Our Campsite at Golden Hill State Park - This is a campground with only 65 site of which all have a view of Lake Ontario. It is a peaceful charming place and has been rated as one of the top 100 state campgrounds in the U.S. It has a few trails, but what is has most, is the arresting beauty of Lake Ontario that inspires your soul and refreshes your inner self. It is a tonic of nature!

30-Mile Lighthouse - This lighthouse is in the campground and is one of the most beautiful lighthouses with keeper quarters attached that I have seen so far. It was built in 1875 and has saved many of ships from the rocky shoals and shifting sandbars. In 1995, the lighthouse was pictured on 32 cent stamps. This is one lighthouse that feels like someone's home and there is a sense of tender loving care that has been given to the lighthouse. From our campsite, we could see the flash from the automated light once the sun went down bringing us a feeling of being out in the waters with this beacon of safety.

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.