Walk the Vischer Ferry towpath on any Saturday in September and it feels like it has always been exactly this: gravel underfoot, herons standing still in the marsh, a dog off leash somewhere ahead, the old canal bed running flat and green to your left. Regulars know the rhythm without thinking about it. Park at the Whipple Bridge entrance or the Ferry Drive gateway, walk past Double Lock 19 and Clute's Dry Dock, end at the general store for a coffee. It reads like something that has never changed and never will.
Then October arrives, and for seven days a year, none of that is true. The preserve closes to walkers, cyclists, and birdwatchers entirely. The gates stay open only for a shrinking group of duck hunters working a New York State-designated season inside a 700-acre preserve that spends 358 days a year as a birdwatching hotspot. If you've lived in Rexford long enough, you've probably noticed the orange signs go up sometime in early fall and wondered, at least once, why a nature preserve becomes a hunting ground at all. The answer says more about how this stretch of the Mohawk actually works than any trail map does.
The Loop Everyone Already Runs
The towpath itself is the remnant of the 1825 Erie Canal, and the Town of Clifton Park has kept roughly four miles of it walkable, stretching from the end of Ferry Drive to the Whipple Bridge and beyond. Along the way, historical markers point out Double Lock 19 and the site of Forts Ferry, the area's first European settlement, dating to 1672. At the eastern end sits Clute's Dry Dock, built in 1852 on the site of an earlier 1825 dry dock, where canal boats once got hauled out for repair.
Most people who walk this loop end it, or start it, at the Vischer Ferry General Store on Riverview Road. The store reopened a few years back under new ownership, Louise and Anouk, and has since expanded its retail corner to include VFGS-branded candles alongside handcrafted local goods. It's open Thursday through Sunday, though hours have shifted before, so it's worth a quick call if you're timing a walk around a coffee stop. Quiche, egg sandwiches, and a seasonal coffee list keep it busy on weekend mornings, and the patio out back has become its own kind of neighborhood meeting point.
None of this is new information if you already live here. What's less obvious is how far back the connection between the store and the trail actually goes.
One Family's Name, Two Ends of the Same Canal
The building that now houses the general store sits on land first developed by Gerardus and Jemima Clute, who built the large white house just past the current store on Riverview Road. There has been some version of a store on that spot for more than 150 years.
Walk about a mile down the towpath and you'll find Clute's Dry Dock, the same family name attached to a working piece of 19th-century canal infrastructure that's now a historical marker inside the preserve. It's not a coincidence anyone advertises, and it's easy to miss if you're just out for exercise. But it means the general store and the dry dock aren't two separate stops on your walk. They're two surviving pieces of the same family's footprint on this stretch of the Mohawk, more than a century apart.
That kind of layering is what makes Rexford feel settled rather than staged. Nothing here was built as a destination. It accumulated, one household and one dock at a time, and the towpath just happens to be the thread that still connects it.
The Week the Gate Rules Change
The duck hunting closure is where that sense of permanence runs into an actual, negotiated arrangement. Town code restricts hunting within the Vischer Ferry Nature and Historic Preserve to shotguns only, for duck hunting only, limited to the first seven calendar days of the state's duck hunting season. In practice, that means the preserve shuts down to every other use, recreational or otherwise, for that stretch. Last fall the town set the window at October 13 through October 19.
The scale of the hunt has changed a lot over the years. Town Supervisor Phil Barrett has said the preserve issued just 36 permits in 2025, down from a era when more than 100 hunters would work the marsh in a single season. Drier conditions in recent years have thinned out the waterfowl the hunt depends on, and some longtime participants have started skipping years entirely because the week no longer lines up with their schedules the way it used to.
The arrangement isn't uncontested. In 2023, a group of hunters asked the town to expand hunting beyond the single week, arguing the restriction wasn't the town's call to make. Supervisor Barrett turned the request down, writing that the town had reviewed the situation and would not be opening the preserve for the full season. On the other side, some residents have pushed to end the hunt altogether, pointing to the preserve's status as a New York State Bird Conservation Area and an Audubon-recognized Important Bird Area. Neither side has moved the needle much. The one-week compromise has held for years, and it's the reason your October walk needs a calendar check first.
What to verify before you plan a fall walk:
- The closure window shifts year to year. Check the current dates with the Clifton Park Town Clerk's office before you head out in October.
- The preserve is fully closed to walkers, cyclists, and birdwatchers during the closure, not just restricted to certain trails.
- Entrances at Whipple Bridge, Ferry Drive, and Clute's Dry Dock are all affected equally.
- The general store stays open on its normal schedule regardless of the preserve's status, so it's still a fine stop even during closure week.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
The towpath's appeal has always been that it feels untouched, a flat gravel path through wetlands that have looked roughly the same since barges pulled through here two centuries ago. But the preserve isn't frozen. It's actively managed, contested in public meetings, and handed over to a different use entirely for one week a year through a rule the Town Board could technically revisit at any time. That's not a knock on the place. It's closer to what makes it real. A truly static piece of land doesn't need a supervisor's letter explaining why a permit request got denied, and it doesn't generate a shrinking hunter count that town officials track year over year.
If you've never noticed the October closure before, it's probably because you've never tried to walk the towpath during that specific week. Most residents don't, whether by habit or coincidence. But knowing the mechanism behind the quiet week, rather than just accepting the orange signs at face value, changes how you read the rest of the preserve. The Whipple Bridge, Double Lock 19, and Clute's Dry Dock aren't relics sitting untouched behind a fence. They're part of a working agreement between the town, a handful of hunters, and everyone else who walks the trail the other 358 days of the year.
For those who want to extend the loop beyond the towpath and the store, Grooms Tavern on Sugar Hill Road has its own layer of local history, hosting community gatherings through groups like Friends of Heritage Square at Grooms Corners. It's a short drive from the preserve and worth knowing about if you're building out a longer weekend route through this part of town.
None of this changes what the towpath is for most of the year: a quiet, four-mile stretch of canal history that residents treat as an extension of their own backyard. It just means the quiet is scheduled, negotiated, and occasionally interrupted, the same way most things that last this long tend to be.
If you're thinking about what a move within Rexford or the surrounding towns might actually look like, from the trail-adjacent streets near the preserve to the neighborhoods a little farther from the Mohawk, Katherine Sullivan can walk you through what's currently available and how these pockets of the Capital Region compare. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
