[Hiking] Lisha Kill Preserve

Nice day for a short hike.

A simple hike in Niskayuna, New York with some nice views of water and wildlife. The trail has lots of trail markers so it is almost impossible to get lost. We decided to tackle the entire trail by going through all of them.

Book: Best Easy Day Hikes Albany by Randi Minetor*

We wanted to do a short hike before doing our errands nearby. This book gives quite a lot of options for hikes around 1-2 hours. This hike was mention under the section for best hike for waterfalls.  We saw water falling but it was more of a inch for the stream. I'm not sure if it was listed under the wrong section, if we missed it or we couldn't get a good view.

GPS: Waze*

Luckily, this time we were in an area with signal so we had no problems leaving. We did have a hard time finding the trail. The sign was tiny and we finally made it after 3 tries.

* = not affliated

Our Bag

Well, due to the fact it was a short hike with some up and down hills, we did not bring much.

• Water (1 bottle, it was enough)
• Bug Spray (Really needed this, so many little ones)
• Sunscreen (It was very sunny)
• Book
• Tissues

The Hike

We entered the trail and came to a clearing with a bench. We weren't sure why there was a bench so early but we realized when we came back. The hike goes downhill (a bit steep) from that spot and hiking back up took a bit of effort. There were a couple of manmade planks of wood to walk across to continue. We continued to follow the red trail and each time there was a split, we stayed on the left. We saw an opening with a good view of the stream and a bench. It was relaxing to enjoy the quiet scenery for a bit.

Eventually, we made it to the blue trail and this trail loops around to the spot it starts at. We were lucky we did not get stuck going in circles because we started to wonder if we were after a while. We continue this time going on the other path back to the exit. It wasn't much different going back since the path was parallel to the one we came in on until we reached a blue trail. This part of the trail started to scare us because we saw the trees move and heard the trees creak. There were lots of fallen trees in the area and we were afraid the trees would topple over any second.

There was a ton of pollen today, the air was filled with it and mostly seen at this part of the trail. We saw a snake and eventually a robin before making it back to the beginning.

Completion Time: ~ 1.5 hours

Below are some pictures of our venture. (Click to enlarge)

Small water view.

A school of small fish having fun.

Toppled over tree.

Large fallen tree.

Stream.

Small stream.

Fallen trees in the distance.

Fallen trees with chipmunk.

Zoomed up chipmunk.

Snake in there somewhere.

Zoomed up snake.

Top view of snake.

More water views off the side.

Oh, it's a robin.

End of the trail.

Signed out.