It’s come to my attention that if I don’t want to turn into a completely miserable person I need to get out into nature at least once a week when possible. So that’s what we did – this time we ended up at the Blue Hills Reservation for a day of hiking.
The weather was perfect – not too hot, not too cold, and with the trees changing into their vibrant Autumn colors it was just pure bliss to be out here. And we had also decided to bring Stormy the cat along in her little soft cat carrier in the hopes of trying out her harness for the first time.
We parked in the first parking lot we came across and tried to find a trail at random but there were a lot and many crisscrossed and none of them seemed like they were marked with titles… All we knew was that we were trying to reach the summit where there was the ruins of an old observation tower and a weather station. Upward we went!
If we are to believe the signs we only climbed about half a mile from the parking lot before we found what we came for – a big stone structure just quietly sitting in the woods surrounded by picnic tables and overlooked by a tower to one side. I chucked at the old decaying fireplace which had “No fires” written on it. This seemed to be a lovely place to play with the lighting and do a bit of whimsical and nature photography. There were other people about, some even had dogs, but everyone was pleasant and respectful. And that was all good because up until this point I had been struggling with a migraine and such intense dizziness and nausea that I had to take several breaks on my way up. I was asked why I had even bothered to go out on this day but it wasn’t that bad earlier on in the morning when we had left! Such is the nature of my life.
When we got to the top we stopped and let Stormy out of her carrier to go explore a bit with wide eyes. She was very unsure of the place but seemed to settle in a little bit until other hikers would walk by and she’d fixate on them like they were monsters come to eat her. It’s weird as we had both thought she’d been plenty exposed to people up until this point. She didn’t even seem to care about the dogs!
I left her and her human to climb to the top of the observation tower a story above. It was primitive but beautiful and the view on this Autumn day was as breath taking as you’d expect. So many vibrant trees spread over the landscape and off in the distance you could see the city of Boston. I have found Boston to be a strange place – still surrounded by a lot of woods. Eventually my companion made it up here too with the cat and we all enjoyed this great view.
The weather station was a quarter of a mile up another trail, basically just around the corner but it was being renovated and not open to visitors until 2023. Fair enough. On our way down we took the Abigail Adams Trail and ended up in a totally different parking lot, having to walk a little ways past the visitor center to a different parking lot where we found the car still minding it’s own.
This excursion was brief but very enjoyable. I would call the trail short but moderate difficulty as it was mostly a steady incline with lots of rocks with which we had to scrabble across. Not appropriate for anyone who needs a flat or very easy trail, and not enough of a challenge for people into real hiking. The perfect in between!
*If you’re just here for pretty pictures feel free to scroll to the gallery at the bottom, I took a lot!
You know we haven’t done all that much in Connecticut… so on this particular day that’s where we decided to poke around. Only thing is I don’t know squat about Connecticut so I had to conspire with Google. I asked for a town map because I didn’t want to drive much more than an hour. It’d already been a super packed week. On the border of Connecticut I saw Killingly and decided that sounded like a interesting town name and I asked what was there… Cat Hollow State Park was the answer. Even better it was supposed to be a park with the ruins of two old cotton mills in it.
I didn’t really know what to expect. Probably something swank, this is Connecticut after all. And the park was newly established – only running since 2003. What does a baby park look like? Wellllll….
Driving into town it was indeed a posh area filled with great big mansions behind thick brick walls and iron gates. And all the street names had hideously adorably animal names like Doghouse, Cockcrow, Cat Hollow, and my favorite Peeptoad. Did we fall into a fairy book? No, we most certainly did not, because when we drove up to the park it looked thoroughly abandoned. It was a gate across a road with one car parked in front of it, a big trail map bulletin board with NOTHING on it and I mean nothing, not so much as a scrap of paper or hint it ever said anything on it. There was a bench just beyond but it was looking at nothing except the blocked off road. What just happened?! How did we end up here??
Although not impressed by the state of this place we still decided to get out and look around. And in good spirit I decided to place one of my books on the bench to be found by some passerby as part of my book bombing campaign. Who knows, maybe someone will find it and love it.
