Ithaca in four days
The town’s bumper stickers say it plainly — Ithaca is gorges. A university built on the lip of one, and a dozen more cut into the hills around Cayuga Lake. This is one day on Cornell’s campus and three in the gorges: Buttermilk and Lucifer Falls to the south, Taughannock’s single 215-foot plunge to the north, and the stone-stepped glen at Watkins to finish.
- Basecamp
- Ithaca, NY — one town, everything within 45 minutes
- Anchor
- Cornell campus & Cascadilla Gorge — the university day
- The gorges
- Buttermilk · Robert H. Treman · Taughannock · Watkins Glen
- On foot
- 3 hiking days, ~12–15 miles total — short but stair-steep
- Getting there
- ~4.5 h from NYC · ~1 h from Syracuse airport (SYR)
- Season
- Gorge trails open ~mid-May–early Nov; best late Sept–mid Oct for foliage
- The gorge trails are seasonal. Buttermilk, Treman, Taughannock and Watkins Glen close their gorge trails roughly mid-November to mid-May — ice makes the stone stairs lethal, and they mean it. Come in the open season; a shoulder-week trip can find a trail roped shut with no warning.
- State-park entry — $8–10 / vehicle day-use in season. If you’re hitting three or four parks, the Empire Pass ($80/yr) covers vehicle entry at all of them and pays for itself on Day 2.
- Cornell campus is open and free to walk. Parking is metered/permit weekdays — use a visitor garage, or come to campus on the weekend when lots open up. The Cornell Chimes play free concerts from McGraw Tower most days.
Water access from the gorges — wading, swimming, cliff jumping — is illegal and regularly fatal. Stay on the stairs. Designated swimming is at Buttermilk’s and Taughannock’s guarded pools in summer.
The university on the gorge
Ease into Ithaca on foot — a hilltop campus split by two ravines, reached by climbing one of them.
The right way to arrive on campus: park downtown and walk up the gorge. A stone staircase climbs Cascadilla Creek from Collegetown’s edge, past eight waterfalls and under mossy cliff walls, and delivers you to the south end of campus at the top. It’s the everyday shortcut Cornell students take between town and class — and the best short introduction to what “Ithaca is gorges” means.
Trail closes in winter. The lower entrance is on College Ave / Cascadilla Park Rd; come out near the Schwartz Center.
Up top, the campus is a walking tour on its own. Cross the Arts Quad, where the statues of Ezra Cornell and A.D. White face each other across the lawn, and climb McGraw Tower for a chimes concert and the view. Drift down Libe Slope for the postcard look out over Cayuga Lake, then follow Fall Creek to Beebe Lake — a flat mile-loop around a mill pond in the campus’s other gorge. Save an hour for the Cornell Botanic Gardens and the I.M. Pei–designed Johnson Museum, whose top floor has the best free view in town.
Buttermilk & Lucifer Falls
Two of the finest gorge trails in the state, ten minutes apart on the same road south.
The creek pours over a long, frothing slope of rock right at the parking lot — the “buttermilk” that names the park — and the Gorge Trail climbs beside it past a ladder of ten cascades. Come back down the wooded Rim Trail. Short, steep, and relentlessly pretty; there’s a guarded swimming hole at the base for a hot afternoon.
The best gorge walk near Ithaca. The Gorge Trail threads Enfield Glen on stone paths cut into the cliff, past a dozen falls to the showpiece — Lucifer Falls, a 115-foot ribbon you meet at eye level from a carved-rock ledge. Loop back on the Rim Trail high above the glen. Start from the upper lot and walk down-then-up, or the lower lot for the classic bottom-up climb.
Gorge Trail is seasonal (roughly mid-May–early Nov). The lower park has a stone-dam swimming hole under Lower Falls.
Taughannock — taller than Niagara
A flat walk to one enormous drop, then the rim loop for the view from above.
At 215 feet, Taughannock is the tallest single-drop waterfall east of the Rockies — a straight plunge off a sheer amphitheater of shale, higher than Niagara. The Gorge Trail is flat, an easy stroll up the creek bed to the base viewpoint; the payoff-to-effort ratio is the best in the Finger Lakes. Add the Rim Trail loop (~3–4 mi, stairs both sides) for the overlook down onto the falls and gorge.
The rim overlook off Rt 89 is a two-minute walk if legs are done. Swimming beach on Cayuga at the park entrance in summer.
Watkins Glen — the big one
Save the most famous gorge for last: nineteen waterfalls and 800 stone steps in a mile and a half.
The one that ends up on the calendars. Glen Creek has carved a slot canyon through two hundred million years of rock, and the Gorge Trail runs through it — stone stairs winding under overhangs, behind the curtain of Cavern Cascade, and across the arched Rainbow Bridge with the spray of Rainbow Falls catching the light beside you. Climb the gorge one way, return on the rim; it’s worth the 45-minute drive west from Ithaca.
Check status before you go — the main tunnel entrance and Sentry Bridge were under construction into 2026; the North Rim entrance is the alternate access. Dogs aren’t allowed on the Gorge Trail.
If you have more time — or a rained-out gorge
Ithaca Falls (a 150-ft wall of water, a five-minute walk from downtown) is the easiest add-on; Robert H. Treman’s lower park and Buttermilk’s upper Lake Treman loop both reward a second visit. Further afield: Fillmore Glen (Moravia, ~40 min) and Stony Brook are quieter cousins, and the Finger Lakes wineries along Cayuga and Seneca fill any afternoon a gorge trail is closed for weather.
A campus you reach by climbing a waterfall, and three days of stairs cut into rock — Ithaca earns its bumper stickers.