Photo-of-the-Week #176 Chequaga Falls, Montour Fall, New York, July 2014

Here is, yet, another natural discovery I made. No, I don't mean I actually found something that no one else had discovered before. In fact the beautiful display of nature is actually in the middle of a residential neighborhood in the little town (population around 1,800) of Montour Falls, New York. There is, apparently, no Montour Falls, just Chequaga Falls (also misspelled Shequaga).

So, while I spent two years living in upstate New York and had been back through various parts of upstate New York on several occasions over the years, this little town and this picturesque park with the falls were a new discovery for me.

I would never have come upon this sight had I not traveled down to the southern tip of Seneca Lake, one of the New York Finger Lakes, for my first visit to the village of Watkins Glen and an opportunity to see the Watkins Glen International racetrack, home of a major annual Grand Prix auto race that began in 1948. I'll have photos of those for another time.

After leaving the Watkins Glen area on my way over to Ithaca, New York, the home of Ithaca College and Cornell University, my route brought me through this tiny town with this beautiful sight. I had to stop and spend some time here. So, I drove down the street, turned around and parked My McVansion in front of a home that had this view from their front window. Not bad, eh?

I have no idea how the people of this small town make a living. It's another of those beautiful little "in the middle of nowhere" places that has existed under a couple other names over a few hundred years before becoming Montour Falls. It was originally the site of an American Indian village that, sadly, from the little I could learn was destroyed and resettled by Europeans.

I'm often saddened by the greed and cruelty of some of our "immigrant" ancestors who came to the New World and took what wasn't theirs. But, that's a topic for another time. I'm just glad that the beauty of Chequaga Falls remains for anyone traveling through this region to experience.