Watkins Glen State Park

Watkins Glen State Park earns every visitor it gets, which is a lot of visitors. The gorge trail runs approximately two miles along Glen Creek through a sequence of nineteen waterfalls carved into Devonian sedimentary rock, and the scale and compositional density of what you move through in those two miles is the most concentrated geological payoff per trail mile of any park in the Finger Lakes system. I have walked the gorge in every season it is open and multiple times in most of them, and the repeat visits have not produced any diminishing return on the experience.

Let me be specific about what makes the gorge worth the crowd it draws. The waterfalls are not evenly distributed. They come in clusters and in sequences, with the trail passing directly under some of them and beside others, and the relationship between the trail and the water changes along the two-mile route in a way that requires you to move at the gorge's pace rather than your own. The geology does not allow you to rush it. The stone walls press close enough in sections that the trail is a negotiation between your movement and the rock, and the overall effect is immersive in a way that cliff-edge viewpoint parks are not.

The photographic problem at Watkins Glen is the crowds, which compress into the narrow gorge corridor most intensely on summer weekends and which make the kind of long-exposure work the falls and moving water demand technically difficult after approximately 9 AM on a Saturday. The solution is either an early start on a weekday in summer, or the shoulder seasons, which are among the most productive working conditions the park offers. May and early June in the weeks before the summer pressure peaks. October, when the gorge floor transitions to fall color in a way that the canyon walls frame in a specific relationship with the light that the summer canopy forecloses. Those are the versions to target if photography is the reason for the visit.

Five stars for the geology, for the engineering of the original trail system, and for the quality of the DEC's ongoing infrastructure maintenance at a level appropriate to the visitor volume the park handles. The tunnel sections, the stone steps, the rainbow bridge, these are infrastructure elements that have been in the gorge for generations and still function at a standard that the original builders couldn't have anticipated needing to serve.

Watkins Glen State Park is one of the anchor locations on any serious Finger Lakes photography itinerary. If you haven't been, go in October. If you've been in summer, you haven't seen it.