We were a bit confused at what we saw from there. Beyond the gate it looked like a very new paved road big enough for cars but obviously not driven on by cars. Infact even though the road looked almost brand new it also looked like it’d been left over from some apocalyptic society collapse. It was odd. Not far up the path we found another bench, this one had its leg chained to a pole with no less than three locks but the pole was only 2 feet off the ground which means the chain loop could have easily been lifted over it if someone was insistent on bringing home this bench. Even funnier still the chained loop wasn’t even a loop. Upon further inspection it was just a chain placed on the ground to look like it looped around something. Very odd!
Then we started seeing the weird graffiti. Every big rock seemed to have the same image on it – that of a neon pink spraypainted figure with big X’s for eyes and a crazy hairdo that made it look either like Mom from Futurama or Nosferatu. If there’s anything I have learned in the past few years it’s that teenagers love abandoned places and things. Wherever you can find ruins in the woods you will also find great evidence of teenagers. The two for whatever reason are inseparable and these odd tags throughout the park only further proved this observation.
It wasn’t far in that we came by a fence – the most woeful fence I have ever seen in my life. Behind it there was some sort of wrought iron equipment sat on the river, maybe the remains of a water turbine or something similar. The fence did nothing to keep me away from it as just around the edge of the fence was a path where people were clearly going around to see it anyway. And beyond that there was a rough path into the wilderness which I honestly couldn’t tell if it was made by humans or deer but I figured what the hell might as well “bushwhack” our way through this as one internet guide suggested we might have to do in this park. And it wasn’t too far away that we found the first substantial set of ruins over this river.
This trail seemed to have ended at these ruins so after poking around we headed back up towards the road and continued on foot from there. Apparently, this road extended for half a mile. We wouldn’t get that far though before we found more trails jutting off the sides. We decided to take another one right around the edges of a fence that seemed to have a different set of ruins behind them. This one brought us into the woods to a very serene little spot where the river had more or less dried up so we could wander over it at will.
It was then we realized all the rocks at the bottom of this riverbed were blackened which seemed very weird. Was this some sort of pollution form the 1800’s? Probably not, after coming home I learned these mills all burned down, one as recently as 2001. You could see the charred line on some of the larger rocks a little downstream.
We walked along the river’s edge for quite a while until we came to the biggest feature of the park – a giant stone wall over the river that on a normal day is a beautiful waterfall. They must be suffering drought this year as there wasn’t so much as a trickle. There was however a young man meditating on a rock underneath it, weary of our presence. We wandered on.
I think we ended up doing the trails ass backwards because this is when we found the “picnic area” and the sign denoting the beginning of the trail being choked out by vines. This seemed fitting for this part. Here we also found more graffiti (with one rock literally looking like a kindergartner painted on it) and of course another trail that led under some bridges and out into a field on Main Street. It was cool under the bridges, and we loitered for a while digging the graffiti salamander looking down at us.
After returning from that dead end we found what looked like another trail on the high ground making jokes about bigfoot and starting to sweat from the oppressive heat and humidity. We took a few breaks and just mucked about before finding our way back from where we came. I’m told there’s a mile and a half of trails out there but every map shows something different and when we were on the ground there wasn’t any markers or guides or even any way to note when a trail had started soooo…. it was a fun place to wander but uh, poorly organized on the park’s side. That being said seeing the ruins were very cool and we both enjoyed just chilling out there in nature.
When we finally managed to find our way back to the car it was only then we found the signs saying what we could find here in the park and where to go. They were… in rough shape. Could have been used as the set of a post-apocalyptic horror movie. But hey, I guess it’s an E for Effort?
Sadly no one took my book in the two hours we spent puttering about.
It’s funny, when you travel around like I do trying to hit different places every time you leave the house it pretty much ensures that someday you’ll forget where you have been and end up there again during one of those hazy deja vu moments I have become so familiar with. That was the case with the Freetown Fall River Forest. It had long been a source of fascination considering it is supposed to be the epicenter of all the weird happenings in the Bridgewater Triangle. I mean there are stories about this forest that include fairy lights, full ghostly apparitions, murders, UFO’s, bigfoot, a liberal dose of satanic panic and even the delightfully strange assortment of pukwugies – which are little anthropomorphic porcupine type creatures that shoot poisoned darts and lure people into the woods never to be seen again. They are from indigenous traditions in the area and as such are unique little cryptids.
