The guns of September brought A Guy on a Bike to Penn Yan. The paths of Keuka Outlet Trail brought him to peace of mind.

The day’s destination, for the rider’s teenaged son and his two comrades in arms, was Black Ops Airsoft in Yates County. The owners call their 50-plus acres of fields, buildings and bunkers the No. 1 airsoft field in New York State. Airsoft resembles paintball, except the guns shoot various-sized BBs, which go farther than paintballs. Its players, as opposed to paintballers, focus more on military simulations.

The Sept. 15 “Operation Selective Reasoning” was an eight-hour affair. When combatants hiked to the woods, A Guy on a Bike unhooked his all-purpose DiamondBack from the roof of his car and rolled down into the village of Penn Yan.

The destination was Keuka Outlet Trail. Its website notes it is one of “the very first rail trails.”

The seven-mile trail, maintained by Friends of the Outlet, begins in Penn Yan on Keuka Lake and links to Dresden in the east, on Seneca Lake. The trail is built on the track bed of the old Fall Brook Railroad (1884-1974). That track followed the towpath of the Crooked Lake Canal that connected the lakes until 1877 when the canal, with 27 locks, was shut down by the state. The trail’s name comes from the “outlet,” — technically a stream that connects Seneca and Keuka lakes. Its level is controlled by a dam in Penn Yan. On this day, the stream looked to be only a few feet deep in places, but water releases are sometimes made for fishing and kayaking enthusiasts and to lower the level of Keuka Lake.

The trail mixes bucolic scenes with the rubble of industry. The Washington, D.C.,-based Rails-To-Trails Conservancy notes that the canal at one time supported as many as 40 mills and 12 hydropower dams. Today, a person on the trail can view a crumbling mill at one turn and be awed by a waterfall on another.

The beginning of the trail in Penn Yan can be accessed at the village’s boat launch/recreation area off of Elm Street. Nearby, there’s the one mill still in operation in the village. The Birkett Mills on Main Street is the world’s largest manufacturer of buckwheat products. It’s been in continuous operation since 1797.

There’s a small segment of pavement for the trail’s beginning in Penn Yan, but the bulk of the trail is a mixture of either packed dirt, crushed stone or a track made by countless bicycle tires over fields of grass. Black walnuts, some nearly as large as lemons, are scattered on many parts of the trail.

The trail takes a very slight downhill to Dresden as it follows the creek, which drops approximately 270 feet along the way. In Dresden, the trail ends about a mile from Seneca Lake. An effort is under way by Friends of the Outlet to extend the trail to that lake.

From Penn Yan, about a mile into the trail at Fox’s Mill Road, a sign gives a warning that is so matter-of-fact that A Guy on a Bike wonders if it was created tongue-in-cheek, or more likely, as a necessity in this digital age: “Natural areas possess hazards not normally found in your home surroundings.”

There are several rest areas along the trail. The most elaborate is a pavilion at about the half-way point. Sponsored by the local Lions Club, it honors the memory of Bruce Hansen (1947-1999), one of the trail’s visionaries. A plaque about Mr. Hansen is situated on a boulder in front of the pavilion. Another plaque on a boulder nearby honors the memory of John M. Sheridan (1925-1984), a Yates County attorney who negotiated the purchase of the land for the trail.

Shawn K. Blauvelt of Penn Yan, who was on a nature hike further down the trail with his 5-year-old grandson, said the trail is a marvelous community asset. He recalled that Hurricane Agnes in June of 1972 wiped out a large segment of the railroad tracks along the outlet, shutting down the railroad and eventually sparking the idea for the trail.

A new fan of the trail is Dr. Karen James, a 2012 graduate of Cornell University, Ithaca. In July she began working at East View Veterinary Clinic in the village of Penn Yan, which got its name from its pioneers being equal numbers of Pennsylvanians and Yankees.

A Guy on a Bike caught up with Dr. James a few miles outside of Dresden on her way back to Penn Yan, where she began. She said it was her first time on the trail and that it was perfect for her late-’90s Specialized, front-suspension mountain bike.

The native of Charlotte, Maine, said that when she began her job, she was given a tour of the village by a wife of one of the doctors at her clinic. “I had seen signs for the Outlet Trail, but I didn’t know how to quite get there,” Dr. James said, after arriving back at the boat launch in Penn Yan. “She came down here and showed me where to go.”

