Six Mile Creek

After hiking the Six Mile Creek area, my (former) roommate and I have hiked pretty much everything there is to hike in Ithaca and seen all the waterfalls listed in guidebooks. In the summer of 2015 alone, we went to Treman, Buttermilk, Taughannock, the Plantations and Fall Creek (via the Cayuga Trail), Lick Brook, and finally, Six Mile Creek. I had forgotten that I had visited the Six Mile Creek area with my hiking class a couple falls ago, but on our summer adventure there, I extended my hiking experience by travelling both farther up and downstream.

We started out about midmorning and located the area where we were supposed to be able to find a trail pretty easily. Then as we walked along, we pretty quickly lost the path and ended up wandering in the woods right behind some peoples’ backyards (sorry). It turned out that the path was much closer to the creek edge, and we had a pleasant walk to Businessman’s Lunch falls. What’s unique about these falls is that they’re right next to an abandoned mill. Six Mile Creek was formerly used as a power source, and the mill and some hundred year old pipes are still hanging around as evidence.

Businessman's Lunch falls, with mill beside

From the falls, we walked up to the road and crossed the street to the Mulholland Wildflower Preserve for the next stage of our adventure. There are several waterfalls created by dams along the trail, all of which are pretty cool. After the early parts of the trail, the path became somewhere . . . less well defined. Still easy to follow, but it was pretty obvious that it was less travelled, sometimes muddy, and often close to rather steep inclines. It was never dangerous, as long as you were aware of the fact that you were indeed hiking, as opposed to lounging on your couch, and weren’t fooling around.

Double waterfalls early along the Six Mile Creek trail system

Ithaca has a good mix of walking options, ranging from paved paths to single track, steep, muddy, rock-strewn, lesser trekked trails. The number of people you encounter is roughly inversely proportional to how developed the trail is. For example, the Gorge Trail at Taughannock, which is flat enough for strollers, tends to be swarming with people. Similarly, on the heavily advertised gorge trails at Treman and Buttermilk, you can’t turn a corner without running into someone*. If you hike the Rim Trail at Taughannock or around Lake Treman at Buttermilk, however, it’s much quieter, but still on state park lands, so the trails are maintained, with steps and fences on the steep parts.

If that’s still too established for you, the Cayuga Trail, Six Mile Creek, and Lick Brook offer a more natural experience, though the Cayuga Trail has an interesting mix of wandering through random forest and suddenly appearing on a road. Lick Brook is undeveloped, and has the longest steep section of anything I’ve hiked around Ithaca. I’ve already mentioned what the trail at Six Mile was like. In our hours of hiking these three trails, we saw maybe a few dozen people, which is what you’d see just at the trailhead of a popular state park trail.

Back to our Six Mile Creek hike – we continued along the trail until we came to a lake/reservoir. At that point, we turned back and retraced our path to return to the apartment, completing what was to be our last great adventure of the summer.

If you keep going almost to the end of the trail, you'll be rewarded by these falls

*Exception: Hike early in the morning. My roommate and I started out before 10:30** at Treman and had a quiet hike on the way out. By the time we headed back the trail was getting pretty crowded.

**Apparently tourists sleep in on Saturdays? 10:30 is mid to late morning for me.