Audio
3. Cycle the Erie Canal - Trails in New York State
Transcript
– Intro Music –
Francesca: In today’s episode, I travel to Peebles Island State Park within the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor. The episode will introduce the heritage corridor, a special event that takes place called Cycle the Erie Canal, as well as the importance of trails in New York State and the benefits that trails can have for local communities.
– Intro Music –
Peter: Hi Francesca!
Francesca: Hi Peter.
Peter: Well, welcome back. I’m really excited about hearing this next episode about Erie Canalway.
Francesca: Yeah, I went up to Peebles Island, ah, north of Albany in New York and I sat down in the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor and I spoke with Andy Kitzmann from the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, as well as Jamie Meerdink, Project Director from Parks and Trails New York. And we talked about this Cycle the Erie Canal event that takes place each year, ah, where folks ride their bicycles along the Erie Canalway from Buffalo, New York all the way to Albany.
Peter: Wow, that’s pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah it’s a great event and, you know, I’ve been working with the Erie Canalway for many years and known Andy a long time. I don’t know, ah, Jamie Meerdink, but I know, we’ve worked with Parks and Trails New York and they’ve had a strong relationship with the Erie Canalway for a long time. I’ve also, you know, spoken with Bob Radliff who is the Director at Erie Canalway, and I believe he took his wife and daughter on the, part of the bike ride this year.
Francesca: Yeah, yeah, one of the points that we touch upon is that the bike ride itself from Buffalo to Albany is huge, but—
Peter: Yeah.
Francesca: Both of them are really invested in creating, you know, events, ah, that are really accessible to families of all ages and people, um, who are really experienced cyclists and like maybe not-so-experienced cyclists.
Peter: Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, one thing I just mentioned and I don’t know if-if it really comes up in your conversation with Andy and Jaimie, but they did a presentation at the World Canal Conference last year which was held in the Erie Canalway in Syracuse. And, ah, someone presented, someone who has, ah, accessibility issues or handicapped, and they do the whole ride using the special bikes all along—the entire way—and they gave a whole presentation on it, people were practically crying because it was so emotionally charged, um, but, you know, really interesting that they can make the trail ride available to a really wide variety of people, so.
Francesca: That—that’s really amazing. I’m glad you shared that because we did not end up talking about that in our conversation.
Peter: Sure, yeah, yeah. I was, ah, really blown away, so, it’s pretty amazing. So, but I’m really anxious to hear the rest of your conversations that you had, and you were up in Peebles Island, which is right outside of Albany, I believe right, so—
Francesca: Yeah, there were groundhogs running around.
Peter: (laugh) Yeah, it’s a great site, always wonderful to see the canal and the locks and all that kind of stuff. So, well, look forward to-to hearing it so let’s proceed.
Francesca: Yeah, yeah. Let’s-let’s dive into it.
– Music Reprise –
Francesca: Hello, this is Francesca Calarco, Communications Coordinator for the National Heritage Areas Program from the National Park Service Northeast Regional Office. I am going to be speaking today about the Cycle Erie Canal event that happens within the heritage corridor. And I’m going to be speaking with Andy Kitzmann, Assistant Director of Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, and Jaimie Meerdink, Project Director for Parks and Trails New York. So thank you both for coming here today to speak with me and ah, let’s dive into it. Andy, could you introduce yourself and a little bit about the heritage area.
Andy: Sure. Ah, thank you Francesca. My name is Andy Kitzmann and I am the Assistant Director with the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor. Ah, we are located in upstate New York. We are a five hundred twenty four linear mile corridor that includes two hundred and thirty communities. Ah, and we were designated by Congress in 2000. We have a preservation and management plan that guides our work, and, um, that steers us in what we do. And there are three major pieces of that that we focus on, ah, we preserve the valuable historic resources within the canal corridor, we promote the corridor as a-as a tourism destination, as a valuable place to live, and we work with our local communities and our state partners, ah, including the New York State Canal Corporation who owns and operates the system, and Peebles Island State Park is part of the New York State Parks and Recreation, ah, Office of Parks and Recreation, which is another state agency, ah, and we have a variety of non-profit partners, like Parks and Trails New York, that we work with throughout the corridor.
Francesca: Okay, thank you! Thank you for that introduction, and ah, so Jaimie, being from Parks and Trails New York, do you want to speak a little bit about what Parks and Trails New York does, as well as the event?
Jaimie: Sure, um, so Parks and Trails New York—we’re a non-profit, um, advocacy organization and we work state-wide. Basically our mission is to ah, improve and enhance ah, our network of multi-use trails and protect public and open-spaces across the state. Um, so we’ve been doing that work for ah, more than thirty years. And Cycle the Erie Canal is an event that we-we just did our twentieth Cycle the Erie Canal. It’s an event that highlights, really the prominent—the longest and most prominent multi-use trail in the state, and that’s the Erie Canalway trail, ah, which stretches from Buffalo to Albany, it’s three hundred and sixty miles. So, yeah, twenty years this year, it’s a great event, it’s ah, it’s actually our largest fundraiser for our organization, um, and it funds really the programming, the technical assistance, and then the advocacy work that we do throughout the year.