Dr. James said the trail pleasantly surprised her.

“I didn’t know if you could easily get your bike from one end to the other,” she said. “But it was no problem.”

The Friends of the Outlet note that besides bicyclers and walkers, trail users include bird watchers, cross-country skiers, snowshoers and horseback riders.

A day of history and beauty concluded for this cyclist on the return climb to Black Ops Airsoft. The battle was still raging. But from the hill on State Route 14A overlooking the village of Penn Yan, a sense of appreciation and placidity was triggered. We all left on peaceful terms, hoping to return.

If you have a suggested ride/column idea for A Guy on a Bike, contact Times features writer Chris Brock at cbrock@wdt.net, or write to him at the Watertown Daily Times, 260 Washington St., Watertown, NY 13601.

Some previous columns can be read at www.watertowndailytimes.com/section/col04

Sarah Ellen Smith was standing alongside the Black Creek Road in Clayton with what she thought was a useless bicycle.

Back in January, she had also thought something else would be useless — a project recommended by a friend that has brought her back to this same lonely spot for the past six months.

Both things turned around. The chain on her 1980s Spalding bicycle, which she had driven to the site, was easily re- attached to its crank ring one morning late last month. Minutes later, she was riding away, with camera at the ready, for her continued mission on the Sissy Danforth Rivergate Trail.

Riding to Black Creek Road from the village of Clayton to join her roadside at the trailhead were a Guy on a Bike and Elaine V. Tack, volunteer and trustee of the Thousand Islands Land Trust. It was Ms. Tack who back in January had an idea.

“I asked her if she would take on this year-long project of documenting the Rivergate monthly” on YouTube, Ms. Tack said. “Not many people know about the trail.”

The 27-mile long Rivergate Trail, an old New York Central/Penn Central railroad bed, runs from the town of Clayton to the village of Philadelphia. The rails-to-trails project is named for former TILT director Louise “Sissy” Danforth, who championed its development. She died in 2006 at the age of 66. It's a multi-use trail in several sections that can be accessed at several points from Clayton to Philadelphia from roads intersecting it. TILT purchased its first section of the trail in 1994, and it opened two years later.

Clayton residents can be excused for not knowing about the trail. Just to get to the Black Creek Road trailhead is a meandering trip of about four miles from the village riverside, a situation TILT hopes to improve. In December, the land trust purchased 142.3 acres southeast of the village along Black Creek Road from the S. Gerald Ingerson Trust — managed by Gerald F. Ingerson and Mary Ingerson-Mulchy of Alexandria Bay — for $50,000. The purchase price was covered by a North American Wetlands Conservation Act grant.

Ms. Tack said TILT hopes to extend the Rivergate Trail through that new property, a distance of 3½ miles, to bring the trailhead closer to the village. That section will be pedestrian and bike only, said Ms. Tack, who is also a board member of the advocacy group Parks & Trails New York.

There is a path on the old railroad bed that goes directly into Clayton, but it is on public and privately owned land and, a Guy on a Bike found, in much rougher shape. It runs behind Cerow Recreational Park and Guardino Elementary School. Ms. Tack envisions the day when the area is smoothed, cleared and teeming with scores of village residents and tourists.

With a surface of dirt and crushed cinder, Rivergate Trail attracts users ranging from walkers and cyclists to ATVers, skiers and horseback riders. Most of the maintenance on the trail, according to TILT, is performed by the ATV clubs Rivergate Wheelers, the Lodge ATV Club and Indian River Lakes ATV and Snowmobile Club.

At first, Ms. Smith didn't think much of Ms. Tack's idea of a photographic journey.

“I'm thinking, 'A straight cinder trail; what on Earth can you take a picture of?'” Ms. Smith said.

But if one slows down, unplugs, looks and listens, she realized, there is a lot.

“For one, it's the ferns,” she said. “My gosh! There's probably 50 different types of ferns between here and Fox Hill Road. That's like a mile.”

Ms. Smith posts about 60 photos a month on her YouTube videos, which also feature the sounds of surrounding nature and descriptions told in Ms. Smith's calm, soothing voice. She takes about 1,000 shots a month with her Canon EOS 7D camera, visiting about three times a week. She limits her treks, mainly on foot, to the Clayton to LaFargeville segments of the trail, a distance of 5½ miles bordered largely by wetlands. She has walked there and back several times. She would like to devote more time to the project.

