Beaver Lake Nature Center

I had my first field trip of the year today. Up until yesterday I was sure I would get the VG soccer team tonight. I don't like working evenings, so I was thrilled when it worked out that I got to take a group to Beaver Lake.

There wasn't a whole lot of fall color at the park yet. The first two pictures were taken on the bog trail.

I have always liked the bog trail because of the boardwalk. Today the hard surface really bothered my foot.

This is a good representation of the amount of color change we have throughout our area. Some individual trees doing their own thing but not the mass of color that we comes and goes too quickly.

The weather forecasters here are in their glory. The weather patterns are changing and we have been getting lake effect rain. I swear the one weather guy must have said "lake effect" 40 times yesterday during the news. This picture shows one of the lake effect bands as it was starting to break up. There were a few geese on the lake but they were too far away for my camera.

It rained before we took the kids and started raining again just as they were getting back on the buses. While we were there the sun came out and the weather was almost perfect. I just liked this picture.


Lake Effect is what gives us our 150+ inches of snow a year. The winds come across Lake Ontario picking up moisture and dump it on us. The clouds set up in bands. Sometimes one wide band at the east end of the lake. More often the bands set up as narrow fingers of clouds that can extend for miles to the south east. The closer to the lake, the more snow you're likely to get. East of the lake, on the Tug Hill Plateau, they get more snow than us, down in Syracuse they get less.