Letchworth SP in Northwest New York

Click on the map to enlarge it. This Northwest corner of New York State is the ancestral land of the Seneca. It was fought-over by the French and British, and later the Americans and British. You can see the three campgrounds we visited: Letchworth to the Southwest of Geneseo, Golden Hill at the Northern edge of the Lake Ontario South shore, and Four Mile Creek right at the mouth of the Niagara onto Lake Ontario.

The Genesee river cuts deeply through sedimentary layers here. These lands used to belong to the Seneca indians. Not far from here was the land of a white woman that had grown-up as a Seneca. She cultivated it with some of her mixed blood sons. Her name was Mary Jamison. She was captured in a frontier Pennsylvania farm in the late 1700's by a warring party of French and indians. Her original family was massacred. She was given to the Seneca by the French to replace a dead warrior. Her life, and that of the Indian tribes fate is a tragic one. The Seneca were technologically in the stone age. This becomes SHOCKINGLY vivid when you look at their stone tools. The male Seneca were warriors and hunters. When they could no longer do this they got hooked by the white mans liquor. Mary's middle son - very much a Seneca - killed her two other sons that had inherited more white traits.

Middle Falls near the Glen Iris restaurant where we had a couple of unusually good meals. When the flood control dam at the North end of the park fills, the canyon water level rises from a fast whitewater brook at the bottom to a lake that just covers these Middle Falls. A tremendous amount of water is held back that otherwise would have flooded communities and farms to the North of the park.

The Canyon walls are 550 feet high at their highest point here. This view is past the Middle Falls, as the Genesee flows Northward

Teri looking into the Canyon of the Genesee river from Inspiration Point.

The Northern end of the canyon.

The Glen Iris - the old Letchworth home - is in the background.

Our campsite is under a dense pine canopy.

It is a rustic one, with no water, sewer, and only 20 amps of electricity. We had to use our long fresh water hoses to fill the 100 gallon fresh water tank in the RV, and our Macerator System to empty the RV holding tanks. Here is how it works: the Macerator pump connects to the RV sewer outlet and pumps all onto our sewer tank on the truck bed. We then drive to the sewer dump a mile away and empty it directly by gravity from the truck bed.

Because of the remoteness and low altitude of the Canyon, we had to deploy our 32 foot external high gain cell antenna. Of course, our Satellite Internet or Television services were unusable. Luckily we still could connect to the Internet - slowly - with our cell phone.

This is not our favorite type of campsite.

It was unusually hot and muggy here in Northwest NY. Luckily we found that even on 20 amps our AC worked well as long as we removed all other major loads.

The CCC (Civilian Conservation Core), created by FD Roosvelt during the great depresion of the 1930's, planted these pine forests on vacant farmlands purchased for the park. The CCC helped feed and organize many million unemployed and hungry young men. We saw the menus and daily schedule. They ate four square meals a day and slept 8 hour a night. On this regime of ample good food, sleep and hard physical work, the average weight gain was 12 lbs in muscle during their work creating wonderful public parks and works all over the country. Part of their pay was theirs to keep and the rest was sent directly to their families.