When it comes to planning a vacation or getaway, New York State Parks has overnight options for all kinds of adventures – and budgets!
While some enjoy sleeping in tents away from it all in remote, natural settings under the stars, others crave a few more amenities. Whether you prefer booking rustic cabins and bringing your RV, staying in fully equipped cottages, or resting your head at a historic inn or resort with the comforts of home, State Parks has something for everyone.
Our Parks system includes 8,148 campsites, 967 cabins and cottages, 18 yurts, three inns, and – yes – a lighthouse. There are countless adventures for every type of stay. Get a map handy and explore highlights from some of our most interesting properties to inspire your next stay.
La Isla Bonita
If you have a boat or have access to renting one, answer the siren song of the water and consider the benefits of staying on one of three island parks in the Thousand Islands that are only accessible by boat.
Why worry about clearing your campsite for the tent when you can enjoy a level platform? Platform camping provides a wooden deck floor for pitching your tent on a smoother and more even surface.
A camping deck inLake Taghkanic State Parkin Ancram, NY.
The perfect place for a family reunion on the Great Lakes? Check. Lakefront luxe in the Finger Lakes for a bachelorette wine-tasting weekend? Check. Thousand Islands waterfront cabin for anglers telling fish tales about the day’s catch? Check. Memories to last a lifetime? Check, check, check.
Robert Wehle State Park’s cliffside compound, Thousand Islands region.
Robert Wehle State Park features a private setting that accommodates eight, and includes a compound with a main house, guest quarters, studio, and formal gardens set cliffside along the Lake Ontario shorefront.
A cabin porch at Betty and Wilbur Davis State Park near Cooperstown, NY.
Fans of America’s pastime can stay at a cottage at Betty and Wilbur Davis State Park near Cooperstown and head to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, then go old school and listen to a game on the radio from the cottage’s front porch.
With summer now in full swing, hiking trails are calling from the Central Region of State Parks, which stretches from Lake Ontario to the Southern Tier and Pennsylvania border.
The region includes glacial lakes, sandy beaches, segments of the historic Erie Canal, and dramatic waterfalls.
Covering Broome, Chenango, Cortland, Delaware, Herkimer, Madison, Oneida, Onondaga, Oswego and Otsego counties, the Central Region is home to 22 parks, seven historic sites and three golf courses.
Overview of State Parks and Historic Sites in the Central Region.
Maps and a variety of other useful information on NY State Parks, including those in the Central Region, are now available on the NYS Parks Explorer app. The free app, which is available for use on Android and iOS devices, is easy to download, user friendly and allows patrons to have park information readily available.
As with all hikes, there are a few things to remember beyond carrying a mobile phone. Wear sturdy, yet comfortable shoes or boots, bring water and snacks, and perhaps carry a camera to capture what you see. Be aware of your surroundings and mindful of hikes on steep terrain or those that go near cliff tops. Having a small first-aid kit available in case of an emergency is never a bad idea.
Hiking poles are also useful and can transfer some of the stress of hiking from your knees and legs to your arms and back.
Trail maps are available on the new Parks Explorer app, as well as on each individual park website page at parks.ny.gov and at the main office of each park. Be sure to download maps ahead of time or carry a paper copy as a back up
In addition to the name and distance of each designated trail in a park, the maps include facilities such as parking, comfort stations, park offices, nature centers, campsites, and boat launches. To learn more about NYS Parks trails CLICK HERE.
Hikers should know how long a trail is and how long it ought to take to finish. Since daylight is not an unlimited resource, tossing a flashlight or headlamp into your backpack is a good form of insurance, should you unexpectedly find yourself on the trail as dusk approaches.
Additionally, as incidents of tick-borne diseases surge in the state, it is always important to check yourself for ticks after being outside, even if it is only time spent in your own backyard.
Lastly, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, remember to practice safe social distancing, particularly in parking lots and at trailheads, and use face coverings when a distance of six feet cannot be maintained. To learn more about important COVID safety guidelines, CLICK HERE.
Chenango County
Oquaga Creek State Park, 5995 County Route 20 Bainbridge, NY 13733, (607) 467-4160: Take a scenic hike around beautiful 55-acre Artic Lake on a trail perfect for all ages, including beginning hikers. Afterward, cool off by taking a swim or having a picnic at the beach. The trail starts at the right side of the beach area, where the main Oquaga Creek is tucked in the woods. After coming out of the woods, take the blue trail to the left to start a 1.2-mile journey around the lake. There are plenty of spots to stop and fish and even a cemetery dating back to the Civil War. The park has more than ten miles of wooded and open trails.
