Meet Our New Intern: Jules Hoepting

Hello, there! My name is Jules Hoepting. As you may have inferred from the title, I will be interning with Parks & Trails New York over the summer. I’m pretty stoked about it!

Just a few weeks ago, I graduated from SUNY Fredonia with a Bachelor's degree in Communication: Public Relations. Although classes were fun, I got most of my education through my position as both the Managing and Design Editor for the school’s award-winning newspaper, The Leader. There, I covered and edited a variety of topics, such as how proposed logging around a local reservoir could lead to more instances of undrinkable town water and the reason behind the closures of several major cafes popular with students. In recognition of my efforts for the paper and my other activities on campus, I was one of 180 recipients across 61 universities of the SUNY Chancellor's Award of Student Excellence.

I’m excited to see how I can use my communication skills while working with PTNY this summer, since my projects will center on a topic I’m pretty passionate about — canal trails. I will be working on various aspects of the Canalway Trail Partnership, such as promotion, support for volunteer programs, writing for the Canalway Trail Times, and working on the Empire State Trail Town program. I will provide similar support for the Genesee Valley Greenway Trail Towns initiative.

The Erie Canalway Trail is half a mile from my childhood home in Albion, NY, the halfway point between Buffalo and Rochester. I always really liked the canal, mainly because I like water. I’d hang out near it after school. I took my high school graduation pictures next to it.

Although I went on fun camping trips all over Western NY and southern Ontario throughout my childhood, I didn’t really get into hiking until a few years ago. In 2017, I started going for walks on the Erie Canalway Trail, progressively going farther for the fun of it.

In 2019, I spent a fateful summer in Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies with my aunt who worked for the park. In an attempt to fully take in my breathtaking surroundings, I hiked every opportunity I got. In the process, I became hooked on hiking. I was looking forward to planning more trips for the following year…

But then the pandemic hit. Spring 2020 found me at my mom’s house finishing up university courses that had been hastily shifted online halfway through the semester. What to do with no schedule or structure? Sleep during the day and stay awake at night? That’s the direction I was going in. I needed a goal, an objective…

I kept going further to the east and west from Albion on the canal. I thought, “wouldn’t it be really cool to have done 50 miles of the Erie Canalway? Wouldn’t it be really cool to have done 100 miles? 200 miles?” And as I checked off each of those mileage objectives, I kept thinking, more certain by the mile, “Well now I have to walk all of it. All 300 miles of it.” (I avoided the long portions of the trail that were on the road, which makes up ~60 miles of the Erie Canalway Trail.)

For a schedule, I got a full time job at a grocery store (who else was hiring?) and for a goal I did what I often did; take really long walks on the Erie Canal.

Except I did 600 miles, because I did the whole thing by myself through a series of 30 day trips. I’d park my car, walk out numerous miles, and then walk back to my car. I averaged 20 miles a day, 1o miles of trail. And when the trail got too far for day trips, I’d find somewhere to stay for a night or two when I had consecutive days off work.

On August 31, 2020, I finally saw the historical marker indicating the historic eastern terminus of the Erie Canal in Albany, NY. I had completed something not a lot of people had done.

I didn’t quite realize how far I walked until I took Interstate 90 back to Fredonia that night, where I was beginning my junior year of university.

Throughout this canal journey, I learned a lot. Sure, when you grow up in a canal town, they tell you in school the Erie Canal was revolutionary. But it hits a lot harder when you walk through all of the towns built around the canal and stop to read all the trail’s historical signs. There’s something about going on foot, about seeing the world slowly, that is rewarding to me.

And, of course, the trail illustrates the marvelous engineering of the canal… I will never cease to be flabbergasted at how people figured out how to control water like that.

During my canal journey, I also learned about Parks & Trails New York, as its interactive Cycle the Erie Canal Map proved to be quite helpful. And I learned about all of the projects PTNY had underway.

Continuing to follow my interest in canals and long trails in general, I went on to walk the Genesee Valley Greenway, a former canal turned railroad turned trail from Olean to Rochester, in the summer of 2021. The same summer, I hiked the stretch of North Country Trail that runs through Allegany State Park and Allegheny National Forest, and explored many other trails. I am currently working towards walking the Ohio & Erie Canalway Trail — love those canal trails — and will look for more trails afterwards. When I’m not hiking, you can find me interning, writing for fun, taking pictures, and generally trying to find an interesting perspective on the world.