“I generally don't have a whole lot of time,” she said. “I could devote days to this. But I have a job.”

She and partner John Arnot own St. Lawrence Pottery, Route 12, Clayton. Mr. Arnot is the potter and Ms. Smith paints the pottery, creates jewelry and other artwork.

“I'm not a wildlife photographer by any stretch of the imagination,” Ms. Smith said. “Usually, I'm like, 'Wow! Would you look at that!?' And I'm like, 'Oh yeah — I have a camera!' I'm an artist before I'm a photographer.”

We rode about a half mile into the trail until the artist's eye spotted something and she dismounted. It was an old wooden railroad mile post. She noticed that the vine clinging to it had bloomed, and she snapped a photo.

Ms. Smith often strolls off the path into the outskirts of the trail — something others should be careful of because of the abundant amounts of poison ivy. Ms. Smith said she has found she is immune to the effects of the plant.

“It's a nice ecosystem that runs along on either side,” she said. “And it's different on either side.”

We neared a swamp, where Ms. Smith has been trying to photograph an elusive beaver. It remained so on this day.

She pointed to a dead tree with hollowed out cavities; a swallow seemingly stood guard at its top.

“That little swallow keeps coming back,” she said. “He's got a little hole in there. He dive-bombs me. There's a turtle over there I'm trying to get a good picture of, and the swallow keeps swooping down, right near my head.”

We entered an area where growth on one side of the trail is short, allowing a vista of a green and brown field overlaid with a hazy blue sky coated with high-level thin, white clouds.

“I was away for 30 years, and the one thing I missed is the north country sky,” Ms. Smith said. “It's just incredible.”

The General Brown High School graduate left the north country in 1978, went to college in Quincy, Ill., then became a rafting guide in Maine. She also raced sailboats in Florida. Through it all, she was a freelance artist and also did ad agency work and architectural rendering part-time. For nearly 10 years, Ms. Smith was an artist in residence at Creative Clay in St. Petersburg, Fla., and traveled to advocate for artists with developmental disabilities. She has also taught at the Thousand Islands Arts Center in Clayton.

Although Ms. Smith doesn't consider photography her primary art outlet, she has shot in some exotic locations. In 2007, she joined a group of photographers on a trip to Uruguay by invitation from the Ministry of Tourism of Uruguay coordinated and arranged by Nova Southerastern University in Florida.

For her Rivergate project, not all of her shots are of the natural world. Part of April's YouTube video highlighted garbage along the trail.

“That was really interesting,” she said. “Here's this remote thing, but some people know about it because they dump their garbage on it.”

The garbage ranged from Styrofoam takeout boxes to beer cans. But some items seemed absurd to Ms. Smith.

“There was a bottle of Thousand Island dressing,” she said. “How did that get there? Was somebody eating a salad and say, 'Oh, I hate this dressing!'”

She was especially bothered by a particular piece of garbage that kept cropping up at various points off the trail: the remnants of deer after they were harvested by hunters. The offal was placed in plastic bags and tossed off the trail.

“Why would they leave it in a plastic bag?” Ms. Smith wondered. “You would think they would just let it go, because that way, the coyotes or whatever could eat it.”

Other signs of humanity have been more gratifying for Ms. Smith. She meets the occasional family with children. They get encouragement from Ms. Smith to walk all the way to LaFargeville where, she tells them, there's an ice cream stand.

She said she has had nothing but good experiences with the ATV riders she meets.

“They are very friendly and courteous,” she said. “They slow down, and a lot of them say hi and ask if I need help.”

They may just be wondering about this roaming woman with camera on the trail. But not to worry. Ms. Smith has found her stride and she's looking forward to uploading another half year of trail photos and thoughts on YouTube.

She may be just getting started.

“I'm thinking about doing another spot next year because I'm loving this so much,” she said.

A Guy on a Bike is an occasional column in which the rider introduces you to people and places along roads you might easily miss. If you have a suggested ride/column idea, contact cbrock@wdt.net, or write to Chris Brock at the Watertown Daily Times, 260 Washington St., Watertown, NY 13601.