Chenango Valley State Park, 153 State Park Road, Chenango Forks, (607) 648-5251: The two-mile Chenango Lake Trail circles the park’s namesake lake. The trail on the eastern side is open, accessible, and suitable for wheelchairs, while the western side is more robust single-track style path. There are several ways to start the trail – at the newly renovated beach area, located at the south end of the lake, or after parking in the new ADA compliant parking lot at the north end of the lake that connect to the Bog Trail, which then connects to the lake trail.. This multi-use trail also attracts dog walkers, hikers, cyclists, and bird watchers. And keep an eye out for one of the park’s resident bald eagles, gliding above the lake searching for a meal. This park has more than 14 miles of trails.
To explore the park’s 14 miles of trails, find a trail map here…
The ADA-accessible trail at Chenango Valley State Park.
Onondaga County
Green Lakes State Park, 7900 Green Lakes Road, Fayetteville, (315) 637-6111: This 2,200-acre park has a nearly 20 miles of trails, with access starting at the main parking lot at Green Lake, a rare meromictic lake with an unique aqua color. (Meromictic lakes have water layers that do not annually intermix, as in in the case with nearly all other lakes. There are only three dozen meromictic lakes in the U.S. Green Lakes has two, with Round Lake being the second.) Trails around both Green Lake and Round Lake run about three miles, while doing just the Green Lake trail covers two miles. The park offers a variety of recreation including mountain biking, fishing, kayaking, and birdwatching.
Delta Lake State Park, 8797 State Route 46, Rome, (315) 337-4670: This park is located on a peninsula that juts into the Delta Lake Reservoir. The Fox Run Trail starts in the northwest corner of the Fox Run Parking lot. At about a half-mile long, this wide level trail is perfect for beginners. With benches along the way to rest and take in the surroundings, hikers can see a variety of ducks, the occasional eagle, a rare owl and maybe even a fox. The Fox Run trail ends at the Yellow trail, where you can keep exploring the shoreline forest or head back.
A red fox surveys from atop a downed tree stump at Delta Lake State Park.
Pixley Falls State Park, 11430 State Route 46, Boonville, (315) 337-4670: A highlight of the Nature Trail, which is just three-quarters of a mile long, is the 50-foot waterfall that the park is named for. The trail can be steep, and slippery in wet weather, so proper footwear is definitely recommended. The trail includes many other smaller falls, and on its lower half follows the course of the Lansing Kill, which is well known for its trout fishing.
Glimmerglass State Park, 1527 County Highway 31, Cooperstown, NY 13326, (607) 547-8662: Overlooking Otsego Lake, the famed “Glimmerglass” of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, this park offers five miles of hiking trails and a beach for swimming afterward.
The rolling, partially wooded terrain is host to a wide variety of wildlife. If you bring your four-legged friend, remember to keep dogs on a six-foot leash at all times.
An uphill trail through Mount Wellington offers the Sleeping Lion Trail that varies terrain and offers two miles of varying terrain for a moderate hike. Along the service road that leads to the trail head offers an scenic overlook of the lake to the south toward Cooperstown.
The overlook of Otsego Lake at the Sleeping Lion Trail.
The Beaver Pond trail offers a half-mile ADA -accessible trail surface around the “Beaver Trail”. Along this route you will discover “Eco Boxes” that describe the animals that might been seen during a hike.
The Covered Bridge Trail leads to the oldest wooden covered bridge in the United States. This one-mile, partially wooded trail runs along along Shadow Brook that feeds Otsego Lake.
The wooden covered bridge at Glimmerglass State Park.
Betty and Wilbur Davis State Park, 133 Davis Road, Westford, NY 12197, (607) 547-8662: Perched atop of a hill, this 223-acre park offers spectacular views and vistas to the south and west for some amazing sunsets.
This park has 2.7 miles of trails, with gentle meadows, wooded areas, and two catch and release ponds. Birdwatchers, remember to bring your binoculars.
The Ice Age, which helped form Chenango Valley State Park in the Southern Tier about 12,000 years ago, is back in a big way.
After leaves are off the trees, but before the snow flies, park crews will create what is possibly the largest refrigerated outdoor ice rink in North America. And when they build it, hockey players young and old will come.
At 24,200 square feet, this mechanically-generated ice sheet is more than 40 percent larger than the temporary outdoor facilities set up by the National Hockey League, which plays a handful of its contests outside each year.
