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An Urban Treasure

  Written by Britney R. Milazzo

Bullock's Woods Waterfall
Picture by Britney R. Milazzo
Nature's beauty is right here

Named for its location on the Genesee River where ships “turn around” before hitting the Lower Falls, Turning Point Park encompasses 275 acres (16 total trail miles) of woods, waterfalls, and hiking trails which take you along and through the gorge of the Genesee River that weaves south into the horizon.

Bullock’s Woods, which trumps a majority of the park, is made of endless rolling hills and skyscraping maple and oak trees that date back hundreds of years.

An abandoned boat yard is the first form of welcome from the north, heading south on the Turning Point Park hiking trails in Charlotte-City of Rochester, N.Y.

Several of the ships are fishing vessels that navigated great expeditions across Lake Ontario from Canada en lieu of fishing retreats to an empty water hole where the Northern Pike beckoned to be lured to their hooks, storm stories and tales of heroic adventures.

Sails are ripped and torn off of the other boats as rust corrodes at the bows of their once trusty steeds.

Perhaps at night you hear whispers of mariner captains yelling orders in the distance. “Ahoy!” or maybe it’s just the wind howling through the barren trees whose leaves have been left for the trails.

In the afternoon, the crunch of the leaves tickles your ears as runners leap through the leaves that flower the trails with bits of yellow, red and orange.

A stream from Bullock's Woods Waterfall
Picture by Britney R. Milazzo
The trails at Turning Point are the main corridors to the Park’s most lauded attraction: the hidden waterfalls. In the distance as you’re hiking, you can hear the flow of the waterfalls down their cliffs which gets louder as you approach.

The park contains two waterfalls: Red Falls and Bullock’s Woods Waterfall; both of the falls reaching at more than 30-feet, but hikers need to wander off the path and explore the natural beauty of the park in order to discover them at a nearly two-mile hike.

Where the falls lay is intersected by a part of the Genesee River that connects the park back together to the north and south by the Genesee Riverway Trail, a 3,572-foot boardwalk.

Mansions atop the city’s bluffs look down and out to the wave of cattail, flowing in the crisp autumn breeze, surrounding the river, which splits Rochester into Eastside and Westside.

Photo courtesy of Ruth's Waterfalls
Map of Turning Point Park
As you make your way past the Genesee Riverway Trail and back on the land, you can see back in the distance through the trees to the east, a massive cruise-liner style ship nestled at the edge of the gorge in the river.

Haunting images of its broken windows and scrapped white paint fill hikers’ minds, but the thought of life, once reigning through the Genny brings back a pleasant feeling, to a now, comparatively slow living waterway.

Come witness this urban treasure and many of the Park’s natural products that garner the attention of Rochester residents, where two of western and central New York’s two hundred waterfalls lie.


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