Lansing Center Trail builds community

Bruce Barber walks his dog every morning on the Shoemaker Loop of the Lansing Center Trail, sometimes on cold mornings before the sun has risen over Cayuga Lake.

It’s located close to where he lives, and walking the roughly 2-mile loop is a secluded and peaceful way to start his day.

“I love it back there because you’re away from everything,” he said. “It’s quiet. You often see all sorts of wildlife out there. I encounter red-tail hawks a lot. A lot of deer, foxes, it’s really beautiful, and there’s a lot of history of Lansing out there.”

Barber is the president of the Friends of the Lansing Center Trail, and the 8-mile stretch of trail that encompasses old farm land has meant a lot to him since he moved to Lansing in 1999.

The trail was started in 2011 by Lansing Pathways and features seven loop trails accessible for walking, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing.

The parking lot at 9 Auburn Rd. is usually filled, Barber said. Since he took over as president of the Friends of the Lansing Center Trail in 2021, he’s realized how much the community values the trail.

“It’s a great resource we have,” he said. “I went by the parking lot the other day, and it was full. People love to walk it, love to snowshoe, cross-country ski on it. There’s a lot of history on it with the farmland out there.”

The loops of the trail are named after prominent people and families integral to Lansing’s history.

Barber said former Lansing Historian Louise Bement, who died on June 30, 2022, at 89 years old, was essential to the town naming its loops after individuals and families that Lansing residents would identify with.

It wasn’t just Bement; Barber said help in maintaining the trail has come from the town government and the citizens of Lansing.

“The trail is really a community effort,” he said. “The trail itself is owned by the town, but it is maintained and improved by the Friends [of the Lansing Center Trail] working in conjunction with the Recreation Department. [Parks, Recreation and Trails Chairperson] Pat Tyrell and his crew do a lot of stuff on the trail for us.”

Barber hopes that the trail can sustain its use to the community. He said that the land is owned by the Town of Lansing and can be sold, and conversations have happened with the Planning Board about potential development on the land used for the trail in the past.

He said he was unaware of any proposed development on the trail currently. He also said the town has written into the deeds for land where the trail runs through that access must not be impacted by new development.

“They can’t do away with the trail; they have to provide some provision for where the trail will be,” Barber said. “The trail will always exist — it’s just about where it will exist.”

Barber wishes that the trail will stay untouched, but he understands if the town takes a position of selling the land, as long as it doesn’t impact the trail.

“It’s a fact of life. I don’t have the money to buy up all the land, so I live with it,” he said. “We all enjoy it so we go there and do work, but there’s always the thing in the back of your mind; you create something out there, what’s its lifespan? If the land stayed wild in perpetuity, I’d be happy, but you can’t always get what you want.”

Barber said the trail doesn’t have much land to expand on. He’s hoping the future of the trail is one that maintains use from the community, including groups like the Girl Scouts and Eagle Scouts that have contributed to maintaining the trail.

“There is no more land to truly grow on, I think we’ve expanded and built about as many trails as we can out there,” he said. “Our goal is to keep it nice, to improve it any way we can so people enjoy it more and get people out there. People seem to love the trail. There’s a lot of people that are constant users of it that I know. They’re walking their dog, or as soon as the snow flies, they’re out there cross-country skiing.”

As soon winter hits, Barber is one of the many to brave the dreary and daunting upstate New York winter, clicking on his snowshoes and taking to the trail.

He said it’s important to have a place like Lansing Center Trail, not just as a community resource, but also as a sign of why people move to rural communities like Lansing.

“It’s just beautiful out there,” he said. “It’s a great resource that we’d love to see live happily ever [after] long with everything else.”

Lansing at Large appears every Wednesday in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@VizellaMedia.com.