The Quest for the Eternal Flame

we did the trek back in March! - Christopher Henning

When I let Chris know that we were doing the Eternal Flame hike he was sure to go out of his way and call it a ‘trek’, which really scared me to say the least. I brought 6 quarts of water, a full first aid kit, a whistle, a GPS, a satellite radio and food for two days just in case.

We got to the parking area around 6pm (trail is open from 7am to 7pm) and set off ready to hike our asses off. We hiked in about 5 minutes and we were already there.

Good one Chris! You got me good!

Yea, it’s that close to the road. To get to the waterfall itself, you need to walk down the gorge… which can be pretty tricky since the trail for some reason keeps changing from one side of the creek to the other and pretty steep.

We actually ran into a lot of people on this trail in our short time there, it definitely isn’t that ’secret’ like Bruce Kershner says in his book, 25 Secret Places In WNY…

Keep this hike a secret! It is too special to give away to people who might abuse it with litter or vandalism.

or maybe the secret just got out. Maybe putting it in a book and blogging about it on the internet is part of the problem. We saw plenty of trash on the trail and my car was vandalized when we were hiking but I’ll get to that later.  We were down at the flame and we started chatting it up with two local ‘experts’ from the area. They sure offered us no extra knowledge on the area besides the best place to have huge beer parties in the park without getting busted by the cops.

There really isn’t much to do there except climb and marvel at the waterfall… but every since that one hike… we clearly were thirsty for more falls.

I would definitely recommend this secret waterfall to anyone looking for a interesting sight to see. This trail would be good for kids and you can even bring the family dog! You wouldn’t need a whole day to see it either, just an hour a so. A good thing about it is, that it is a two minute drive from Chestnut Ridge Park, which has some cool things to do as well.