A walk in the woods

Let's leave downtown Albany for a while and go for a walk in the woods. My friends L&L took me for a ride through the countryside on the way to a restaurant they know. On the way, we stopped at the Huyck Preserve, a nature park and research station in the Helderberg Mountains west of Albany. By the way, Huyck is a Dutch name and it rhymes with "hike."

The visitor center at the park's entrance.

The preserve offers twelve miles of trails for public hiking. We took a short walk along a trail that led from the visitor center to Rensselaerville Falls on the small creek that drains one of the park's lakes. We took our time and enjoyed the views. There were a bunch of cars in the parking lot, but we didn't see another person on the trail. The other hikers were probably a lot deeper into the park than we were.

Some houses in the hamlet of Rensselaerville, just outside the park.

Rensselaerville is both the name of the town (sometimes called a "township" in other states) and of the small hamlet where the park is. Rensselaerville is one of ten towns that, along with the cities of Albany, Cohoes, and Watervliet, make up Albany County. Rensselaervilles's town hall is in another hamlet called Medusa, about five miles south of the hamlet of Rensselaerville.