I had a feeling I’d been here before but there wasn’t a Catching Marbles entry on it. Weird. Still, I suggested it as a place to go check out with a new travel companion who was here to meet me for a signed copy of my book. Sounded good to me so off I went…
Driving into the parking lot I remembered this place clearly. I had visited the previous autumn. We spent a few hours wandering the woods with a nonsensical trail map that neither one of us could make sense of, got lost, and eventually made our way back to the car. HMMMM. Perhaps this time would go better.
This time the park actually had quite a few other cars in it and I realized the weird parking lot actually went around corners and expanded a lot farther than I had thought. Even more interesting was a splash pad that was running with delighted children zooming through it. Still I parked near the entrance and after meeting with my hiking buddy we set off in the same direction I’d gone once before to what I now know is Bent Rim Trail. Mind you Bent Rim Trail is more of a road than a trail – no cars were allowed but we did see some cyclists.
We walked on Bent Rim Trail for awhile until we hit what looked like an actual non-road trail and we decided to try that one. There was no signs or markers but clearly this was a trail. I’d come hoping to find something weird, my friend had come hoping to find some cool plants to satiate her own special interests in biology. We were up for a brisk hike in the heat but luckily it wasn’t too bad beneath all these trees and the path was flat and easy to navigate. A few parts had rocky bits to scramble around but even that wasn’t bad. Unless you’re on a bike. Sadly, there wasn’t much in the way of plant diversity. It just seemed to be miles and miles of blueberry bushes. Although even that was kind of cool as many had blueberries on them.
Other than that the trail was pretty much a lot of the same. It was however very quiet and despite the parking lot being full of cars we didn’t hear any other people and didn’t see any either on the trip out. We continued down the path crossed the road trail twice before eventually hitting an actual road. The park is on 55,000 acres soooo how we managed to walk out of the park I don’t know. Getting back would be a challenge as we tried to get our phones to give us any clue whatsoever as to which direction we should take back. I was starting to see why this place had such a reputation for being a great hiding spot for bodies and ghost stories. Getting lost here is hideously easy and there is an odd sense you’re the only ones out here even if that’s not really true.
I have seen photos of this park that show water features and cool things. I don’t know where those are, only that we didn’t pass any. All we passed were several people walking dogs and a family taking a bike ride together who I sheepishly asked for directions from. We’d hoofed it at least four miles by that point and it was starting to get a bit dark so it was best to find the car soon. Luckily they told us vaguely where we were and how to get back. There were grid markers here and there reading numbers and letters… which would have been helpful IF THEY WERE ON ANY MAPS. Alas no.
We did end up back in the parking lot, somehow at the far side, where there was a random statue greeting people shirtless and proud. Bit weird choice but OK. Annoyingly we also found the trail maps on a bulletin board nearby which I had missed coming in, although I don’t think they would have helped much. In the meanwhile we both had a great time happily burbling about anything and everything under the sun and getting our exercise in! All and all a lovely time, even if it was super confusing and looked all the same. I can’t say I saw any bigfoot, ghosts, or UFOs but maybe you have to come at night for that?
The other day I passed the Fish Hatchery Lands and made a note to come back some morning when it wasn’t 90F [32C]. And today was that day. Granted I had a hard time re-finding it because I thought it was near the Fish Hatchery. It’s not. It’s across from 554 North River Road. Now that I have made that easy for you here’s what it was like:
It had initially caught my attention because the parking lot is HUGE and there was a bulletin board at the end of it that looked like the same thing you’d see on a hiking trail as well as a sign across the road that denoted a hiking trail although oddly there was no name other than Fish Hatchery Lands. I parked next to a huge pile of garbage that was nestled under a sign reading, “no dumping.” Clearly this place was forgotten enough to be used as a trash pile but not forgotten enough to be abandoned. Or as I like to see it – a possible hidden gem.
The billboard had a plaque stating this place was set up in 1992 and honestly it looked like everything had been left just as it was then. A trail map hung lethargically; its trails having been completely bleached out by the sun. I didn’t know what we were walking into…
Once you get past the bulletin board there’s a big field to either side and what looks like a path big enough for cars to go down so we started walking. We ended up passing two little brown outbuildings as we made our way into the woods. Here we were greeted rather strangely by a little basket full of rocks sitting on a concrete column. We were inspecting this when an angry crow flew up to a nearby tree and screamed at the top of it’s lungs. It also had a very large snake (or something snake-like) it it’s beak. Now I know what you’re thinking – this is the beginning of a horror movie and we should have left before the serial killer got to us – but I was not about to be scared off by an irate bird. No siree.
