Franklin Gulf County Park, NY

Overview
Franklin Gulf Park, formerly known as Larkin Woods, is a 631-acre park containing forested areas, creeks, ravines, ledges, and waterfalls. There are about 10 distinct loops, all color-coded, but when combining them, there are hundreds of different possible routes that can be taken throughout the park.


This area won the Best of WNY (Western New York) award in 2015 for "Most Beautiful Under-The-Radar Park".Note
Some of the trails have some steeper grades which may be slippery at times. The trails are color-coded, marked well, and have sequential numbering along the way which can provide a rough estimation of how far you are along the trail.

Hike
Start at the trailhead on Larkin road. For a 4.85-mile loop see my route which involves all of the following trails: Orange, Pink, Yellow, Purple, Light Blue, Red, Blue, and back to Orange again. This route involves at least 3 creek crossings, a large wooden bridge, hiking down to a small waterfall, and finding a geocache called Genesis II (GC7CQ4A) (see geocaching.com) that happened to be very close to the orange trail at the bottom of the ravine. I did a small amount of bushwhacking to get to the bottom of the ravine from the orange trail which was fairly easy. Then, I walked along the ravine to the geocache.
Depending on what your goals are you may decide to skip the small amount of bushwhacking shown on my route.

For a shorter hike, take the orange trail loop which is a 2.8-mile lasso loop. If you take the left branch, the numbers will count from 73 to 1. If you take the right branch, the numbers will count from 1 to 73. On the orange route, there should be at least 3 creek crossings.

For roughly a 2-mile hike, take either orange branch of the loop until you reach the blue trail and take the blue trail back to the parking area.

2022-09-21 Mike_W