Day #16: Medina to Niagara Falls (40 miles)

Today was a bit of a crescendo: it was our last day on the Erie canal; it was our last day in New York State; it was our first day in Canada... we won't be back in the US until we get to Detroit in a few weeks. And we saw two amazing sights: the 5 locks of Lockport, and Niagara Falls.

They are both related to this thing I'd never heard of before: the Niagara Escarpment. Niagara Falls is around 176 feet high. Lake Erie is upstream from the Falls, so lake Erie is on a plateau that is around 176 feet higher than Lake Ontario. The slope up from Lake Ontario up to the top of the plateau is called the "the Niagara Escarpment." Most of the Erie Canal is on the low side of the slope. You can see this in the red line on the map shown below. At Lockport the canal has to climb 176 feet and to do this it climbs through 5 huge locks:

It's hard to convey the scale of the "Flight of Five" locks... look at the height difference in the upper-left picture... that's how high the first doors are! The bottom-left image shows a model in the museum...

When we got to the city of Niagara Falls on the US side, we stopped at a Juneteenth celebration, and I scored a couple of free hotdogs thanks to these folks :-)

And then we rode all around the US side off the Falls, including circumnavigating Goat Island :

The Falls really are one of the wonders of the natural world, and the "Flight of Five" locks, at Lockport are miracles of engineering, because they are both solving the problem of the Niagara Escarpment...

The snapshot: 40 miles, starting at 7:30am and ending at 3pm, with 5 hours of actual biking: