# Shindagin / Ithaca NY 6/21



## gorgonzola (Jun 26, 2008)

I took the family up to central NY this past weekend to do a little camping and riding and ended up in Taughannock SP just north of Ithaca on Cayuga lake. We left Friday afternoon and drove up in the pouring rain, than the sky morphs from bruise black and gray to bright blue with the most brilliant rainbow i've ever seen spanning the south end of the lake! 

Lots to do at the park with a nice gorge (like the t shirt says - ithaca is gorges) ending at a 200' waterfall. the best hikes are up through the water in the gorge(not gorge trail)and the rim trails - although all are real easy hikes. all i can say is thunder RIPS through that mofo as we had intermittant storms roll through saturady and sunday nights

No riding there though so i did my saturday morning ride at Shindagin State Forest about a half hour away - sorry no pics. I had posted for some beta and a trail map on cycle-cny.com and ended up meeting a few folks on my ride. real good peeps who do a great job of building/maintaining shinny and other places through out cny. give 'em a shout if your ever up that way and i told them to do the same if they ever get down to the lehigh valley. may even hook up for a half way ride at merli/prompton some time. the trails were awesome fast and flowy singltrack WITH NO ROCKS! lotsa built features - skinnies, logovers, bridges with some free ride type stuff as well. with the rain we had friday it was slick going so i kept the tires close to the ground - hell i keep it close to the ground even when it dry but would have given the elevated bridge and maybe one of the easier skinnies a go. the more technical trails are fairly steep swoopy downhills with lots of turns and woops. highlights include paperboy, bitchditch and the chair trail. Did a total of 12 miles coming in at right around 2 hours. was hoping to ride sun/mon but figured the continued t-storms at night would make it just too soggy and would preserve self and trail for another day.

a report wouldn't be complete wittout mentioning ithaca itself. keeping in mind it was ithaca-fest weekend, its still got to be one of the crunchiest cities around with cornell and ithaca college - i haven't seen that much tie die and pacholi oil since giants stadium 1995


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