Here it looked like there were three paths – one to the right, one to the left, and one straight ahead, although all of them looked ROUGH. They weren’t marked and were badly overgrown and we weren’t even sure if they were human paths or game trails. I decided to go right and see what was out there. The path was rocky but not in the way trails around here usually are. The rocks were all smooth and seemed out of place. The drought this year must be hitting hard because not only did it dry up nearby Purgatory Falls it also left this riverbed dry. That’s right, we weren’t even on a path at all but a dry riverbed which explained the concrete columns. They must have made a makeshift bridge to get over what used to be water.
I took a few snaps and we returned to the columns and readjusted our travel plans to go straight. This path was almost not a path at all. We even had to climb over a dead tree and then maybe 250 feet in we reached a dead end at the riverbank. I imagine when the river is high this was probably a sweet fishing spot or maybe swimming hole (depending on current of course!) But as it was now it was just a nice view to reflect for a moment before going back.
From here we noticed another woman with her dog was going behind the little building. Was there a path there? Did she know something we didn’t? We decided to check it out. Sadly, this seemed to greatly annoy her because the dog went ape-shit and wanted nothing to do with the walk anymore, just wanted to see us as we trailed quietly behind. Out here there was indeed tiny loop trail, maybe a quarter of a mile if that that wound close to the river and gave one lovely scenic view before looping back. Still, that was… not much…. certainly not enough for that huge parking lot.
To add more mystery when we left we met a nice young couple pushing a baby in a pram heading towards the “trails.” Where were they going?? Nothing we just explored was pram friendly. If anything the vast overgrowth of plants was probably a great way to roll your baby in ticks like nuts on a soft serve ice cream cone. (OK OK, I should be fair, although this place was GROSSLY overgrown I did not pick up any ticks but boy did it look like there should have been a swarm of them!)
As we found our way to the parking lot we noticed there were suddenly 5 other cars here. WHERE WERE THE PEOPLE?! I have no answers. I think this place may have been on the outer edges of the Twilight Zone (I mean there was a cornfield right there…)
I am a relentless insomniac so when I woke up at 5 in the morning for no reason whatsoever I decided to make the best of it and see if I could find a trail. The early morning was eerie as there was almost no traffic and miles of dragon’s breath both hugging the top of Mount Monadnock and tickling the surface of every lake and pond I passed. It would be a PERFECT time to go do a pond hike! And maybe find some more little free libraries to gift a signed book. It sounded good… I had even found a trail online before I left the house. The Heron Pond Trail. This trip was organized. Too organized.
As it turns out there wasn’t a damn thing on Heron Pond Road outside of an elementary school nestled in the woods and a lot of bizarre “reptile crossing” signs. This was doubly frustrating since I passed no less than five trail heads on the way there. Five trail heads I no longer remembered where they were. And every time I thought I might be close to one of them a car would come out of nowhere and lodge itself six inches from my bumper. People had NO patience for a doddering Prius today. None at all. I even got honked at for… get this… switching my blinker on and turning. I know, the audacity! I was only turning to get that damn pickup truck off my ass. It’s always pickup trucks.
Anyway, as I was pissing off every driver on the road by merely existing, I stumbled onto Purgatory Falls! It had clear sign, some available parking, and it was on my bucket list from a few years ago after I had checked out the other side at Lower Purgatory Falls. Serendipity strikes again! This made up for the three cemeteries I passed without checking out. That was painful.
The parking lot was oddly shaped and had enough room on this day for 5 cars. More could have probably fit if the original pickup truck didn’t park like a total asscracker. And this must have been a popular place because up and down the road outside the parking lot there was a lot of no parking signs. I toddled out, took a photo of their sign and headed in. Also if you see the border collie listed on the missing poster please call those poor people. They PLASTERED the entire area with these notices. Clearly this is a much loved and very missing dog.
Speaking of dogs… As I headed up the trail an old couple were coming out with their bear of a dog that they were keeping on a super short leash which I took to mean I should keep a good distance. I tried. But there isn’t much path. Luckily, he was only holding the dog back because he was wet and not because he wanted to potentially eat me. After stating as much I laughed, approached, and gave him a good scratch. I think it was a Burmese Mountain Dog. Huge, fluffy, probably very huggable when not wet.
