Chapter 20, Niagara Falls State Park, New York

The RV Park we stayed in was a small park attached to the Cinderella Motel in Grand Island New York and was not much more than a gravel lot, so I won’t waste much time writing about it. It was a place to park for the two nights we’d be in the area and had full hookups and clean bathrooms. The real attraction was Niagara Falls, five miles away. We only had one day to experience this world-famous location, so we got up early the following morning and didn’t waste any time!

Canadian Side of Niagara Falls

The forecast was for sunny skies and highs around 80 but we’d woke that morning to a thick haze of smoke from the Canadian fires that turned the sun red and blocked the blue sky. The layer of smoke would stay with us for the duration of the time we spent in the park. The thing that struck us both upon arriving at Niagara Falls is how built up the area is. We were expecting a natural area, wild and uninhabited outside of the visitors who came to see this natural wonder, but instead we were met with hotels, casinos, and a carnival feel. That held true for both the U.S. and the Canadian sides of the river.

The falls themselves were spectacular and as grand as I’d imagined (although I have seen pictures, so I had an idea of what to expect) and we were awestruck by the sheer size of each of the three falls on the U.S. side—American Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, and the granddaddy of them all, Horseshoe Falls. The Niagara River comes from the great lakes and flows from Lake Erie, down the falls to Lake Ontario and it is a huge, wild river!

Horseshoe Falls

We discovered in our research that there are several hiking opportunities in the area so after we spent some time enjoying the view of the falls we set out on our hike along the Niagara River Gorge Rim Trail. We were relieved to leave the hordes of people behind (not very long after leaving the falls) to enjoy the tranquility and much more natural landscape of the canyon trail that followed the massive river.

Most of the trail was paved, but we soon left the paved part, descending a series of stone steps to traverse a more rustic trail that followed closer to the river in the canyon itself called The Great Gorge Railway Trail, which paralleled the upper trail and felt much more like actual hiking than the paved path high above.

It was lush and green, with sections of high rock walls and many spectacular views of the river. Unfortunately, the trail was closed through a portion due to unstable rocks, so we had to climb back up another rock stairway to rejoin the paved upper Gorge Rim Trail. We went through Whirlpool State Park, where we stopped for a break, had a snack and used the bathroom. We then continued to Devil’s Hole State Park which required another long descent on stone steps to see the namesake.

Our legs were feeling a little fried by this time since we’d already come about five and a half miles and we still had to go back. And we’d just done all those stairs on our seven-mile hike in Watkins Glen a couple days before, and hadn’t fully recovered. But we thought it’d be a lost opportunity to come all that way and not go see the main attraction. So down we went, albeit slowly. We got to the bottom and walked out to the river’s edge, confused by the fact that there didn’t seem to be anything about any ‘hole’ that we could find. We walked around a bit and asked a young couple we’d come across if they knew where the Devil’s Hole was, but they seemed to be as perplexed as we were.

There was a ranger who’d we’d come across about halfway down, that we saw on the way back up, so we asked her about it. Turns out the ‘devil’s hole’ wasn’t connected to the river at all, but was a small cave on the way down that Native Americans of the time believed were inhabited by evil spirits. So, we went a quarter of a mile down those steps and didn’t even see the devil’s hole! By the time we got to the trail that led to the actual ‘hole’ we were too tired to try and find it knowing we still had six miles to hike back to the truck. Besides, the ranger told us there was a lot of graffiti in the cave so that was a deterrent as well.

We really enjoyed our hike along the river and the falls themselves, although the urban sprawl surrounding the falls was a bit off-putting. Good day. We were tired by the end but glad we came!