The Waterfall in Town That Beats Niagara on Height

Here’s a number that surprises people: Taughannock Falls drops 215 feet in a single plunge, which makes it taller than Niagara. It’s not as wide, sure, but it falls farther, a ribbon of water spilling off a lip and dropping into a stone amphitheater whose walls climb nearly 400 feet overhead. And the wild part is you barely have to work for it. The gorge trail runs about three-quarters of a mile, flat as a sidewalk, right to the foot of the thing.

This is the whole story of Ithaca, really. The town sits among more than 150 waterfalls and deep rock gorges, all of them carved by the same patient water cutting through soft sedimentary rock after the glaciers pulled back about 10,000 years ago and left the Finger Lakes behind. The locals turned it into a slogan, “Ithaca Is Gorges,” and for once the bumper sticker isn’t bragging.

Buttermilk Falls is the other one worth your boots. Its trail climbs about 600 feet alongside a foaming cascade, threading past deep pools, sculpted rock, and a stone landmark called Pinnacle Rock that stands 42 feet on its own. Down at the bottom there’s a natural swimming pool fed by the creek, the kind of cold, clear plunge that makes August worth surviving.

Two state parks, two very different climbs, and somewhere around 148 more falls scattered through the hills if you ever run out. Bring real shoes. The stone steps are beautiful and they are also wet, and the gorge has been winning that argument for ten thousand years.