Francesca: Excellent. Could you tell me a little bit about the event this year?
Jaimie: Yeah, absolutely. So um, like I said this is our twentieth annual event. And really the event has grown every year, but at its base what it is-is a supported, fully supported eight-day bike ride along the Erie Canalway Trail. Um, and when I say supported what that means basically is, you wake up in the morning and you take your luggage and your tent and anything else you have with you, and you throw it in a truck and then all you have to do is ride to the next town. And we bring all the, you know, all your luggage, ah, to the next location. Ah, we also have rest stops, we have what we call support and gear and SAG support. And we have lots of events and programming each night at the tent cities. Um, some people also stay in bed and breakfasts or hotels. So-so that’s what the ride is, every day is between forty and sixty miles of cycling, and ah, the Erie Canalway Trail is-it’s about eighty percent complete as an off-road route. So, most of that um, day you’re on an off-road, multi-use trail, either paved or stone-dust trail. It’s also a really great kind-of introduction to bike touring, because it’s a very flat route as it follows the canal across the state. Really, the-there are some hills and there’s some road connections, there’s some rolling hills, and then there’s a couple of really, rather short hills that have become kind of legendary in the minds of our riders because they really experience almost no hills the rest of the route when, so these little hills become just huge mountains. But ah, it’s a very ah, nice intro ride for families, and for people who are trying to get into the sport.
Francesca: So, during this journey from Buffalo to Albany, if you are going forty to sixty miles a day, how long does that entire journey take?
Jaimie: Well, so like, in a day, a lot of people like to get out really early cause, you know this is the summer. So, we’ll have a breakfast and it’s kind of, you go at your own pace, it’s not a mass start, it’s a—you start as you like. Um, so people get breakfast and they head out on the trail and-and really we have some people who like to get their riding done kinda early, so they might head out at seven or eight and they can, a couple-couple hours in there through the forty to sixty miles. We have more, most of the people through are somewhere in the middle, where they’re gonna stop at our rest stops in the morning and the afternoon. They’re gonna stop for lunch probably, and then they’ll probably stop at least once or twice at a museum or, um, a lot of the communities along the route come out and they have rest stops where they have information tables to tell people what they’re gonna see either from the canal, on the canal infrastructure, or also just the towns that they’re going through. The—part of the beauty of this ride is it’s not a—not a wilderness ride. The canal actually, you know these towns along the route formed because the canal went through the town so, especially in the Western part of the state, ah, where we’re on the older part of the Erie Canal, the more original canal, you’re going through a town every six to ten miles and a lot of them have the name “port” at the end of them, you know you got Middleport, Spencerport, Brockport, Gasport, Weedsport. And so you’re going right through downtown, you’re going to, they might have a local historical society or museum, they have restaurants and bars. So some people literally will take, you know, eight in the morning until five or six at night to-to go through all that and really kinda soak in up-sate, the canal corridor as you go through the ride during the day.
Francesca: Very nice, that sounds like a really exciting event with a lot of different components that aren’t just biking.
Jaimie: Yeah, it’s-it’s really, biking is kind of the, the vehicle that gets you to explore the corridor and the reason that people choose this ride is, like, it’s pretty flat honestly. So, if you’re trying to go to climb mountains or to-to do that kind of a ride, that-this isn’t probably the ride you’d choose. This is, a lot of the people are history-buffs or canal-buffs interested in the history of upstate New York, or really just wanting to explore upstate New York. That’s this kind of a vehicle for them to do that.
Francesca: Excellent. So, in addition to this event, are there other similar types of programming or events that Parks and Trails New York does to get people engaged with bike trails or trails along parks and the Erie Canalway?
Jaimie: Yeah, I mean, so we have kind of a whole, I guess range of programing, and a lot of it is ah, in partnership with partners like Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor. We also have a contract with the New York State Canal Corporation, where we um, we administer volunteer programs for the Canalway Trail. We have a Trail Ambassador Program. Recently we just started, ah, it’s a bike-friendly business program where businesses that kind of go the extra mile for cyclists get certified through us, and they have a decal and sign that they put in their window, and we list them on our website. And then we have a bunch of resources on the web, because really this—the event is to raise visibility, and it’s you know one week during the summer, but really every day of the year at least, or-or in the riding season or nice weather there’s lots of people who come from around the world to ride this trail, and so our-our real point is you can do it on your own. We-we have resources for you to do it on your own and that’s really where we make a big impact for the community is-is encouraging people to come out whenever they want to visit this corridor and this trail, to make it apart of their other vacations, to extend a vacation to do an extra day on the trail, things like that. So yeah, there’s really, there’s programming all year-round that has to do with this destination.
