American Byways by Sherman Cahal

American Byways by Sherman Cahal Explore Your America.

Back in June, on my annual work trip to the Finger Lakes, I decided to hop the guardrail and explore Johns Creek near Mo...
09/03/2026

Back in June, on my annual work trip to the Finger Lakes, I decided to hop the guardrail and explore Johns Creek near Montour Falls, New York. There are four significant waterfalls packed into about a half mile, and getting to all of them means some bushwhacking and a fair bit of streamwalking once the informal trail gives out.

The last one made it worth the effort: an estimated 40-foot cascade at the top of the glen.

🧭 More photographs and a travel guide are available through the link in the comments. A visit helps support American Byways' ongoing work documenting these places through research, photography, and storytelling.

Holland spends eleven months a year looking like what it is, a harbor town on Lake Macatawa with a long Dutch memory. Th...
09/01/2026

Holland spends eleven months a year looking like what it is, a harbor town on Lake Macatawa with a long Dutch memory. Then May arrives and five million tulips open at once. The whole thing traces back to Lida Rodgers, a biology teacher who suggested mass plantings as a tribute to the town's founders. The city put 100,000 bulbs in the ground, held the first Tulip Time in 1929, and never really stopped.

While you're there, Windmill Island Gardens is worth the trip on its own. De Zwaan was built in Krommenie in 1761, sold to Holland for $2,800, and shipped over in 1964, the last windmill the Netherlands ever allowed out of the country. It's the only authentic Dutch windmill still working in the United States, and it still grinds wheat into flour.

🧭 More photographs and a travel guide are available through the link in the comments. A visit helps support American Byways' ongoing work documenting these places through research, photography, and storytelling.

Shequaga Falls is one of those rare roadside waterfalls that anyone can visit. Located at the end of Main Street in Mont...
08/27/2026

Shequaga Falls is one of those rare roadside waterfalls that anyone can visit. Located at the end of Main Street in Montour Falls, New York, 156 feet of water tumbles down, framed by an 1830s Colonial house standing in front of it and a bed and breakfast operating next door. The Seneca called it tumbling waters, and after dark the village lights it just enough to see.

Montour Falls sits in a stretch of the Portage Escarpment carved out by glaciers 18,000 years ago, with hills running a thousand feet up on every side and seven glens fanning out from the village edge. There are a couple dozen waterfalls in this valley.

It's worth knowing whose valley it was. A Seneca town called Queanettquaga stood here, better known as Catharine's Town after the matriarch who led it, until the Sullivan-Clinton campaign burned it in the summer of 1779. Settlers rebuilt on the site and called it Havana. In 1895 the village renamed itself for Catharine Montour, whose grave mound still sits south of town.

🧭 More photographs and a travel guide are available through the link in the comments. A visit helps support American Byways' ongoing work documenting these places through research, photography, and storytelling.

Moon Rocks and HooDoo Rocks are the reason Yellow Creek is one of my favorite hikes in the West Virginia highlands.This ...
08/17/2026

Moon Rocks and HooDoo Rocks are the reason Yellow Creek is one of my favorite hikes in the West Virginia highlands.

This 860-acre natural area near Davis is named for a tributary of the Blackwater River and sits right next to the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge, with a 4.6-mile loop climbing over both rock formations and informal paths to the top for a full panorama. It also plugs into the Heart of the Highlands Trail System and its 20-plus miles of trail, so you can make a day of it or just chase the rocks.

🧭 More photographs and a travel guide are available through the link in the comments. A visit helps support American Byways' ongoing work documenting these places through research, photography, and storytelling.

Black Mountain, at 4,139 feet, is the highest peak in Kentucky. Situated along the Virginia border, the mountain range i...
08/14/2026

Black Mountain, at 4,139 feet, is the highest peak in Kentucky. Situated along the Virginia border, the mountain range is a haven for biodiversity, hosting some species unique to the area and not found elsewhere in the state. At the summit is a disused fire lookout tower, and nearby is an FAA radar site that plays a crucial role in identifying and tracking military and civilian aircraft.

