Everyone knows about Watkins Glen. The crowds, the photos, the way it ends up on every "best of Finger Lakes" list like clockwork. And it deserves it — it's genuinely stunning. But there's another gorge park in this region, about 20 minutes from downtown Auburn, that offers most of the same payoff and approximately none of the parking lot and crowd chaos.

Fillmore Glen State Park sits just outside Moravia, a small village in Cayuga County. It's 941 acres. It has five waterfalls. It has stone bridges and trail walls built by Civilian Conservation Corps crews during the Great Depression — the same hands that worked Watkins Glen and Letchworth. And on a Sunday in May, after weeks of heavy rain, my husband and I hiked the Gorge Trail and didn't see another person for long stretches. Just us, the trees, and a stream running so fast it was almost loud.

That last part is the thing I keep thinking about. The water. With all the rain we've had this spring, the creek through the gorge wasn't doing its polite little trickle. It was moving and pouring down the walls in some spots! The sound of it filled the whole trail — all that rushing, churning energy bouncing off the rock walls — and somehow the gorge felt even more alive for it. A reminder that these parks aren't static destinations. They change with the season, with the weather, with how much it rained last week.

The park entrance is off Route 38 in Moravia. When you pull in, here's a tip worth keeping: skip the main parking lot at the bottom and drive up the park road a bit further to the upper shelter area. There's a smaller lot up there with access to the Gorge Trail without the brutal 135 stone steps at the entrance. (I have a thing about stairs. The upper lot is my thing.) You'll miss a small stretch of the lower gorge, but you'll hit the trail with your knees intact and your mood intact, which matters.

The Gorge Trail itself is about 2 miles out and back from there. It's manageable — some incline, some uneven footing, but nothing crazy. The payoff is the geology: you're walking through millions of years of layered shale and limestone, past waterfalls carved by the same glacial meltwater that shaped everything about this region. The rock walls get close in places. It feels, for stretches, like the gorge is leaning over you.

The park is open year-round, though the Gorge Trail closes in winter. Camping runs mid-May through mid-October (60 sites, plus cabins). The stream-fed swimming area opens in late June and runs through Labor Day weekend. There's fishing in the Owasco Lake inlet. In winter, the unplowed roads are open for cross-country skiing and snowmobiling.

Spring is a particularly good time to go if you want the water drama — everything is running high and fast right now, and the tree canopy is just starting to fill in, which means more light through the gorge than you'll get in July. On a Sunday in May, we saw maybe five groups total during our entire visit. For a park this good, that's almost unfair.

Parts of the park are dog-friendly, so you may also get some bonus dog-spotting along the way.

If you're going to do this even semi-regularly — and you should — it's worth looking into the Empire Pass. It's an annual pass ($80 for most vehicles) that covers vehicle admission at nearly all New York State Parks and DEC recreation areas, including Fillmore Glen. If you visit more than a handful of parks in a year, it pays for itself fast. It also makes the whole "let's just go" decision a lot easier when you're not doing the parking fee math in your head.