Francesca: I think it’s really good that the trail be made as accessible as possible, so you don’t have to be an expert cyclist or like a-a triathaloner to really engage with the trails.
Andy: I think one of the things that’s really interesting about the ride is that you have-you have young children riding, you have people up into their eighties who ride, and everybody in between. And ah, it’s a support network, so as people are going across they’re supporting each other, they’re watching out for each other. But it’s an opportunity for families to connect. It’s an opportunity for people to see the canal system, to see the national heritage corridor at a different pace. They’re not zipping along the New York State Thruway, they’re not zipping along Highway 31, they’re-they’re going very slowly. They’re seeing things that they’re not gonna see from a car window. They’re experiencing the canal in a way that they’re not gonna experience it in a normal, daily life. So, you know, from-from our stand point that’s one of the huge values here, is the opportunity for-for that engagement. We have um, a mission that is to promote the valuable resources in the canal. There are canal resources all throughout here from ah, the Towpath, there are former locks, there are the Towpath of course, there’s aqueducts, all kinds of really interesting things that we as an organization try to raise awareness about. The-the purpose of our national heritage corridor is to promote those resources as a valuable piece of today’s infrastructure. That we want to make it relevant to today’s society. We want the-the younger generation to realize that the Erie Canal has value for them, ah, that it’s a recreational tool. That there’s, ah, an economic benefit to the canal system itself.
Jaimie: The-this ride is kind of a-a micro-study in kind of the growth of this idea as, of the canalway as a recreation way. It’s not just a, it’s not something that’s static, it’s not just a piece of history, it’s something that people are using and enjoying. And I think a lot of credit should go to the New York State Canal Corporation for seeing that that transition should be made and um recognize that planning for this ride started out twenty years ago as a couple dozen people and really more of a, they called it a trek and it was more of a, kind of almost a fact-finding mission, because the trail wasn’t nearly complete. This was just kind of isolated patches of trail. Over the years the Canal Corporation State Parks, multiple governors and leadership in the state have recognized that we should, we should fund, we call it closing the gaps but it’s you know filling in these gap sections with off-road trail and now we’re at a point where we can really legitimately say that this is one trail across the state. And so, when it’s finished it will be the longest single multi-use trail in the country. And then now, its popularity and its growth has fueled kind of a renewed interest in multi-use trails. And now we have a new investment, a huge investment in funding from the governor, its two hundred million dollars to close-finish all the gaps in the Erie Canalway Trail and then also to connect it to a trail from New York City to the Canadian border. So, we already probably had the longest multi-use trail in the country, but now we’re going to have the longest system, trail system in the country and it’s gonna be a really big deal for the state for tourism and for outdoor recreation.
Andy: And If I can talk about that growth, um, one of the purposes of a national heritage area is to generate sustainability, not only in our organization but within our partners. And this ride is one of those great examples. I was a curator at the Erie Canal Museum when the first ride came through in the late ‘90s, um, before the national heritage area even existed. And I can remember the twenty people that showed up on that ride in our way chamber and had our little reception there. And today you guys have six hundred plus riders, you got people coming in from all across the country, and the national heritage area got involved at a certain point and started to invest resources in the ride. And not just the-the trail ride here but also, ah, there are voyages, cross-corridor voyages that happen. There are other running events, biking events that we invest resources in. And oftentimes, and this is one of those examples, we’ll invest resources at a greater amount early-on and then as they grow and become more sustainable we’re able to reduce our investment. And at the same time be able to provide technical assistance, like promotion and outreach, ah, reaching into the various communities that the trails go through, making connections, and helping to grow it in a different way. So that’s an example of sustainability both from a national heritage area standpoint and a Parks and Trails New York or non-profit standpoint.
Francesca: I think those are, those are really good points to make about this continuing of the trail throughout the heritage corridor—
Andy: Yeah.
Francesca: —and all the different types of benefits that can happen from government and organizations working together to complete this trail and how they can help communities within the heritage corridor.
