E13 Yosts

There’s a small irony tied to Lock E13. It sits at Yosts, just across the Mohawk from Fultonville — a canal town named for Robert Fulton, the man whose steamboat helped make the old towpath mule obsolete. E13 is the shallowest step in this reach, an 8-foot lift at mile 53, and like its neighbors it’s less a “lock in a ditch” than a gate on a canalized river: the Mohawk itself, pooled behind one of the eight movable bridge dams that lower for the season and rise before winter’s ice. The lock is a working veteran, its approach walls later fitted with mooring bollards to make the tie-up easier. Blink on the trail and you’d miss it — a quiet, low lift in some of the prettiest farm country on the whole canal.