High lake levels have been pulling at the shoreline all season, damaging protective structures and coming into people's yards and homes -- but the water is also affecting one of the region's greatest natural wonders.
If you hike up the side of this hill in Huron, New York, fight your way under a few fallen trees, and push past the leafy blushes, watch your step.
In front of you is a cliff, an almost sheer drop down to Lake Ontario. Beyond the cliff, there are giant sandy peaks jutting up over a hundred feet toward the sky from the beach below.
The Chimney Bluffs have been here for thousands of years, but they’re always changing.
Mark DeCracker is the president of the hiking enthusiast group Trail Works of Wayne County. He’s here a lot, so he notices changes right away.
"I’m just looking over to the west there and I can see some serious erosion happening right before our eyes," he says, looking over the edge. "A tree fell in, that little piece must have fallen in recently."
Like other, more famous canyons, this place was formed by water eroding away the land over time. You can hear the ceaseless clapping of lake waves on the shore below these hiking trails.
But the rate of erosion seems to be accelerating.
"The bluffs have been devastated in 2017 and 2019," DeCracker says. "High water, it just comes in, erodes under, and things collapse from above, and the rains that we got this spring just pelted down."
Last year the park had to close the Bluff Trail, which ran along the edge of the cliffside, for safety. Park officials say they are currently working on new trails further inland, thanks to a grant from New York State.
Climatologists predict that climate change will bring higher levels of precipitation and heavier storms to the Great Lakes region, which would continue to wash the bluffs and the shoreline away without intervention.