Jaimie: Right, we-we did a, a study a couple of years ago, it was an economic impact report for the canalway trail that found just huge direct and indirect spending, and then tax revenue, and actually jobs created. It’s like two hundred and fifty million dollars in economic impact and it’s over three thousand jobs, that’s an annual figure, and that was a couple years ago where we estimated about 1.6 million visits. Part of the interesting part about this trail is it’s so long that there are people from one part of the corridor that actually might take a vacation in the other part of the corridor. So these are locals but they’re not local to the place where they’re vacationing or going out on the trail. And, and we, so like I said before it’s a year-round thing. Our ride is one week and it raises the visibility. I think a great benefit of it is, if there’s a community member that knows the trail, they’re like that’s my backyard trail, that’s something I walk the dog or I take the kid for a walk, when they see someone from Germany or Australia or the U.K. that’s come to New York state just to ride beside the Erie Canal and-and go across the state, they think a little bit differently about their community trail and they realize that it’s a part of this really cool state-wide network and that, hmm, maybe our community should put in a pavilion or put in some lockers or showers or parking for people to use the trail and that will help our downtown develop and be a place where people stop and stay the night instead of just coming through. Um, so that’s kind of the education that goes on and both our organizations do a lot of that, sharing those kind of best practices with the communities along the way and I think that it’s definitely paying off.
Francesca: That’s great to hear. Do either of you have any final thoughts on Cycle the Erie Canal or, ah, engagement with trails from both of your organization’s perspectives?
Andy: I think there’s a lot from a trail standpoint, I think there’s a lot of interest today in trails. Not just for riding trails, but for water trails. We have this five hundred and twenty four linear mile navigable system and ah Erie Canalway is working on a water trail guide, developing this system-wide guide that compliments what the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area has done in their-in their region. And when you start to look at things at the state level with the state’s, um, what they call their consolidated funding application, all of the state agencies grant together, and the three areas that they have for priorities, each one of those areas includes trails and recreation. Um, which really tells you about how valuable getting people out into the corridor, getting people out onto the trail has become at a-at a state-wide level. And I-I think that ah, that really speaks to the good work that Parks and Trails New York is doing, but to what a national heritage area does to raise awareness of the value of things like these rides, to promote the activities that the communities are doing at the local level as the riders come through to-to not only create a great experience for riders, but to create an economic opportunity for those communities. To create a stimulus, to create energy and enthusiasm for the value of the resources of the system. That’s what a heritage area is all about, is inspiring our community, inspiring our 3.2 million people who live here that this is a great place. It’s not just about bringing in people from other areas, but it’s inspiring our local folks that this is a resource that’s worth protecting and worth having.
Francesca: That’s great. I think it’s really great when you can feel pride in your community, and pride in the local resources and heritage of your community.
Andy: Yep.
Jaimie: I’ll-I’ll just add, you know, people should come out and see for themselves. You know there’s a, we have a great website called cycletheeriecanal.com where we have trip planning guides, we have an interactive map, we have hotel listings, we have all kinds of things to do your own trip in the corridor, on the Erie Canalway Trail. We’re gonna look for more funding over the next couple of years to try to connect other trail systems and other recreation in parks to this kind of, I guess, backbone that we’re forming of trails. So, it doesn’t stop here and we’ll continue to advocate for that stuff, but once-once you’re on the radar as kind of that great trail state, outdoor state, it changes-it changes everything. It changes how people here look at it and how people that are visiting look at it too. So, it’s all really positive what’s going on here.
Andy: I think one of the things that’s interesting about Erie Canalway too is ah, ten years ago the Erie Canal really was not on the radar of I Love New York, which is the major tourism promotion agency, and in the ten years that I’ve been here with the national heritage corridor, um, I Love New York has become involved. They have seen the value of Erie Canalway as a tourism engine, and they have created ah, a new region for their tourism initiatives that includes Erie Canal. And I think that’s really important because we really played a role in-in working with I Love New York and raising awareness with them at the macro-level about what was happening in the corridor, both in the local community level and at the larger corridor-wide activities that are going on. Um, not just during the summer seasons, but year-round. Even-even in the cold months there’s things that happen on the canal that are worth doing, if you’re so inclined.
Francesca: That’s really cool to hear; I am a native New Yorker so um—
Andy: Awesome.
Francesca: —I’m always interested to know what other people from outside of the state think of our state, and I am happy to know that people know we’re not just the city, but also we have forests, we have open grasslands, we have rivers and trails, and so thank you both for all of the work that you do to make sure that we have these things, I appreciate it.
Andy: Thank you.
Jaimie: Thank you.
– Outro Music –
Francesca: For today’s episode we owe special thanks to Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor and the assistance that they provided with audio recording.
– Outro Music –
Francesca: This podcast series is produced by the National Park Service Northeast Regional Office. Today’s episode was edited by myself and Volunteer Audio Engineer, Suzie Calarco. The episode’s music was performed by Suzie and Sam Wolf. Thanks for tuning in and have an amazing day.
– Outro Music –
Description
In this episode, Francesca speaks with Andy Kitzmann, Assistant Director of the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, and Jamie Meerdink, Project Director of Parks & Trails New York. We discuss the annual event Cycle the Erie Canal where cyclists traverse across New York from Buffalo to Albany, as well as the use and importance of trails in New York state.
Duration
23 minutes, 20 seconds
Credit
NPS Northeast Region
Date Created
09/20/2018
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