Anyway…. that distraction aside I kept walking. Just like in Lower Purgatory Falls this path was… confusing. It was well maintained and cleared but not marked and seemed to have a complete rat’s nest of little tributary trails jutting off it. All seemed to lead to the same place, so I tried not to think too much about it. I can say I was absolutely delighted to find the same graffiti here that there was at Lower Purgatory – that of a spray-painted rock with cat ears reading PURRgatory. I mean if you’re going to paint graffiti you should always make sure it’s 1) adorable and 2) punderful.
I wasn’t out there terribly long when I came to a great chasm where I am guessing the falls usually are – the only thing is we’re currently suffering a drought and the water was the lowest I’ve ever seen, only a tiny trickle of a gully below. Even so I had walked far enough into the woods not to hear traffic anymore and it was still beautiful. I walked on until I found a little branched off mini trail along the water’s edge. There I found a huge gear of some sort clearly from another era just chilling in what should have been the river. Because it was so dry I was able to climb over the river to see it as well as the stone ruins that surrounded it. Twitter tells me it was part of a water turbine and probably produced power at some point. This makes sense for the area – it may have even been part of a mill. Who knows. I sat there on a fallen tree playing with this artifact and enjoying the woods for quite some time. It felt nourishing but I had other things to do so I continued on. I walked until I could smell the distinct odor of cow poo and see an electric fence. This is where the trail ended for me. I *think* the trail was supposed to hook up with the trail through Lower Purgatory but if this is the case I got off the beaten path somehow. Oh well, it was still a decent enough distraction and I left feeling content. By the time I left at 9:30 or so in the morning the parking lot was so full I was barely able to get out – in fact I had to back out into the road blind. Always love doing that. In a Prius. On a busy 50MPH road. Keeps the blood going that’s for sure!
Anyway, it was a nice little walk. It was easy, short, had some great views, and is apparently very amicable to dogs. Although I imagine it’s probably much prettier when there are actual falls here… I don’t know, maybe save that for another day!
By now we were running out of ideas of places to go and were hankering for something a little different. That’s the thing about travelling, at first you’re happy with anything and everything but eventually you get jaded and the desire for novelty sets in hard. This time around we decided to check out a lavender farm. Why? Mostly because we’d never been. So, we packed up the cat in her protective bag so we could stroll through this beautiful setting with her.
It was a gorgeous (if not oppressively hot and humid) day and finding the farm was somewhat tricky. We went from full civilization, to a very house filled neighborhood, to a couple one lane dirt roads (driveways?) with arrows pointing the way. Before we knew it we were in the woods. It was crazy. We drove up and there was an adorable little gift store, signs to be careful of dogs while parking, and there was a little path to the lavender field. We took that first and before we knew it we were standing in front of the most whimsical and charming little fairy castle which looked over the whole field. We’d missed it blooming this year but it still smelled very much of lavender. Normally lavender gives me migraines but on this particular day I had come prepared as I already had a migraine before arriving! You might think this would have made for a miserable experience, but I’ve had so many of these damn things in the past few years I was determined not to waste another day sitting on my ass waiting for it to pass and this delightful fairy friendly farm was soooo wonderful. It was worth the drive where I came *this* close to pulling over and puking in the breakdown lane three times. SIGH. (I have learned my lesson – I did push myself too far this time.)
Better still there was a path you could walk down that led us deeper into the woods which just got more whimsical looking the more we walked with trees covered in lichen and arching across the path. I was so incredibly at peace here. And the cat was too. She was sprawled out in her bag purring up a storm and allowing herself to be carried place to place like a tiny furry queen. There were even birds to watch as mourning doves were everywhere making their haunting little calls. My companion thought they were owls at first (because of the noises they were making.)
We stopped in at the gift shop before we left. There was lavender everything there – from the expected soaps to lavender maple syrup?? Odd but interesting! A teenage boy ran the counter and seemed very happy to be there. I bought a book of other plant nurseries and gardens throughout New England figuring it’d give us something else to check out.
This was a very small place that didn’t take us long at all to explore but if you happen to be in the area I definitely recommend checking it out. It’s a slice of a fairy tale. Absolutely stunning.
