Camping on Piseco, Hike to T Lake Falls

This weekend we went camping on Piseco Lake (in the South Central Adks- near Speculator). Heather and I went with a few friends. Our site was in the Poplar point campground- I wouldn't recommend it- the old DEC Ranger who was managing the joint hassled us a bit and the site was right on Old Piseco Rd. It was kind of strange, I felt like we were camping in peoples back yards. We weren't doing anything to deserve the hassle besides having one too many people in the site and one too many cars parked there- which has never been a problem before at other state sites. I think he just wanted to hassle us, thinking 'oh, here's a bunch of young kids, there going to be trouble'.

Anyway, despite all of that, it was a pretty rad time, all and all. We got down pretty good on Friday night, ate some good food and drank some tasty drinks. On Saturday we hiked into T Lake Falls. T Lake Falls is a 660 foot waterfall, about 5.6 miles in from the trailhead on Old Piseco Road. The trail is maintained by the DEC to the Lean-To at T Lake (about 3.6 miles), but they no longer maintain the trail from T Lake to the falls (another 2 miles). So we bushwhacked our way through the the woods, sometimes on the old overgrown trail, sometimes through the woods. It was a nice hike, although long and pretty strenuous at points. Heather says she doesn't want to do something like that ever again. The falls were crazy- the trail kind of just ended at the waterfall, with a couple of warnings of people dying by falling off the falls. The waterfall starts as a slide drop and I can imagine people trying to get closer to the edge to see down and then slipping off and taking the big fall. We tried to get down but couldn't figure out the trail down- we tried from either side of the water fall but the way down both times just ended with a rock face and a big drop. There's a nice pool below the waterfall which would have been nice to swim in. We chilled out above the falls and had a snack and did a little swimming in the stream- it was pretty rad.

The hike was obviously an all day sort of thing and we got back to our site around 6:30 and had dinner and got down pretty good again with tasty food and drinks. I forgot my camera but thankfully my buddy Ben remembered his...here's a couple of pics. One of a pretty cool flower we saw (anyone know what it is?), another of a smaller waterfall about a mile upstream of the big falls (we were all pretty beat and the smaller falls provided a nice quick cool off spot) and finally the third picture is of the view from the top of the falls.