We arrived in Ithaca on a grey afternoon in late September, and the first thing I heard before I saw anything was the sound of water — a low, constant roar coming from somewhere below the road. Lia found it before I did. She was already halfway down a set of stone steps slick with moss when she called back to me, and there it was: a gorge cut clean into the earth, a ribbon of falls dropping into a pool the color of steeped tea. Nobody had told us it would be right there, a five-minute walk from where we’d parked. That’s Ithaca, we’d learn. The spectacular is casual here.
Walking Into the Gorges
The next morning we did Buttermilk Falls, climbing beside a staircase of cascades where the creek slides over layered shale like water spilling down a flight of stairs someone forgot to finish. Lia kept crouching to touch the rock, tracing the horizontal bands with her finger, and I understood the impulse — the stone looks stacked, deliberate, as if the whole gorge were built rather than carved. At Robert H. Treman Park we swam, or rather Lia swam and I stood shin-deep swearing at how cold the water was while she laughed at me from beneath the falls. My feet went numb. I did not care. There are worse ways to lose feeling in your toes.
The Town on the Hill
Ithaca proper climbs uphill from the lake, and Cornell sits on top of it all, its own gorges slicing right through the campus so that students cross footbridges over hundred-foot drops on their way to class. We wandered the Commons, the pedestrian heart of downtown, and ate lunch outside while a busker played something mournful on a cello. There’s a particular energy to a college town in autumn — everything feels provisional and hopeful at once, full of people who are only passing through but taking it seriously. We drank good coffee, browsed a bookshop with sagging shelves, and Lia bought a secondhand paperback she never finished. I loved it there.
Cayuga’s Long Water
On our last evening we drove up the west side of Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, and pulled off at a small winery where the tasting room looked out over rows of vines dropping toward the water. The lake is absurdly long — forty miles, thin as a river — and in the low sun it turned the color of hammered pewter. We didn’t buy much wine. Mostly we sat on the terrace and watched the light go, saying little, the way you do when a place has quietly worn you down into contentment. A heron worked the shallows below. Lia leaned into me. The gorges were still roaring somewhere behind us, out of sight.
Getting There
Ithaca sits in the heart of New York’s Finger Lakes region, roughly a four-hour drive northwest of New York City and about ninety minutes south of Syracuse, which has the nearest sizable airport. There’s a small regional airport in Ithaca itself with limited connections. Honestly, though, you want a car here — the gorges, the state parks, and the wineries along Cayuga are spread out, and half the pleasure is the driving between them. Come in autumn if you can. The crowds thin, the water still runs full, and the hills turn every shade of fire.