If King Philip’s Cave was a bit of a disappointment surely we could find something else cool to see in these parts. Why not check something off my list that has been on there for a few years? Dighton Rock. Dighton Rock is a boulder that was discovered covered in all sorts of strange petroglyphs. We have no idea what it says, who made it, or why. It’s just a total mystery which of course beckons me like nothing else.
There’s a long-standing story that the indigenous people didn’t build anything out of rocks or have a written language when the colonists came over buuuuut the more I poke about New England finding curiosities like these the more I think that’s a load of hogwash. We don’t know shit about the people who lived here before us because we kinda sorta killed them off and drove any survivors away. Suffice to say whole civilizations were lost and clearly this rock was part of that.
The rock is advertised through signs on the main highways nearby and I have passed by it a number of times. It’s actually located within a park, Dighton Park, in a building that calls itself a museum that was built around it.
When we got there we parked in a parking lot that claimed it was $3 but had nowhere or no one to pay. It seemed to be a very pretty little park with lots of grass for children to run and some picnic tables near the water, all surrounded by trees. Honestly it was one of the sweetest parks I remember. There was even a young woman here at one of the picnic tables playing her guitar. She waited until we were out of sight to start singing The House of the Rising Sun but she shouldn’t have. She had a nice voice! And her guitar playing was also lovely. It echoed eerily in the air on this fine summer day.
We managed to find the museum nearby but it was all locked up. There wasn’t any opening hours posted anywhere. It was just a whole lot of nothing. When we got back to the parking lot we found a sign saying to call for opening hours so we did and got an answering machine asking to wait for a call back for an appointment. We didn’t leave our info, it seemed unlikely anyone would call back within any reasonable amount of time to come down here and unlock the museum for two out of towners. Their website claims that opening hours are dependent on local health regulations… so I am guessing Covid has struck again.
So we wandered back to the car and started driving off when my travel companion yelled, “PARK PARK!” I stopped, and parked again. He’d seen a sign reading, “Dighton Cemetery” and wanted to check it out. However, upon further inspection it read, “Former site of historic Dighton Cemetery.” In other words no stones remained. We hiked down the trail a ways anyway. It had a lot of bowed trees going over the path from both directions and I found it to be quite whimsical, but my travel companion was disappointed there wasn’t an actual cemetery. He had wanted to stumble blindly onto another sweet forgotten collection of headstones in the woods like we’d seen at Historic Cemetery 26. No such luck. As for myself I was trying to keep positive but I was suffering from heat stroke and a migraine was kicking up so we went back to the car and continued our journey to find a real cemetery to round out the day.
On this particular day we decided to muck about the Bridgewater Triangle which is supposed to be a hot spot for ghosts, UFO’s and even Pukwudgie sightings. Pukwudgies are part of Native American folklore and are said to be small troll like creatures that lead people into the woods never to return. Sadly we didn’t go at night to poke at these phenomena but we did decide to check out a bit of indigenous history in exploring King Philip’s Cave.
King Philip was the name we gave the local chief of the Wampanoag tribe in the days of our early colonization. He was initially in favor of working with the white colonists and establishing trade but things sort of went south when we kept coming over in droves insisting the locals bow down to our rules and religion. And so “King Philip” (Metacomet) started to lead the other indigenous tribes in a war against colonist expansion.
King Philip’s Cave is where he hid during key moments during the war. We thought this might be an interesting thing to see so we prepared for a day of hiking and drove to a quaint little neighborhood on a private road that had a sign up saying, “Residents and guests only.” We decided we were guests and drove in anyway and at the end of a cul-de-sac there was a couple parking spots on the grass a big sign reading King Philip’s Cave completely obscured by another truck parked there.
We headed in and realized this wouldn’t be a day’s hike. The “cave” wasn’t far from the road at all and was just barely obscured by trees. It wasn’t a cave either, rather just a pile of glacial rocks sitting atop each other in such a way that a small tunnel was created through them. You see this sort of thing a lot around these parts and I suspect being at the end of a cul-de-sac this may have been some child’s favorite place to play. It was interesting but entirely underwhelming. There wasn’t even a plaque at the cave itself explaining it (though there was one at the entrance of the trail.) It was all very… half-assed. We’d seen this before looking at other places important in King Philip’s War and other bloody skirmishes with the people who already lived here. It’s almost like we’d like to forget it ever happened…
Luckily we had other plans that day to go see Dighton Rock and the Mayflower Hill Cemetery also in the area so the day wasn’t a complete wash.
