A.I. slop has come for the mountains

After visiting Rainbow Falls for the first time recently, I wanted to know what made its ledges so colorful, streaked as they are with vivid hues of red, orange and yellow, like a Mark Rothko painting. And what did I find? A world of humbug and despair. A world where everything looks amazing but where everything is wrong.

Rainbow Falls, for example. The link that rose to the top of my search featured a waterfall so transcendently beautiful, it would be worth hiking 10 hours through black flies to see. But it was not the waterfall I just saw, at Minnewaska, lovely as it is in its own way.

The site says it “get[s] to what truly makes the Hudson Valley special,” but what it really gets is so much wrong about the landscapes I know and love, it might have been created in Manchuria. The page about Rainbow Falls at Minnewaska State Park Preserve folds in information about the Adirondack Park, which also has a Rainbow Falls, as it turns out. The description melds the geography of two places 200 miles apart into one tangled mess. Does it matter? If you follow the “information” on this page, you’ll end up somewhere, and maybe it’ll be fine. Even as you read this, A.I. is scraping the internet for New York’s several Wildcat Mountains, North Lakes, and Trout Ponds, and tossing them together like a chopped salad.

The falls in the photo can’t be found in either preserve. They exist in a place where autumn leaves reliably drift into Martha Stewart-like arrangements and dead trees never collapse into streams. These falls may not, in fact, exist at all. The Rainbow Falls I visited with Tom most certainly does exist, and I’d like to tell you about it. But first I must unburden myself about the gleeful disregard with which real things are now being treated, real things that are important to me.

Reams have been written about the Hudson Valley’s natural wonders, so much of it excellent and inspiring. But slop is weighing it all down, like a heavy step keeping a log underwater. It’s as if this mess was created with a single prompt, like: “Produce a slick SEO-optimized website about Hudson Valley recreation with an emphasis on the outdoors. Stick in lots of tabs and contributors.” Or more accurately, “contributors,” because they, too, don’t seem to exist. One contributor’s bio, next to a photo of a smirking fellow in a baseball cap, says the smirker grew up “along the rolling hills, pristine waters, and wild environments of the country.” He’s wearing a lei, because nothing says “Hudson Valley” like a lei. A reverse search of the photo turned up “sports fan in Hawaii.”

Fearing that the Rainbow Falls slop will be folded like pink slime into a bigger bucket of slop until the truth cannot be found, I reached out, hoping to find a sentient being among the wreckage. Everything on the page is wrong, all wrong, every bit of it! I said in a message sent to an email I found on the page. I got an automatic response: “Howdy Pamela A. Chergotis!” (Because no greeting says “Hudson Valley” quite like “howdy.”) “We’ll get back to you soon!”

Our hike to the falls started by following the wondrously picturesque Peters Kill to a steep connector path, and then to a carriage road that would be our last reprieve before the painstaking descent to the bottom of Huntington Ravine. We listened for water as we picked our way down, and it was a long time coming. I was expecting a roar but heard only some pleasant splish-splashing as the fall’s thin streams spilled over the flat-topped ledge onto the scree below. It was difficult to find purchase in the bottom of this narrow V filled with loose rock and blowdown. We headed for a log that was reasonably horizontal, and it held our weight.

The rainbow ledge is the star of the show. I’m not sure I’ve gotten to the bottom of the color question – a scholarly paper about the Shawangunk Conglomerate says its trace amounts of iron, oxidized by rain, can seep through the cracks of its “slaty cleavage” and stain the rocks red and yellow. The water that dribbles over the rainbow rocks is spare, even in spring. But in winter – do they freeze into flutes of rainbow ice? Ooooh....probably! But I won’t look for pictures on the internet to find out. We will come back and see for ourselves.

SNEAK PEEK

Trailhead: Minnewaska State Park Preserve, 5281 Route 44‑55, Kerhonkson, N.Y. Day pass is $10 per car, free for seniors who live in NYS.

Trails: From the lower parking lot, take the Mossy Glen Trail (yellow blazes) 1.6 miles to the Blueberry Run Trail (blue). Turn left. Continue a quarter-mile to the Upper Awosting Carriage Road (green). Turn left. After a half-mile, turn right onto the Rainbow Falls Trail (orange) and continue another half-mile to Rainbow Falls.

Length: 5.7 miles round-trip (out and back)