Watkins Glen State Park
Interesting facts
- The first Watkins Glen Grand Prix in October 1948 was raced on a 6.6-mile loop of public roads running along the edge of the park.
- The race was the idea of Cameron Argetsinger, a Cornell law student, and after a spectator died in 1952 it moved to a purpose-built closed circuit.
- Nearly 1.4 million visitors walked through the park in 2025, a remarkable crowd for a gorge barely two miles long.
- The gorge walls are Devonian sedimentary rock, laid down as mud and sand on the floor of a shallow sea more than 350 million years ago.
- Tributary valleys around Seneca Lake were left hanging some 390 feet above the valley floor when the ice sheets deepened the main trough.
- Under private owners the glen had its own hotel, the Glen Mountain House, which was damaged by fire in 1903.
- From 1902 the New York Central Railroad sold special Sunday excursion tickets to bring city crowds to the glen.
- A Civilian Conservation Corps camp worked in the park from 1935 until the Second World War broke up the troop in 1941.
- From 1983 to 2001 the gorge hosted Timespell, a night-time sound, light and laser show projected onto its walls.
- The park's trails link into the Finger Lakes Trail, a footpath network of about 800 miles across upstate New York.
Why it is worth it
Watkins Glen is a gorge on a small, human scale, and that is what makes it so absorbing. In about two miles, Glen Creek drops some 400 feet on its way to Seneca Lake, and in doing so it has cut a narrow, winding slot through the bedrock, with cliffs up to about 200 feet high and nineteen waterfalls along the way. The rock is mainly soft shale, interleaved with harder bands of sandstone and limestone; because the layers wear away at different speeds, the creek has carved a staircase of plunge pools, chutes and potholes, and the walls are scalloped into curves and overhangs. Glen Creek is a hanging valley stream, left perched above Seneca Lake by the glaciers of the Pleistocene, and the gorge is the trench it has cut since the ice withdrew.
The Gorge Trail is the reason to come. It follows the creek through the full length of the glen with more than 800 stone steps, crossing and recrossing the water on bridges and passing behind Cavern Cascade, where the path runs under the fall's overhang. Further up, Rainbow Falls spills from the side wall across the trail, and a stone bridge spans the gorge above it; in the Spiral Gorge section the canyon tightens into a twisting cleft. The stonework is part of the beauty. Much of it – mortared walls, arches, steps and railings – was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, replacing earlier wooden walkways, and its weathered grey stone now looks as if it had grown out of the gorge.
The glen was first opened to visitors in 1863 by Morvalden Ells, a newspaper editor from Vermont, as a private attraction. After years of negotiation it passed into public ownership in 1906 and became a state park, today one of the most visited in New York's Finger Lakes region.
Getting there
The park's main entrance is in the village of Watkins Glen, at the south end of Seneca Lake. The nearest larger city is Elmira, about 32 km away, and the nearest airport is Elmira Corning Regional (ELM), around 24 km away. Besides the main entrance there are Upper and South entrances, linked to it by a shuttle bus, which makes it possible to walk the gorge in one direction.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Watkins Glen State Park is in the village of Watkins Glen, south of Seneca Lake in Schuyler County in New York's Finger Lakes region. The park's lower part is near the village, while the upper part is open woodland. It was first opened to the public in 1863 and has been a public park since 1906.
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