Buttermilk Falls State Park is located in Ithaca only minutes from the city center and provides a swimming hole with amazing ambiance along with tons of waterfalls
We spent the beginning of our day hiking through Watkins glen and Robert H. Treman State parks. After some lunch we finished our first day in New York by hiking Buttermilk Falls which was located 2 minutes from our hotel. Like Treman park, this spot also had a swimming pool at the base of the falls that was not open. The water flow was pretty minor compared to photos I've seen but this didn't prevent people from sunbathing or dipping their toes in.
The entire park is composed of yet another gorge hike followed by a return trip on the rim. These rim hikes all seem to be pretty uneventful while the gorges are all amazing. What we discovered though is that the no swimming rule was only really follow in the main pool area and most people were jumping into the various water waterfalls with abandon, once out of sight of the rangers at the bottom.
While this was the shortest of the hikes we took that day, we were already burned out from the massive number of stairs from earlier. When I explain to you that this park is purely stairs on the way up with only sporadic flat sections, I'm not kidding. I had to wait quite a while to snap photos in some areas with people swimming. In fact most of these photos have people in them... it's just that they dove under water and I quickly snapped the picture right then. Don't expect to have this place to yourself at all.
The gorge seemed to be very well shaded from the sun, we hiked through at 4pm and it felt like twilight. If you watch the video above you'll get a very good feeling for the lighting here. There is a mark on the map called pinnacle rock. This a pillar of stone between the trail and water that is hard to miss. After this point is a few more small swimming holes and falls and then that's it. You can proceed up to the road and hike beyond or do what we did and turn around. We crossed the well marked bridge over to the rim trail which takes you directly to the parking lot.
This, like all the other parks in Ithaca, is a must visit. The sheer number of water falls packed into these parks is amazing. This park in particular has so many options for swimming even though it's supposedly not allowed. Even though it's the smallest of the three parks we visited that day, I think I enjoyed the scenery here the most.
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