Rochester's High Falls & Lower Falls

Two weekends ago we decided to make a short trip to High Falls in downtown Rochester. There’s this pretty good sized waterfall that is kind of in among the buildings of the city – apparently these waterfalls were a main reason that Rochester was originally settled, because of the potential to use the energy created by the waterfalls in the mills and factories that used to line the banks around High Falls. We also found out that there are one or two other falls nearby too, so after visiting High Falls (it was cool, but you could just walk out on a pedestrian bridge and look at it, and we’re more excited about hiking through creeks to ‘discover’ waterfalls that feel like they’re more out-of-the-way, so it just didn’t seem as impressive, even though it was a good sized waterfall), we drove down a ways and took a little walk through Lower Falls park. (We parked at a rose garden, and took a trail from there – I guess there’s also another trail on the other side where you can actually get down in the gorge near the river). But we got to walk through this little, secluded park in the middle of the city. At one point we climbed up on a wall to get a view of the smaller Lower Falls, and could see some people way down at the bottom who had taken wave runners up and gotten out near the base of the falls and were walking behind the waterfall – now that looked cool, although it’s not really the kind of thing you could do with little kids. But we enjoyed the walk through the park, and it was a nice little outing that only took a couple of hours.

Isaac letting Brax wear his hat.