Ithaca Falls

Fall Creek drops 150 feet and spreads 175 feet wide before pooling at the base — the last waterfall in a series carved by glaciers along a hanging valley above Cayuga Lake. The shale walls formed an amphitheater here through cycles of freezing and thawing, and that same geology made it a mill site: in 1830, a young Ezra Cornell blasted a tunnel through the gorge wall to divert water to the mills clustered below. Ruins of those mills still ring the splash pool. The city of Ithaca acquired the land from Cornell in 2000 as part of an environmental cleanup.