Spring weather’s here. With the snow (mostly) gone from the northern Hudson Valley and a kind of soft and pure spring warmth in the air, I was eager to bike somewhere to the north. I’ve spent days in the Pinelands in search of warm weather, but now that it was here, I was thinking Hudson Valley, and was curious about the newly-opened Albany Hudson Electric Trail.

Stuyvesant Falls, near Kinderhook, New York. The area was a center of rural industry in the 1800s; the area around the falls once supported mills, factories, taverns, stores, and forty-nine dwellings.

Making good on Governor Cuomo’s promise to open the full Empire State Trail by 2020, it was officially opened on December 31, 2020. Snow, of course, prevented any kind of bike travel besides fat tires in the Hudson Valley, so the AHET would have to wait. Maybe mid-March is jumping the gun, but the snow depth maps showed that the way was clear.

Anyway, I was curious. We have plenty of bike paths in the New York City area, and I’ve gotten used to their character, which is generally straight and suburban. But Columbia County’s backroads are different: its lushly-textured hills and valleys, wide pastures of corn and cows, a long-abandoned chimney at a turn in the river. Those towering forests. 

The cinder surface of the Albany-Hudson Electric Trail. The trail follows the route of an electric trolley that once joined the cities of Hudson and Albany in the Upper Hudson Valley.

The Albany-Hudson Electric Trail is part of the Empire State Trail and a crucial link in a largely-unbroken dedicated path from New York City to Buffalo, The 36-mile section follows a route taken by an electric trolley from 1899 to 1929, knitting together historic places, powerful dams and industrial towns of paper mill pasts.

I planned to bike from the parking area at Stuyvesant Falls and head north, towards the twin villages of Kinderhook and Valatie (pronounced Vuh-LAY-shuh, I was told). Out and back, it would make an easy, flat 18-mile ride.

I left my car in Stuyvesant Falls Park along Lindenwald Avenue in Kinderhook. The falls, blustery and swollen with melted snow, are the attraction in this small roadside park; no matter how you feel about dams, the water power here is impressive. I biked across the Kinderhook Creek on an iron bridge, where you can get a good view of the falls and the old brick factory from a time when the area was a center of rural industry.  

The Albany-Hudson Electric Trail follows an old electric trolley line, south through the villages of Stockport and Stottsville, New York.

Soon you’re leaving the creekside, crossing through farmland and pasture, across broad and level countryside. Smells of leaves burning and the barnyard mix with sodden ground and hay. Here and there the trail ends and puts you out onto the roads, but the car traffic is minimal on the secondary roads, and the trail is well-marked with the recognizable blue-and-yellow signs.

As you reach Kinderhook, an easy-to-miss sign in Mills Park, at the end of Sunset Ave, tells you that a right-hand turn onto Albany Ave. will get you into the center of town in a quarter-mile. Broad Street and Hudson Street present a handful of businesses, among them the magnanimous (and my favorite) Broad Street Bagels, which is not one to pass up. The kettle-boiled bagels are crisp and heavenly; toasted with cream cheese, a little onion and tomato and there’s your lunch. 

Broad Street Bagel Co.’s bagels are a perfect lunch for the Albany-Hudson Electric Trail. These are authentic, kettle-boiled bagels. The cafe has plenty of outdoor seating (just look for the big chicken!).

The trail past Kinderhook becomes somewhat suburban as it pushes past shoulder-to-shoulder houses and along busier roads to Valatie. It never quite reaches the center of the town, but skirts it. You’ll pass two gas stations on this route — good to know if you need a bathroom or a drink. You could go into Valatie, too, by turning right onto Main Street (you’ll see a station house across the street); the town, with a restaurant or two (and I recommend Main Street Diner for the basics), is visible from the trail here and just a stone’s throw down Main.

A straight-down view of the bike path. Pine forests edge up to the path south of Stuyvesant Falls.

At Kinderhook Lake in Niverville, nine miles from where I started, I turned back and retraced my ride along the trail. It had warmed up considerably but even so, I passed no other bike, just a woman pushing a jogging stroller. Before long, I could hear the rush of Stuyvesant Falls, and the bridge to where my car was waiting.

But these trails, they tempt you to keep going. So I kept going, going south, using what was left of my bike’s battery and seeing how far I could take it. Into the scenery, prettier in many ways than the stretch of trail to the north, and quieter, too: long, dark serrated stands of pine forest are broken here and there by a lake or a bog. The trail dives into the entrance to a big farm, set in a pretty valley, but then it’s on its own again. 

Beautiful, raggedy Kinderhook Creek.

In this section, at least, you have the feeling of being somewhere else, not the Hudson Valley but maybe somewhere out west, where the rivers pack the kind of energy that discourages man-made boundaries and keeps in place the natural ones.

I turned back, reluctantly, when I reached the thundering Rossman Falls at the Chittenden factory, another project of a paper-mill past. Here the Albany-Hudson joins Hudson Avenue (Route 25) to continue south, the frisky Kinderhook Creek always in view. All the way down to Stockport, Stottsville, Hudson. So I’ll come back, whenever this winter is over and the warm weather returns, and try that leg in a week or two, and let you know.