I Planned a Finger Lakes Trip Around One Waterfall

I've photographed some spectacular landscapes, but Watkins Glen is unusual because the beauty is so concentrated.

You don't hike for three hours waiting for the payoff. You enter the gorge and almost immediately you're inside it.

Towering rock walls rise around you. Water runs beside the trail. Stone staircases disappear around corners. Bridges cross above waterfalls. Ferns and moss grow out of seemingly every crack.

And then the trail keeps revealing another composition. And another. And another.

As a photographer, it's ridiculous.

One thing became increasingly obvious to me during this trip.

Your lodging isn't separate from a Finger Lakes vacation. It's part of it.

This isn't a destination where you want to spend all day exploring and then return to a generic hotel room. The landscape is the attraction. So staying somewhere that continues that experience, surrounded by trees, near the lake, with outdoor space, a fire pit, a porch, somewhere to make breakfast and settle in, fundamentally changes the trip.

My favorite thing in town, though, is a giant griddle bolted to the side of a building.

Penn Yan is buckwheat country, and in 1987 the Birkett Mills used that griddle to cook a pancake just over 28 feet across, a world record at the time. They never took the griddle down. It's still there, painted up, leaning against the mill like the town is quietly daring you not to find it charming.

I found it extremely charming.

Walk a couple of blocks off the main street and you're into big Victorian houses with deep porches and bay windows, the kind of architecture that tells you this town had money when the mills and the lake traffic were running.

Hector Falls is one of those Finger Lakes moments where nature just casually appears beside the road.

It's on the eastern side of Seneca Lake, and the part most people photograph, the section you can see from the car, is only the bottom of it.

From above you can see what's actually happening: the falls continue well up the hillside, and the highway bridge crosses partway down. You're driving over the middle of a waterfall and most people never realise it.

Worth incorporating into a drive along the lake rather than treating it as a standalone excursion.

The falls are named after the village, or the village after the falls, depending on how you look at it. Either way, Montour Falls is worth stopping in rather than driving past.

It's a small grid of brick storefronts sitting underneath the hillside, close enough to Watkins Glen that you could easily miss it and be somewhere else in four minutes.

My favorite detail is this doorway. The lodge sign still carries the name Chequaga, the older local name for the water coming down above the village. The building has changed hands, the sign hasn't, and nobody has painted over it.

That's the thing I kept finding in the Finger Lakes. The history isn't curated for visitors. It's just still there, on the front of a building, doing nothing in particular.

Same level of magic as Watkins Glen but different vibes.

There are destinations you check off. And there are destinations that somehow become part of your creative life.

For me, the Finger Lakes became the latter.

That is really what I came home with. Not just the waterfalls, the personality of the place. The honor-system jar. The pancake griddle. The lodge sign nobody painted over. The car on the lawn.

There is so much character packed into a few square miles of it, and I know for a fact I did not get to most of it.

I came home with thousands of photographs and videos. But more importantly, I came home wanting to make something from them. To show people this place. To tell the story properly.