John Kucko at Taughannock Falls, one of his favorite spots in Upstate New York. Credit: Seamus Kirst

A few days ago, John Kucko put up a little July 11 anniversary post on his Facebook page that included an image of Kucko near the Rainbow Falls at Watkins Glen State Park, one of his favorite spots in the world. He squeezed it onto the page, between beautiful posts about Tinker Falls in Labrador Hollow and an old Erie Canal aqueduct at Montezuma and a roadside barn that happened to catch Kucko’s eye, as he drove through Jordan.

Yet the July 11 post had particular meaning. It was a long message of gratitude to his followers, remembering the summer day in 2016 when he took the biggest chance of his working life, summarized with these five words: “Nine years later — thank you!”

More than 12,000 people responded in some way. At least 1,700 offered comments, often to reflect with appreciation on Kucko’s decision almost a decade ago to totally switch the focus of his career. The general theme of the replies was summarized by Sharon Upper, 81, of Angola in Erie County, who described what Kucko’s daily efforts mean to her:

“I love what you do and it brings me joy every day. Thank you. As a senior person I am not able to visit many of these locations, so vicariously I go along with you.”

That, really, is the essential Kucko goal. Whatever good things he dreamed about when he began his digital venture, what’s happened — as far as he’s concerned — “exceeds any vision or goal I ever had.”

For decades, he was a well-known sportscaster in Rochester, where he served as sports anchor at WROC-TV. Raised in Binghamton, he graduated from SUNY Oswego and later joined WROC, in 1989. Kucko covered the 1990s glory and heartbreak of the Buffalo Bills, when a great Bills team came-oh-so-close to the game’s ultimate prize but endured four Super Bowl defeats.

He traveled extensively, not only for the Bills but to such events as the Daytona 500. He covered 19 Super Bowls, often for other stations within the same ownership group. The profession shaped his family: Television is how he met his wife, Charla, who was also in the business. Their daughter Natalie is now a news anchor in Rochester, while their daughter Caroline works for SiriusXM in New York City.

Eternal Flame Falls, Orchard Park. Credit: Courtesy John Kucko Digital Facebook page

That was his work and his world until almost 10 years ago, and he is grateful for everything his sports career brought into his life.

But he does not miss it.

“Honestly,” he said, “it was becoming a bit of a grind.”

His wife, he said, was the impetus for his big decision. She knew better than anyone how he had a Type A, cannot-slow-down personality, and how — as Kucko puts it — he could be “a bit of a workaholic.” On Charla’s urging, they made a swift getaway one day to catch their breath at Letchworth State Park, and Kucko said the moment his new life really began is when he heard a train whistle echoing through the Genesee River gorge.

He looked up and saw a train crossing a railroad trestle, high above Letchworth’s Upper Falls. Kucko had a new camera, and he put it to good use at that moment. He felt a sense of awe as he admired the towering walls of Letchworth, a stunning park created from land donated by Buffalo businessman William Pryor Letchworth — where the trestle, and its eventual replacement, would soon become a compelling feature of Kucko’s work.

In that sense of wonder, he saw a possibility: If he could capture in stills or video what that trestle made him feel in his gut, he suspected a sweeping social media audience was out there, ready for the same thing. Decades of economic struggle in Central and Western New York made it all too easy to disregard the rich and familiar beauty of the landscape “from Cooperstown to Ripley,” as Kucko said, describing the great swath of Upstate from Otsego Lake to Chautauqua County.

The visual soul of the region, to Kucko: A treasury of waterfalls. “I love seeing water in motion, the action, the beauty, the force of Mother Nature,” he said.

They became central to his work. He is willing to walk a long ways, in deep snow or soaking thaw, to capture on video the times when those falls are at their ferocious peak. He brings such moments to Facebook and an audience of hundreds of thousands from around the world. He often receives startled reactions from faraway viewers who had always equated the words “New York” with the Manhattan skyline.

The effort is “growing like tumbleweed,” said Kucko, a high-energy 60-year-old who doesn’t use or like the word “retire.” He has done a full “transition,” he said, from a career as a sportscaster in greater Rochester into a digital force with a different kind of public profile, one he much prefers.

It all begins with his “John Kucko Digital” Facebook page, which is built around this routine:

John Kucko at the Erie Canal Park in Camillus Credit: Courtesy of John Kucko

Every day, he’s moving by 4:30 a.m. To doze until 6 would be sleeping in. Kucko gets in his Ford Bronco and chooses some point within what is basically a 2-or-3-hour circle from his Penfield home in Monroe County, though the best stuff – like the legendary ice-shrouded cottage he photographed during a 2017 winter storm along Lake Ontario, an image that exploded online — is often what he sees along the way.

He takes images and video in all four seasons of the year. Kucko likes to capture budding trees and mounds of snow at different times in especially iconic spots, and his terrain involves historic landmarks and natural landscapes within relatively easy driving range of what you might call the “Golden Snowball Cities:” Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo.

