Robert H. Treman State Park

Enfield Glen was a local scenic wonder long before it was a park, but it owes its survival to Robert H. Treman and his wife Laura. A prominent Ithaca banker and businessman, Treman began buying up the land around Enfield Falls in 1915, cleaned up the glen, and planted more than a thousand trees to heal the cut-over hillsides. In 1920 the Tremans gave the land to the State of New York, and it opened as Enfield Glen State Park.

Robert Treman was more than a donor. He was a driving force in the whole Finger Lakes parks movement, helping knit the region's gorges and lakeshores into a public park system rather than letting them be logged, dammed, or fenced off one by one. After his death in 1937, the state renamed the park in his honor, which is why a place everyone still calls Enfield Glen carries the name Robert H. Treman today.

The gorge itself is the reason to come. Enfield Creek has sawed a narrow canyon down through layered rock, and the Gorge Trail follows it closely, so you are never far from moving water. The path crosses the creek on stone bridges, ducks beneath rock overhangs, and climbs long flights of stairs laid into the canyon wall, with a new waterfall or plunge pool seemingly around every bend.

Lucifer Falls is the showpiece: a 115-foot ribbon of water dropping in tiers into the gorge near the upper end of the walk. It is one of the rare falls you can experience from two completely different angles. The Gorge Trail brings you along the canyon floor looking up at it, while the Rim Trail runs the top of the canyon and delivers a long look down onto the falls and the glen from above. Doing the Gorge Trail up and the Rim Trail back makes a natural loop of a few miles.

No one is quite sure how Lucifer Falls got its fiery name. Some tie it to an older Indigenous name for the place, others to the way the light or the churning water looked to early settlers. The mystery suits it. This is the kind of gorge that feels a little wild even with a stone stairway underfoot.

This gorge was working country before it was scenic country. Settlers arrived in the 1790s on land granted for Revolutionary War service, and they put the falling water to work, building mills at the tops of the waterfalls. The old Enfield Falls gristmill and the miller's house still stand in the park, preserved and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a reminder that these falls once ground the neighborhood's grain rather than just drawing hikers.

Much of what makes the trails so pleasant to walk is Depression-era craft. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps built the stone stairways, walls, bridges, and paths that thread the gorge, fitting cut stone to the canyon so carefully that the work looks like part of the rock. Walking Treman is partly a lesson in that vanished style of park building, where a trail was laid by hand to last for generations, and largely has.

The park has two ends. The lower entrance, off Route 13 southwest of Ithaca, holds the swimming area, the old mill, and the start of the classic gorge-and-rim loop up to Lucifer Falls. The upper entrance, higher on the hillside, sits close to the falls and lets you walk down into the glen and back, a shorter option on a tight day. The two are several miles apart by road, so decide which experience you want before you go.

Aim for late spring through early fall. The gorge trails close over the winter and reopen once the spring melt has passed and the stonework is safe, and the lifeguarded swimming below the lower falls runs only in the warm months. Wear shoes with grip, since the stone steps are worn smooth and can be wet, keep children close on the unrailed stretches, and give yourself a couple of unhurried hours to do the full loop and, if it is warm, a swim in the creek at the end.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.