel" into a sunny area near Morgan Road, I thought I'd found someone absorbed in meditation; it looked like his hands were folded in front of him in the classic gesture of cosmic gratitude. At least that was my rather grandiose thought of the moment. The mysterious figure turned out to be a man named Mike Humphrey, a Spencerport resident and employee of the Empire State Pipeline Company. Humphrey told me he was there taking measurements where the buried natural gas pipeline crosses the Greenway. He and I walked together to the next road crossing where his truck was parked. He seemed to enjoy the Greenway experience even though he was on the clock. (There's always lots of wildlife to be seen in "the ditch," he said.)
The horse farms you pass along the Greenway north of the village of Scottsville have the requisite white rail fences. But you notice something more important. You're able to savor the quiet: the blowing grasses, the flight patterns of bees and dragonflies. It's not the same experience you get when you travel the highway --- especially not through a car window at twice the cruising speed of a thoroughbred. From this zone of comfortable farms, it's a quick ride to the village. The only obstacle is an embankment at Scottsville Road. But once over and around the embankment, you're practically there. (And in fact, the village makes a nice turn-around point if you're just doing a day trip from Rochester.) The Greenway runs just below and within sight of Scottsville's impressive historic residences, emerging at little Canawaugus Park, just downhill from the business district. Two things stood out during my trip through Scottsville. As I sipped some coffee out in front of Main Street pizzeria, I noticed how dead things were: vacant storefronts, close to zero pedestrian traffic. Maybe the Greenway will spark some more activity, I thought. But I also sensed a different rhythm, a feeling which deepened as I left these suburbs and entered the Greenway's next phase, between Scottsville and Piffard. The psychological and material break between exurbs and real country is made palpable here by changes in the Greenway itself. The trail surface becomes more haphazard, with occasional grassy humps and muddy dips. It's still manageable with comfort on a fat-tire bike --- by the way, the kind of machine which is best for riding all but the Genesee Valley Park section of the trail. Along with the roughening of the trail come some natural surprises. I took special pleasure at a large pond not far from the Livingston County line. The pond was beautiful enough by itself, though not more beautiful or well-populated with wildlife than many other wetlands tucked around the Greenway's skirts. But this one was under siege, or that was my first thought. What had caught my eye was a school of large carp --- ten-pounders or more --- which were splashing their way up toward the spillway of a beaver dam. Like the egg-laying turtle I would see a few days later, the carp muscled their way through the stillness. It was probably a suicide mission.
There are some pitfalls on the Greenway, as I found between the Avon area and Mt. Morris. Some of them are little annoyances, like foliage which leans over and sometimes hides the path after a good rain. You feel like you're going through a car wash. Other pitfalls are more literal. On my trip, for example, I found myself stymied by a long-vanished bridge near Cuylerville, in the broad Genesee bottomland. I should have known better: The Greenway website (www.netacc.net/~fogvg; e-mail fogvg@aol.com) includes Tim Bayer's 1998 travelogue and maps, which point out such problems. Many of the old railway bridges which carry the Greenway trail are in good repair, and others are being restored with "TEA-21" funds. (The federal Transportation Equity Act of the Twenty-first Century has provided funds for other enhancements: stabilizing and restoring historic canal culverts, for example. Other public funds have subsidized the building of steel gates at road crossings, the posting of informational signage, and other projects.) But others were removed when the railroad went out of business and haven't been replaced. In any event, there I was in the Cuylerville outback, staring at a 10-foot span of air between myself and where I wanted to go. Would I have to backtrack to the nearest access point and follow the road to the outskirts of Mt. Morris? Or would I have to battle my way sideways through the hedgerows of well-armed berry canes and wild roses to find a way out? It turned out there was a third path: a slick, curving trail through a hawthorn grove, down to the bank of the stream which flowed under the absent bridge. This makeshift trail wasn't too hard to negotiate, actually. But carrying a gear-laden bike through two feet of water and mud somehow slipped the bonds of "recreation." It had been a hot afternoon. So I was primed for collapsing at the Greenway Motel in Mt. Morris, one of several local businesses which have sensed the business opportunities in trail sponsorship. The motel sits near Greenway Mile 35, as measured from Genesee Valley Park. In general, the village of Mt. Morris is perfectly placed as a turnaround point for a two-day trip from Rochester. The downtown looks a little worse for wear, but I found a pretty good Chinese restaurant on Route 408, and I like Main Streetís basic pizzerias and sandwich shops. (There are fancier restaurants and accommodations in the village of Geneseo, only a few miles from Mt. Morris --- like the excellent Some Place Else B&B, where I stayed the last night of my return trip.) Mt. Morris also boasts a dedicated cadre of trail enthusiasts. For example, early on my second morning out, I ran into John Alden and Kristine Beuerlein, trail volunteers who were weeding flowerboxes set between highway and Greenway. Alden touted the Greenway as a practical local thoroughfare. "It parallels Main Street," he said, but it's "out in the woods." Beuerlein added something about her friend's soft side. "John always picks wildflowers" along the trail, she said. The stretch of trail south of Mt. Morris gets less soft as you go, however --- even driving you onto much-trafficated Route 36 for a couple of miles. But it's all for a good cause: In the 18 miles from Sonyea on Route 36 to the Wyoming County village of Portageville, the Greenway yields its most magnificent sights and secrets. (Sonyea, unfortunately, also reveals the Genesee Valley's pact with the devil: the Groveland Prison complex, which has transformed a historic Shaker site and epilepsy treatment facility into a cog in the prison-industrial complex. I used to teach English at Groveland Correctional. So I can't put aside my awareness of the quasi-apartheid system which rules not just the largely Black and Latino inmate population, but also the mostly white society outside the fence.)