I’m not going to lie. Mentally I haven’t been doing so great lately and honestly, I am suspicious of anyone who is on top of the world right now. It’s been a rough few weeks and there has been so many people just burned out and screaming into the void as the world burns. I’m right there with them. And I know life is sucking HARD right now for a lot of us which is why I have decided I needed more trees in my life. A LOT MORE TREES. Because trees are good people. They’re quiet, they gives homes to birds, they never say anything mean, and when we’re not watching they make oxygen!
So I struck out on my own. I know for the past couple of years almost all my adventures have been with travel companions and that’s cool, I still enjoy it, but that doesn’t change the fact I still need to submit myself to the solitude of the forest on my own every now and again. So I shall be doing more hiking – as much as my angry body allows.
Today I started driving to an actual hiking destination (which is more planning than I usually put into these things) but then I got completely and utterly distracted when I found the entrance to this trail on my way. Clearly it was calling me so I had to go in. In the rain. Because it was also raining (yes, I’m that desperate to go play in the woods.)
And I must say skulking through some swampy woods in the rain was exactly what I needed. I spent two hours wandering from the route 123 entrance to the other side of the park at the Condy Road entrance. Along the way I took sooo many photos of raindrops on leaves, found a whole swarm of orange newts and said hi to every one of them, and somehow didn’t get lost even though the trail was not marked and diverged at several points. That being said it was for the most part a very flat trail with only a couple mild inclines at the beginning. I could hear cars for most of the trek but also tons of birdsong and a couple bullfrogs to boot. Someone had even brought their horse down here at some point as I found their leavings and some hoof prints. And of course, I had to pick up two dog ticks along the way. BLECK. All and all it was a nice little find and fed my soul. So if you happen to be in the area and needing a little tete a tete with nature I would suggest this happy little trail.
It’s really nice to travel with other people who have no real expectations and are fine with my less than thourough planning methods. On this particular day I had decided to drive a couple hours into Connecticut to check out the ruins in the Spiderweed Preserve – something I had only known about for less than 24 hours and with painfully little information. All I really knew about it was there was some pretty ruins (of which I found two photos) and the trail was “A loop trail that starts with an upward hike.” Oh boy, before even getting there I knew my unfit self might be biting off more than I could chew but I was determined and so were my crew today.
It started out a bit sketchy as the GPS brought me to a construction company’s parking lot in the middle of nowhere and we were unsure if there was a path nearby. We decided, perhaps foolheartedly, to drag my poor Prius up that primitive gravel road and take a look further on. There was a bullitin board and gate not far up the road from the construction company and enough space for maybe three or four cars to park. The only problem was this parking area seems to have been washed out by the rains and there was no way at all i could park the prius there and be able to drag it’s weak ass back out of there. There was also no shoulders on the road and signs further up saying no loitering or parking. Not helpful. I drove to the end of the street which ended with a terrifying hill that was so steep going down it I could not see the road as I traversed it. There I was leaning over the steering wheel trying in vain to see something, anything, and hoping everything would be alright.
The end of the road looked like private property so we turned around and I did my best to park in front of the preserve’s gate as far off the road as I could get. It wasn’t great though and visibility was just as bad as it was on a corner. I just hoped no one ran into me or towed me while we were hiking and we all hopped out to see what was up.
The trail is indeed an upward hike from the start and we were all having a little difficulty. I was lagging behind the worse, huffing and puffing, and cursing myself out for being this out of shape. It continued on like this for a while until we hit the ruins which are maybe a third of the way up it, if that. And they were beautiful! Here was the remains of an old stone home slowly being reclaimed by the forest. We puttered around it in a bit of awe. It was very quiet and peaceful up here. I had fun taking photos and before we left we decided to go a little farther up the trail to see the first overlook and that was just as beautiful!
There was a lot more trail but the precarious position of the car and our own desire to go see other things in the area spurned us to turn around here. And by the sounds there wasn’t much up there but more hills and mediocre outlooks anyway. We were nearby another favorite haunt Gilette Castle, as well as Dinosaur State Park which I have wanted to revisit for some time now, but we ended up opting in favor of seeing a different set of even more impressive ruins twenty minutes away at Quarry State Park in Rocky Hill Connecticut.