This site was once off-limits unless you were granted permission from the landowner; at one point, there were proposals to strip coal from the mountaintop. However, it is now protected by the Commonwealth.

🧭 More photographs and a travel guide are available through the link in the comments. A visit helps support American Byways' ongoing work documenting these places through research, photography, and storytelling.

Two prairies grow side by side at Plum Run, and neither one should still be here. On 139 acres in Adams County, tallgras...
08/12/2026

Two prairies grow side by side at Plum Run, and neither one should still be here. On 139 acres in Adams County, tallgrass prairie meets cedar glade, the midwestern plains and the eastern hills sharing ground and sheltering more than 30 rare and state-listed plants and animals.

The Arc of Appalachia acquired the property in 2006 with funding help from ODNR's Division of Natural Areas and Preserves, and this July it became Ohio's 156th state nature preserve.

🧭 More photographs and a travel guide are available through the link in the comments. A visit helps support American Byways' ongoing work documenting these places through research, photography, and storytelling.

Some places name themselves. Triangle Rock juts out over the North Fork South Branch of the Potomac near Petersburg, Wes...
08/10/2026

Some places name themselves. Triangle Rock juts out over the North Fork South Branch of the Potomac near Petersburg, West Virginia, a point of Tuscarora quartzite riding the flank of North Fork Mountain along the Wills Mountain Anticline, a fold in the earth that runs from Pennsylvania down into Virginia.

That Silurian sandstone is as hard as anything in these hills and wears away far slower than the rock beneath it, which is why this run of west-facing cliffs has outlasted everything around it. Below, it's sugar maple, beech, and yellow birch; out on the open rock, silvery nailwort and white alumroot make a living in the cracks while wind-bent chestnut oak and Table Mountain pine hold the edge.

🧭 More photographs and a travel guide are available through the link in the comments. A visit helps support American Byways' ongoing work documenting these places through research, photography, and storytelling.

Eighty-seven Union soldiers held this gap against 1,500 Confederates for four hours before the church they were shelteri...
08/07/2026

Eighty-seven Union soldiers held this gap against 1,500 Confederates for four hours before the church they were sheltering in went up in flames.

That was April 1863; today Greenland Gap is a 250-acre Nature Conservancy preserve where the North Fork of Patterson Creek cuts through New Creek Mountain beneath Oriskany Sandstone cliffs rising more than 800 feet. Canada yew and red elderberry grow here alongside Blackburnian warblers and winter wrens, species you'd normally have to climb much higher to find, and from mid-August into October the sky fills with migrating hawks.

🧭 More photographs and a travel guide are available through the link in the comments. A visit helps support American Byways' ongoing work documenting these places through research, photography, and storytelling.

I hiked up Buffalo Mountain in the dark to reach the Pinnacle Mountain Fire Tower before first light, and got the drone ...
08/05/2026

I hiked up Buffalo Mountain in the dark to reach the Pinnacle Mountain Fire Tower before first light, and got the drone up just as the sun broke over the ridgeline.

At 3,520 feet in the Cherokee National Forest, the platform looks out across "The Valley Beautiful" toward Roan, Unaka, and North Carolina's Mt. Mitchell. The tower has stood here since 1931 and went dark in 1989, but in the summer of 2011 a crane lifted away the old wooden cabin and set an all-metal observation deck in its place, a $146,000 project funded partly by individual and business donations. Dedicated that October, it now anchors a trail system linking Erwin and Johnson City. Worth the early alarm.

🧭 More photographs and a travel guide are available through the link in the comments. A visit helps support American Byways' ongoing work documenting these places through research, photography, and storytelling.

One cold winter day on Backbone Mountain made for some of the most rewarding drone work I've done—blue hour and sunrise ...
07/30/2026

One cold winter day on Backbone Mountain made for some of the most rewarding drone work I've done—blue hour and sunrise shots of Olson Tower in the stillness of a frozen morning. Built in 1963 in West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest, Olson Tower replaced the state's first fire tower and honors 28 years of conservation service to the forest.

🧭 More photographs and a travel guide are available through the link in the comments. A visit helps support American Byways' ongoing work documenting these places through research, photography, and storytelling.

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