Hiking Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in New York
Thanks for coming on over to check out our adventure at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in New York! This was a surprisingly large park (4,315 acres) for just a county park.
It was so large that we were only able to hit up a few of the trails while we were there. Hopefully we will be able to head back soon and give you some more looks at other vantage points throughout the park.
SUPER DOG FRIENDLY!
As you can tell in our video, this park is 100% dog friendly as Blaze was happily sniffing and relieving himself on said sniff spots throughout the park. We try to stick with dog friendly parks as much as possible because Blaze loves going on adventures with us. He pretty much expects that either Saturday or Sunday he will be heading out with us on a trail to go hiking somewhere.
–> WARD POUND RIDGE RESERVATION TRAIL MAP <–
This park actually has multiple parking lots throughout so you can get to different trail heads easier. If you take a look at map above, we ended up parking at the Michigan Rd area.
This particular area has a bottom and top layer, so there should be plenty of parking for you. It did cost us $10 to get into the park which kind of stinks, but someone has got to be paid to maintain the park. This is definitely a pretty neat park, so we don’t feel bad for throwing a couple dollars their direction.
OVERLOOK AT WARD POUND RIDGE
The first trail point of interest we started hiking towards was the overlook. We knew this wasn’t going to an overlook of epic proportions due to the fact we weren’t gaining much elevation in our hike, but we were still very satisfied with the view.
If you look off into the distance you can see Cross River Reservoir Dam. I believe this area of New York has a lot of above ground reservoirs rather than relying on underground aquifers.
LEATHERMAN’S CAVE
After enjoying the view at the overlook for a while (and making a less than impressive time-lapse due to lack of clouds) we decided to head to the next nearest point of interest, Leatherman’s Cave.
Have absolutely no history or real information to tell you about this cave other than its bigger than we thought it would be. I am 6′ tall and could stand easily inside the cave while failing to take video inside due to obvious poor lighting conditions. 🙂 It was still a nice little landmark that this park offers.
SUMMARY
Our main goal of the day was to hit up as many points of interest as possible before taking off at Ward Pound Ridge. Unfortunately many of the points of interest are spread out a bit more than we had originally anticipated. So we really only hit up 3 of the many points of interest out there to explore.
It didn’t help that I was still really out of shape at the time of this filming session after taking it easy for a month or so. Luckily Blaze was there to keep pulling us along the paths!
MAGIC STAIRS
We didn’t get any separate photos of it (beyond the video we took), but the final point of interest that we hit up that afternoon was called the “Magic Stairs.” Just FYI, its not some epic flight of stairs to an epic viewpoint, or even that many stairs. There are literally just 5-6 stairs on the trail and someone decided those stairs would be a point of interest.
Guess it was a gap in the map they needed to fill up, not sure. 🙂 If you all find any historical significance or importance of those stairs please leave them in the comments below! I certainly didn’t find any haha.
OTHER NEARBY HIKES
NOTE FROM WRITER
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Adventure On!
