CASTILE, N.Y.-
Turkey vultures with 6-foot wingspans glide on eddies off Inspiration Point, a favorite lookout in Letchworth State Park. Far below in the Genesee River Valley, rainbow-haunted waterfalls tumble through a narrow gorge lined with 400-foot cliffs.
Etched on a granite boulder a little back from the precipice is a paean to William Pryor Letchworth, a dogged conservationist who turned this patched-up Eden into a public treasure a century ago.
"God wrought for us this scene beyond compare / But one man's loving hand protected it / And gave to his fellow man to share," wrote Sara Evans Letchworth upon her bachelor uncle's death in 1910.
If other rich businessmen had had their way, the canyon and its three cataracts might have been converted into a hydroelectric dam–thereby drying up the 107-foot Middle Fall, or "Ska-ga-dee," that Seneca Indians believed to be so wondrous it made the sun stop at midday.
Letchworth, a Quaker who reaped a fortune manufacturing metal pieces for harnesses, wagons and locomotives, called in all the political favors he'd mustered as a longtime philanthropist and social reformer and finally thwarted his opponents by bequeathing his 1,000-acre estate to New York in 1906. Events celebrating the centennial are being held in the park throughout the year.
Grandiosely nicknamed the "Grand Canyon of the East" after his death, Letchworth's river-straddling estate has been expanded over the years to 14,350 acres, chiefly during the Great Depression when failing farms were bought up or commandeered by the state.
One of New York's oldest and largest nature preserves, it runs the 17-mile length of the gorge between the villages of Portageville and Mount Morris in western New York. As many as 1 million people visit each year, from hikers, bicyclists and campers to horseback riders, kayakers and whitewater rafters.
"Definitely the falls are a big draw," said park manager Roland Beck, "but we have more than just waterfalls."
Serpentine trails wind for 75 miles along the gorge rim, the cliff-tops and throughout the varied woodlands, which hide museums, a trout pond, rental cabins, lodges and campgrounds, and an abundance of wildlife, from deer, owls and beaver to the occasional timber rattlesnake and bald eagle.
While returning to Buffalo from a business trip to New York City in 1858, Letchworth first got a glimpse of the falls from a 234-foot-high railroad trestle that still carries freight trains across the valley near the 70-foot Upper Falls.
He began buying up farmland on both sides a year later, erasing all traces of the riverside mills and replanting the hills with 150 or so species of native and ornamental trees. His conservation effort ranks with the state's creation of the Adirondack and Catskill preserves and the acquisition of Niagara Falls.
On the cliff-top above the Middle Falls, where the gorge narrows to 400 feet, sits Glen Iris, Letchworth's Greek Revival-style home-turned-inn. And on a nearby bluff is his memorial to the Senecas who lived in the valley for several centuries before being uprooted in the late 1700s.
Intrigued with their culture, Letchworth acquired a pre-Revolutionary War Seneca Council House that was rotting away in the village of Caneadea 17 miles away. It was rededicated in 1872 in a ceremony attended by descendants of Iroquois chiefs and former President Millard Fillmore.
The grave of Mary Jemison, a famed white woman captured as a child by the Senecas, was moved to an adjacent site when her burial site in Buffalo was threatened, as was a log house she'd built for her daughter.
They serve as historical stops for visitors eager for a tree-shaded ramble. One popular trek leads down an elongated flight of stone steps to the 40-foot Lower Falls and a stone footbridge across the river.
Here, Jim Kearns, a retired automotive engineer from Northville, Mich., had stopped to photograph tiny plants clinging to the shale cliffs when he caught sight of a long-necked bird at the water's edge.
"Oh, there's a blue heron," he whispered urgently to his friend, Dugald Campbell. "It just glided in."
Enveloped by woods, the gorge isn't visible from rural highways running along its east and west flanks.
"It's absolutely spectacular," Campbell said. "Being able to discover it (midweek) when nobody else is around makes it even more special."
Guided tours help outdoors enthusiasts recognize nature's infinite variety–from wildflowers and mushrooms to the euphonies of warblers, owls and frogs.
The cliffs rise to 550 feet in places, "one of the few places in the East where you have anything on this scale," said a park naturalist, Stephanie Spittal. "There are certainly other canyons and gorges and gullies but none of them as long, none with rock walls as vertical."
Pine Creek Gorge in north-central Pennsylvania is more than 700 feet deep but flanked by "steep hills, not cliffs, and they're all covered with trees so you don't get anything at all that gives you the feeling of open rock like you get out West," she said.
While all-comers had been welcomed in for decades, it wasn't until Letchworth's death that the park officially became public. In the 1930s, 3,000 enlistees in the federally funded Civilian Conservation Corps built bridges, walls and cabins as well as overlooks and trails offering glimpses deep into the ravine.
The hydroelectric project Letchworth blocked never surfaced but a flood-control dam was eventually built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1948-52 at the northern tip of the gorge at Mount Morris. It is the largest dry-bed, concrete dam east of the Mississippi, Spittal said, and "has saved many hundreds of millions of dollars in flood damage to Rochester," which lies 35 miles to the north near Lake Ontario.
Amid a jungle of oak, maple, basswood, pine and hemlock, Spittal delights in finding signs of colonial habitation–a house foundation or an old lilac bush trying to blossom. The park's expansion eradicated two hamlets and about 100 farms, she said.
Among the newcomers are carrion-feeding turkey vultures, which never "got much further north than Virginia" in Letchworth's day but are common in the Northeast now that "we're driving around in fast cars on hard roads killing millions of animals every year that provide them with food," Spittal said.
"Up close, they have naked red heads … and they don't smell very good," she said. "But soaring around, they're quite wonderful."
And, undoubtedly, they have the best view.
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If You Go …
LETCHWORTH STATE PARK: Entrances to the park located in Castile, Mount Morris, Portageville or Perry, N.Y.; or 585-493-3600. Open year-round, 6 a.m.-11 p.m. Camping mid-May to mid-October; some cabins may be rented year-round. Deer and spring turkey hunting are permitted in season. Cars and motorcycles, $6 admission; bicyclists and hikers, free.
GLEN IRIS INN: or 585-493-2622. Rates $80-175. Dining room offers extensive eat-in menus as well as picnics packed to go.
GETTING THERE: The park is about 35 miles south of Rochester along the Genesee River. Take Interstate 390 to Exit 7 and follow signs to the entrances at Mount Morris, Perry, Castile and Portageville.
