I've been curious for a while now about the old right-of-way of the Erie Canal along the Mohawk River in Niskayuna, and I've finally managed to explore some of it.
Most of my curiosity came from the fact that when I joined the project, someone had already drawn on OpenStreetMap a trail that followed the canal right-of-way from Aqueduct Road near the traffic circle nearly to the Schenectady city line.
Within the maintained area of Aqueduct Park, the trail pretty much follows the canal tow path, and you can see a very wet area to the southe where the canal has been filled in. There's then a rather less manicured trail that follows a natural gas pipeline (and old trolley right-of-way) up to the Mohawk-Hudson Bike/Hike Trail (Empire State Trail, Erie Canalway).
West of there, the canal right-of-way was obviously impassable. There were, however, numerous unmarked trails that headed north and west from the gas pipeline. I'd only been in there once before, and turned back because the nettles, raspberries, and poison-ivy were just too dense for my liking. Now that we've had a hard frost, I wanted to explore. Part of the area is state land, and while the tax rolls show another part as privately owned, I saw no posters, so had few reservations about bashing off down the herd paths.
Because the days are getting short, and walking there and back again from home is 10 km already, I kept the walks in that area fairly short. What I found was that there's a loop around the beaver pond near the bike path, and another, longer loop consisting of a path in the ditch and another on the south towpath. The flooded section is relatively short, and looks either to be intermittent or the result of beaver activity. Crossing it would still involve wading, so I scrambled the bank of the ditch and found a short beaten path through open woods to the gas line at that end.
There is also a well-defined unmarked trail connecting the west side of the beaver pond down to the trail on the towpath and the one in the canal bed. A very short section of that is flooded, with a well-beaten workaround.
There may be a connection with the National Grid maintenance track under the power line at the west end of the section that I explored. There's more state land to the west, so it's possible that the network goes a little farther. (There's a puzzling area on aerials - it looks as if there's a large clearing with a service building and no road access. No idea what's going on there!)
Anyway, I uploaded a rough draft of the paths that I found and some of the soggy spots that they skirted. That was the mapping activity for this couple of days.
One remaining puzzle: The pond by the bike path is full year-round. The stream under the bridge bu the power line runs continuously. But in a dry season, there's no water flowing across the trails, and no bridges or culverts that I could see. Where does the water go?
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