Nine years after he started, this is the result:

Kucko has 648,000 followers on his Facebook page. That level of support actually provides a better living, he said, than he made in TV sports. The passionate response allowed his work to spread into ventures like calendars and postcards. Kucko also leads international tours — an arrangement started with the help of his travel agent, from his TV days — of such nations as Iceland, Ireland and Scotland, as well as an annual Yuletide journey through the Christmas markets of Europe.

Chittenango Falls Credit: Image courtesy John Kucko Digital Facebook page

We traded texts to set up a meeting for this column, and I caught up with him a few weeks ago at the overlook for Trumansburg’s Taughannock Falls — at 215 feet, the falls is significantly taller than Niagara. Taughannock is a regular Kucko stop. We shook hands at the overlook on a beautiful June day, swinging into conversation as little groups of visitors showed up for the view.

Several people recognized Kucko and stopped to talk. He listened, traded stories, and even joined one guy in taking a quick walk down the trail for a better look.

Kucko sees the success of this new life as a kind of dream, and he understands these readers are the ones who make it happen — loyalty he gives back through simple interest and curiosity, when hailed by strangers. As he wrote to his followers on his Facebook page: “None of this is possible without YOU! I truly believe this was what I was meant to do all along — just took me a while to get to this spot in my life.”

While Kucko and I never met face-to-face before we saw each other at Taughannock, we connected digitally long ago, through a shared passion: The Oswego lighthouse, at the end of the breakwall in that city’s Lake Ontario harbor. I’ve often written or done presentations on the heroism of six men with the U.S. Coast Guard who died at the lighthouse in 1942, when their picket boat was overwhelmed by a fierce gale during a rescue attempt.

The Oswego lighthouse, at sunset. Credit: Courtesy John Kucko Digital Facebook page

Kucko is also drawn to that story. He reveres the lighthouse as a kind of visual measure of a “lake that can have the look of an angry ocean.” And Upstate lighthouses in general – a long list including such regular stops as Oswego, Dunkirk, Rochester or Sodus Point, as atop his X page – are another frequent and beloved focus of his work.

In all these places, Kucko documents a simple truth about Upstate that for too long was easy to forget:

This is a region — in its bounty of waterfalls, in the intensity of the four seasons, in a landscape whose features often remain intertwined with the melodic essence of their Haudenosaunee names — of unforgettable beauty, for anyone who really looks.

A “transformation Tuesday” image of the Dunkirk lighthouse on Lake Erie, winter and summer. Credit: Image courtesy John Kucko Digital Facebook page

He tries to send a message about that beauty, every day of the year. Ask him for five favorite spots, and he immediately mentions Letchworth, the state park that touched off everything he does. Then there is Taughannock and its great falls, which he prefers even to Niagara — though, as his images prove, he dearly loves that world-famous falls, as well.

Kucko gives a high ranking to Watkins Glen State Park, especially the Rainbow Falls, and to the trails along Enfield Glen at Ithaca’s Robert H. Treman State Park. Finally, he chooses Eternal Flame Falls in Orchard Park, which Kucko never knew about during all the years he covered the nearby Bills — even if it’s now the flame that draws him back, far more than football.

The Facebook page has worked, he said, because of “what he saw coming,” long ago: The rise of the age of flashing screens, especially phones. He began sharing his nature images during the bitter and divisive presidential campaign of 2016, and he likes to think if there is any common ground left at all in this troubled nation, then maybe it lies — at least sometimes — in places of sheer natural beauty.

During the pandemic — knowing how many people were frustrated, and trapped indoors — Kucko began what he calls his “60 Seconds of Serenity,” a video post every evening that he intended as “an escape from the world.” The videos — always intimate, often of glimmering streams or soothing waterfalls — were meant to deliver a moment of respite during a frightening and anxious time.

Once the pandemic relented, Kucko asked his readers if he should stop that feature. Their response: Please keep it going.

Sunday, his “serenity” post from Taughannock meant he’s posted one for 1,944 days in a row.

He receives feedback, he said, from around the world — including a woman in Ukraine who told him his posts provided solace amid bloodshed and bombings. He’s heard from cancer patients who say his work is a welcome distraction from hard days of chemotherapy.

A frozen property along Lake Ontario, in winter — an image that went viral for John Kucko. Credit: Image courtesy of John Kucko Digital Facebook page

Kucko is closely following the 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal, doing a post on its beauty or history every Wednesday. He often gets involved in charitable causes that he finds particularly moving — including a “Sunflowers for Ukraine” postcard effort that raised $70,000 to help families traumatized by the war.

As for Central New York, he’s here all the time. Scroll his page, and you’ll find the Oswego lighthouse, and Pratts Falls and Green Lakes and Delphi Falls and Tinker Falls and Chittenango Falls and the Camillus Erie Canal Park with its 1842 aqueduct – and those are only a few spots on a long list.

In Buffalo and throughout all of Upstate, there is hope that “next year” might finally arrive for the Bills in a few months, that this might be the season in which Josh Allen and company finally emerge as Super Bowl champions. Kucko says “no sports team in America deserves a championship like the fan base of the Bills,” and he hopes this entire region gets a chance to see that day, but he has no regrets that his own path now involves a different goal.

You want a triumph? Try hiking to Taughannock, as it roars.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...