Visitors to Gulf Wilderness Park will notice recent changes by Lockport city parks staff at the entrance to the Rollin T. Grant Gulf Wilderness Park.
The Rotary Club of Lockport applied for and received a matching Rotary District grant of $1,500 to match $1,500 committed by the club’s Lockport New York Rotary Foundation to pay for access path improvements from the Niagara Street parking lot to the park trail and for two high quality trash receptacles installed at the Niagara Street and Jackson Street trail heads.
These projects are a small part of a list of improvements that could benefit the park. The challenge is for the community to decide where they are justified given that the park is not well known, even though hikers regularly make use of this 80-acre wooded parcel within the city limits that lines the gorge along the West Branch of Eighteen Mile Creek within the city limits.
The Oct. 31, 1970 edition of the Union-Sun & Journal devoted a full page to photos and an article titled “Wilderness Park of Beauty.” Former superintendent of parks Lawrence R. Martin was quoted as wanting the woodland to be “as natural as we can possibly keep it.”
Rotarian Paul Lehman, chair of the club’s Environmental Committee, received support to pursue the matching grant in early 2024 after learning that there were uncommitted Rotary District 7090 funds available. He noted that a Rotarian hiker had seen the Rotary emblem on the signs at the entrances to the park and contacted the Lockport club president about problems in use of the park which, in that case, involved the wash out of one of two bridges during a major rainstorm event.
While the bridge is still gone, it is hoped that that this recent small joint effort of the Rotary Club and the City of Lockport will stimulate interest in the park as an alternative to the more manicured areas of green space in the city.