Behold the frozen home of the Binghamton Pond Festival (called Pond Fest for short), a series of outdoor amateur hockey tournaments and youth events in the park that started in 2016, and now is drawing hundreds of youth and adult players to Broome County in January from as far away as California and Texas.
Teams compete at the Binghamton Pond Fest last year. Larger than an NHL rink, the Pond Fest refrigerated rink is divided into four sections.
Young skaters take to the ice.
A youth team member gets her game face on.
This year’s fest starts January 11 and again benefits the Mental Health Association of the Southern Tier and its programs focused on youth suicide prevention and youth mental health awareness.
Pond Fest owes it creation and growing success to two men — Tytus Haller, its founder, and Mike Boyle, manager at Chenango Valley State Park — and to the reliability of mechanical refrigeration to create and keep ice even when Mother Nature is not cooperating.
“Our first two years, in 2016 and 2017, we were running the tournament on the lake. We’d be out there checking the ice all the time,” said Haller.
And both years, unusually warm weather during the tournament left the ice in poor condition, which reduced the appeal to potential players. Said Haller, “The first couple of years, it was mainly a local crowd.”
Tytus Haller, founder and executive director of Binghamton Pond Fest, and his wife, Libbie.
But that all changed when Haller — the assistant director of the SUNY Broome Ice Center in nearby Binghamton — decided if winter was going to be unreliable, it was time to free Pond Fest from the weather with a mechanical refrigeration system.
Such systems use glycol, tubes, pumps, and “chiller” machines to drop the temperature of refrigerated tubing beneath a rink into the mid-teens. This forms an ice sheet that can be maintained even in warm weather.
All Haller had to do was figure out a way to get the equipment, which was going to cost a couple hundred thousand dollars.
With the help of state Sen. Fred Askhar, who got a $150,000 grant to help Chenango Valley buy much of the rink system, the 2018 tournament was the first played played on refrigerated ice.
“Things really took off then and in 2019, when word got out what we had and what we were doing,” Haller said. “I have not found anyone else in North America that has a refrigerated outdoor rink as large as ours.”
Now, the tournament in the park is drawing youth and adult teams from states beyond New York including New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, and California.
One of those coming in with a youth team in 2020 is Dallas resident Seth Turner. He has ties to Haller and the region after attending and playing hockey at Broome Community College some two decades ago.
He attended the initial Pond Fests without refrigeration, and saw how it all changed once the equipment was added. Now a youth hockey coach in Dallas, Turner pitched the idea of a January trip to upstate new York to local families, and eight are taking on the expense to send their kids to Pond Fest.
“Having refrigeration is the pitch,” Turner said. “I was able to tell parents that their kids would be playing, no matter what, whether it was raining, or sunny, or snowing. And that we would be playing in a beautiful park, in the woods. That made it an easy sell.”
Hockey is an increasingly popular sport in Dallas, he said, due to the presence of the city’s NHL team, the Stars. Local interest is even stronger now that the NHL will play its outside “Winter Classic” on a refrigerated ice sheet in that city’s Cotton Bowl in January.
At Pond Fest, adults have three-on-three and four-on-four tournaments. Youth teams have six and 16 players for a weekend of hockey and other fun in the park. Pond Fest also hosts a skills and skating clinic and will now offer private rentals of the ice sheet.
Fireworks reflect off the ice at Pond Fest.
Boyle said the festival draws fans and families into the 1,137-acre park along the Chenango River, which also features sledding and cross-country skiing in the winter. The park’s two lakes – Chenango and Lily – were formed as glaciers retreated at the end of the most recent Ice Age.
“We love this
event,” Boyle said. “We hope this keeps going for years and years to come.”
The park has added a fire hydrant near the rink, to make it easier to spray water on the rink mat system. Water has to be sprayed repeatedly in thin layers to freeze in order to make the strongest ice, a process that can take about a week to get the proper thickness on such a large ice sheet.
“Our crew here at Chenango Valley State Park has been fantastic. We have learned a lot about making an ice rink,” said Boyle. “We could build an ice rink in Florida now, if we had to.”
An electrical power upgrade is also in the works, which will reduce the need for portable electric generators that Haller has been bringing to power his multiple chiller units and pumps that move the 2,750 gallons of chilled glycol through the rink’s tubing system. His not-for-profit organization, Broome Winterworks, devotes about $25,000 annually to cover equipment rental, which is just a small part of the expenses that go into the event.