The midsection of the Greenway contains a series of 19th century "engineering miracles" associated with the old canal. First came the taming of the Keshequa Creek gorge. The canal crisscrossed right through it , eventually flowing into a broad, high valley between the hamlet of Tuscarora and the village of Nunda. Then the real climb began, via 17 locks within four miles, to the east side of what's now Letchworth State Park. After plunging through the famous "Deep Cut", the canal even "conquered" the Genesee River gorge. Almost unimaginably, the canal hugged the shale gorge wall across from what's now the Glen Iris Inn, bypassing the waterfalls and rapids. Then well above the falls, the canal crossed the river on a long, low aqueduct, the supports for which are still visible from Route 436 in Portageville. The day I biked the Greenway from Sonyea to Portageville, however, I thought less about the old miracles than about my constant companions, humidity and thunderstorms. Anyway, I only saw the Keshequa gorge from topside: The Greenway trail isn't continuous through the gorge these days because of some spectacular washouts. At some critical points, the rail-trail embankment has disappeared, hundreds of linear feet at a time. (A few weeks after my bike trip, my son and I walked through Sonyea State Forest, which includes much of the gorge. Just on its own merits, this public forest, accessible from town roads above Route 36, is a treasure.) But the view I did get made up for the disappointment. From a promontory just off a town road, I watched the misty weather cloak and uncloak the gorge below me, giving it the seductive distances of rainforest, a terra incognita. Parts of the trail near the hamlet of Tuscarora are easy, if a little rocky, and this whole segment lies in an area around which "progress" has made a wide detour. I stopped at the Tuscarora community park to dry out and have a candy bar. Near the picnic shelter I found a basketball on the ground and shot some hoops on a little asphalt court. Nobody else was around. The ball, like a mess of toys left in a sandbox nearby, seemed to have been provided for whoever dropped by. It's that kind of town. By contrast, Nunda is cosmopolitan. I stopped between thunderstorms at a cafe near the Village Hall for a shot of caffeine and some potato salad. People came and went, but I got so enthralled checking out my maps that the neighborly conversations faded into background. I chewed on one minor failure of my trip: When Ieft Rochester, I imagined lots of serendipitous meetings along the way, with travelers like myself as well as locals. But in two days on the trail, I'd met almost nobody. Then, especially between the Keshequa gorge and Nunda, I found myself liking the solitude. The place had finally drummed the city rhythms out of me. The Greenway's trees, animals, and especially its huge contingents of songbirds had morphed from "tourist attractions" into companions of some kind.
