Chasing Waterfalls: Installment #1

I grew up as an avid birdwatcher. I still have my trusty bird book with all the species I have seen checked off with the date and the location spotted. I am not much of a birdwatcher anymore, which is odd because given that I live in a part of the country that I have not birdwatched, I could be checking off all sorts of new species.

The one issue I had with birdwatching was that every now and then, I would see a bird but not be able to identify it before it flew away. Although one can be fairly certain of what they had seen, you cannot check it off your list if even a grain of doubt exists. So, instead of seeing a bobolink, you had seen what you thought was a bobolink. And thus what you had actually seen was really an LBB - code among birdwatchers for Little Brown Bird.

For Christmas, I was given a waterfall guide to the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, and I thought, "What a great way to get back into looking for things highlighted in a book and checking them off once I've seen them." And it's so much easier because waterfalls cannot fly away.

So, last weekend, I embarked on installment #1 of this mission. The goal is to see as many of the waterfalls in the region by the end of this year. I started off with two easy ones around the Capital Region: Cohoes Falls and the falls near Lock 7. To be fair, I had seen both of them already, but I had not seen them since I had been given the book. Thus, the previous visits were not sufficient to "check them off."

This rule of mine was questioned heavily by Diane, but eventually she caved, marking the first time in the history of mankind that I won a debate.

Here's a photo history of our afternoon:

We started off at Cohoes Falls, which incidentally, is the second highest waterfall in New York State.

Then, we headed towards Lock 7, conveniently located close to this great place on Denison to get a good meal with good company.