The rink refrigeration system set up before layers of water are sprayed inside to form the ice sheet. The freezing process takes about a week.
The finished rink.
Haller said the tournament in the park has turned into an economic benefit for the county, as visitors need lodging and meals.
“There are not a lot of outdoor tournaments that have a refrigerated system like we do. We are getting visitors coming up here from southern states, because they know we are going to have ice, even if it is 60 degrees and sunny,” he said. “It is no different than when people from New York State go south to the beaches during the winter. We have something here that they want and many of our players refer to the Binghamton area as a hidden gem.”
In addition to creating the wintertime fun, the multi-weekend event donates money to various youth programs including more than $23,000 so far to fight youth suicide, said Joanne Weir, development director of the Mental Health Association of the Southern Tier. The money supports the association’s DFID (Do It For Daron) program, named after a 14-year-old who died by suicide.
“We are thankful for the awareness that is provided to our association by this amazing event,” said Weir. “The Binghamton Pond Festival has continued to grow each year, and so have the conversations. Every step that we can take at breaking down the stigma associated with mental illness is a win – on or off the ice!”
Film and television star (and amateur hockey player) Steve Carell gets a look at a Pond Fest 2018 winner’s trophy with members of a women’s team from California after their return home.
Post by Brian Nearing, Deputy Public Information Officer, NYS Parks.
All photos courtesty of Binghamton Pond Festival
Have a team interested in playing at Pond Fest? Registration information is available here.
Interested in ice skating available at other State Parks this winter? Check out this list.
Civilian Conservation Corps By Unknown or not provided (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
What started in 1931 as a simple idea to put unemployed New Yorkers to work on state-funded public works projects through the New York Temporary Emergency Relief Administration grew to become the largest peace time utilization of people and equipment in US history – the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC. Many New York State Parks including Thacher State Park, Fahnestock State Park, Lake Taghkanic State Park, Selkirk Shores State Park, Thacher State Park, Green Lakes State Park, Letchworth State Park, Hamlin Beach State Park, Chenango Valley State Park, Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park and more benefited from the work that was performed by over 200,000 CCC members from 1933-1942. During these nine years, 61 camps of 200 CCC members built roads, trails, cabins, and stonewalls, planted trees, worked on early invasive species detection and removal and more. The Allegany and lower Hudson Valley regions were considered the highest environmental priority and had CCC camps each year, while other encampments would last a season or two, moving on to another location when the job was done.
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About 40 different CCC camps were spread across the state each year. The typical CCC member was between 18-25 years old, “unemployed, unmarried, healthy, not in school, from a needy family, and capable of doing work” (Thompson). Most CCC members were white males; however New York also had CCC camps for Native Americans, African Americans, WWI veterans (separate camps for white and African American veterans), and separate camps for women (known as She-She-She Camps).
State Parks honors the memory of the CCC members with a CCC Statue at Letchworth State Park.
CCC Statue at Letchworth State Park. Photo by OPRHP.
This January, New York State is reviving the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration conservation corps with the inaugural New York State Excelsior Conservation Corps (ECC) and a 10-month residential program modeled after the CCC. The program is open toNew York State students and residents aged 18-25, with an emphasis on veterans and expanding diversity. The 50 ECC members will be based at SUNY Morrisville where they will receive eight weeks of specialized trainings and certifications lead by the Student Conservation Association – Hudson Valley Corps . Then, starting in March and running through early November, ECC members will work in State Parks, Department of Environmental Conservation and other state agency lands on projects across the state focused on:
Open Space Management, maintaining and improving hundreds of miles on New York’s hiking trails
Recreation and Access Mapping, monitoring and mapping over 10,000 acres of public land for safe recreational use
Natural Resource Stewardship, invasive species removal and protection of native species and ecosystems
Environmental Education and Outreach, educating New Yorkers on conservation and stewardship of public lands
Infrastructure and Sustainability, helping to cut New York’s energy consumption and energy costs through the construction of renewable energy projects.
During the 10-months, ECC members will get a chance to work on their education plans and develop career skills. At the end of their service they will be given a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award.
Building on their hands-on experiences and training, ECC members will be poised to become New York’s next generation of conservation leaders. Learn more about the ECC in future blogs.
Post by Susan Carver, OPRHP. Slideshow photos courtesy of OPRHP.
Thompson, Craig; 75 Years Later: The Legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corp; Conservationist, New York State Department of 85 Environmental Conservation, February 2008; http://www.dec.ny.gov/pubs/42768.html.
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