Buttermilk Falls State Park Ithaca
— — the creek the gorge keeps folding.
Not only on a wall.
“Buttermilk Creek drops more than six hundred feet through a glen of shale and sandstone on its way down to Cayuga Lake. Ten cascades, one after another, the lowest spilling into a shallow swimming pool that opens for the summer. The gorge trail climbs alongside in stone steps cut by CCC crews in the 1930s. People come for the bottom falls and stay for the rim.
Buttermilk Falls State Park Ithaca, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Buttermilk Falls State Park sits at the southern edge of Ithaca, where Buttermilk Creek leaves the Cayuga Lake basin uplands and falls toward the lake itself. The park covers 811 acres in Tompkins County and was established in 1924, with much of its current trail and stonework laid by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s. It is one of the Finger Lakes parks managed by New York State Parks, a short drive south of downtown Ithaca on State Route 13.
The creek descends through ten distinct cascades over roughly a mile of gorge, cutting down through layered Devonian shale and sandstone. The lowest fall pours into a broad, shallow pool that the park opens as a guarded swimming area in summer. Above it, smaller chutes and plunge pools step up the glen, with the Gorge Trail running tight beside the water on stone risers. The shape of the falls gives the park its name, the white water reading as buttermilk against the dark rock.
The lower day-use area is open year-round, but the Gorge Trail typically opens after the spring thaw and closes again in late autumn for safety. Summer brings the swimming pool at the base of the lower falls, staffed by lifeguards during posted hours. A vehicle entry fee applies in season. Above the gorge, the Rim Trail and Bear Trail loop through hemlock woods to Pinnacle Rock and back, a longer walk for visitors who want more than the quick lookout at the parking area.