The Gorge and Its Nineteen Waterfalls
Near Watkins Glen, New York
A short walk from the center of Watkins Glen, Glen Creek plunges through one of the most dramatic gorges in the eastern United States. The gorge trail runs for roughly two miles, drops four hundred feet in elevation, and passes nineteen separate waterfalls along its length. All of that spectacle is packed into a trail you can complete in under two hours.
The gorge's origin lies in the Ice Age. Seneca Lake occupies a valley carved deep by glaciers. When the ice retreated, Glen Creek found itself perched high above the new lake surface, and the steep gradient set it to cutting downward through alternating layers of shale, sandstone, and limestone.
Because those rock types erode at different rates, the stream left behind a staircase of waterfalls, cascades, plunge pools, and natural potholes carved into the streambed by swirling gravel over thousands of years. People recognized the gorge as extraordinary early. Private developers opened it to visitors in eighteen sixty three.
The state of New York established the site as a public park in nineteen oh six, and workers spent the following years carving stone steps and building concrete bridges to make the gorge trail walkable for ordinary visitors. Today the trail follows the creek through more than eight hundred stone steps, past towering cliff faces, streaked with the mineral colors of an ancient seabed laid down here hundreds of millions of years ago.