My climb through the 17 Locks section of the Greenway was spectacular --- and I don't use the word lightly. Part of it was the almost incessant wind and rain that day. But in any weather, the trail here is remarkable. From the east, it climbs gradually, never too steeply. But you gain elevation pretty fast. "Deep Cut," one old engineering miracle in this section, has evolved into a natural wonder: a long, slender wetland in a cleft between steep wooded slopes. And as on the steep pitches of the Letchworth gorge, the trees here develop long, straight trunks clear of branches for fifty feet or more as they grown out of the ravines toward distant sunlight. The trail proper is quite clear of vegetation, but the mature forests on both sides --- and overhead --- are among the best anywhere on the Greenway. Given the chances of washouts and avalanches while I was there, I avoided the Greenway within the Letchworth gorge. (I've hiked that area before, though, and I know how scenic and tricky it can be, particularly at the "slide" section across from the Glen Iris.) But no matter. I found plenty of good views in and around Portageville, from my "base camp" that night at Broman"s Genesee Falls Inn, an authentic landmark structure with lots of Victoriana, a decent fancy restaurant, and a smoky taproom. Portageville seemed like a portal to a different Greenway ambience. I was able to travel south only as far as Rossburg, near Fillmore, but I noticed some changes in character. These changes came not so much from the trail itself --- which is in decent shape even though occasionally obscured --- but from the trail's nearness to Route 19, the long "Main Street" of the upper Genesee Valley. Instead of the aural solitudes of the Keshequa-Tuscorara segment, you get the "music" of 18-wheelers and other heavy traffic. Speaking of discords: I stopped at the Portageville post office to gauge local reactions to Greenway development. A postal worker, who didn't want her name in print, told me that some landowners down the valley have been upset the past few months as the state prepared to take title. Some people, she said, viewed this a classic government land-grab, especially if they'd been accustomed to using parts of the right-of-way informally. (State officials have in fact been meeting with landowners about various "encroachments" in hopes of finding suitable compromises.) But local opposition isn't solid, and things are happening on the Greenway's southern sections, all the way to the village of Cuba and eventually beyond, to the city of Olean. Fran Gotcsik, executive director of Friends of the Genesee Valley Greenway, told me that new federal enhancements funds are in the pipeline. She said the funding --- some $990,000 via TEA-21 --- will make the southern half of the trail look more like the northern half. Moreover, she said, the funding could allow the state to acquire a Conrail-Erie right-of-way, complete with bridges, which will take the trail down near the Pennsylvania border. All in all, the Greenway will get wider, clearer, and better marked. And Allegany County trail enthusiasts may yet match what's been done in northern Greenway communities like Mt. Morris.
The Greenway's future looks healthy, to hear Fran Gotcsik. The trail itself will become more and more user-friendly as enhancements are purchased and maintenance improves. (To a limit: Gotcsik told me there are no plans to pave any more of the trail.) There's an economic connection, of course. Increasing commercial oportunities has been "the goal of the Greenway project since Day One," Gotcsik said. This will mean, she said, more B&Bs, diners, and outdoor equipment shops along the route --- businesses like the Tuscarora General Store and some antiques shops in the village of Fillmore. Moreover, developments like these might calm the fears of trailside landowners and residents who feel state acquisition has "taken" something from local interests. There are other social concerns, too. "Just as the canal and the railroads before, the Greenway links communities," Gotcsik emphasized. That thought flashed in and out of my mind throughout my trip. I wondered how the Greenway might become a tool to connect, say, low-income neighborhoods in Rochester's 19th Ward with more affluent areas like Scottsville. The trail does offer the infrastructure for this: A poor Rochester kid could get on his or her bike and sail down south for a dozen or a hundred miles --- especially if the Greenway becomes a magnet for camping facilities and other lower-cost amenities. Conversely, the Greenway could give rural and small-town residents (many of whom are as poor as some urbanites) a low-impact method of getting into the city. But linkages between diverse communities, different economic classes, and as-yet-separated cultures will depend --- as the Greenway renaissance has --- on the choosing the right path, and building and maintaining the appropriate bridges.
SIDEBAR Rails to trails
The Genesee Valley Greenway is just one of many such projects all over the US. Much of the work is coordinated by the national Rails to Trails Conservancy (www.railtrails.org), a not-for-profit group which provides educational and organizing materials to activists. In particular, the conservancy helps focus local and regional organizations on ways to use the $3.6 billion TEA-21 program. Some rails-to-trails projects involve short sections within neighborhoods. Others are incredibly ambitious. The East Coast Greenway project, for example, has set out to build or reclaim a 2,600-mile, continuous non-motorized trail system from the Maine-New Brunswick border down to Key West, Florida, through all the major coastal urban areas. This greenway (www.greenway.org), which will be a complementary alternative to the Appalachian Trail, will incorporate waterfront boardwalks, canal towpaths, parkway and rail corridors. The rails-to-trails movement aims to preserve abandoned rail rights-of-way by putting them to recreational use before theyíre seized for other purposes or transferred to the owners of adjacent properties. But the theory is controversial. It's been charged that the hunger for recreational trails actually encourages railway operators to call it quits --- and this at a time when we desperately need rail-service expansion for environmental as well as economic reasons. But the Rails to Trails Conservancy says it ain't so: "Rail-trails are built after all possibilities for continued rail service have been exhausted; rail-trails preserve the linear corrodor in public ownership and provide the silver lining to the tragic decline in the nation's railroad network..." Still, the controversy shows that the caution lights should go on when a state or region approaches this kind "crossing," in terms of public policy.
Questions about the FOGVG or the Trail? Email:
Fran Gotcsik, Executive Director - fogvg@aol.com
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Brian Managan - fogvg@netacc.net
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See You on the Trail!