Charles River Link Trail Natick and Dover.

The Charles River Link Trail leaves the quiet semi rural South Natick roadways at Pegan Hill.

Bay Circuit Trail: Ipswich Branch Part 1. Appleton Farms and Grass Rides.

The Ipswich Branch of the Bay Circuit Trail currently begins at the main entrance of Appleton Farms in Ipswich. It aims to ultimately begin at Crane Beach and that segment is in various stages of completion.

It initially passes through the working farm element with crop fields giving way to pastures.

Bay Circuit Trail Sherborn MA Rocky Narrows.

Rocky Narrows is a venerable and stunning bit of the Bay Circuit where the Charles River is squeezed by stone.  

If you only had a few parts of the Bay Circuit Trail to visit, this deserves to be high on the list.

Bay Colony Rail Trail Needham MA.

The Bay Colony Railroad was a short line between Newton and Milford MA with a section shared by the Needham commuter rail line.

It was originally part of the NY/New Haven system and then ended up as a bit of Conrail.

Bay Circuit Trail Medfield MA Noon Hill.

I spent a good part of autumn climbing the local Bay Circuit hills like a form of midget peak bagging. And, just as when I used to climb 3000 plus foot things up north, I'm indifferent to such practices  I haul my carcass up a mountain for a view.

That is what Noon Hill has. It is a good one. 

Bay Circuit Trail Medfield MA The Shattuck Reservation.

The Shattuck Reservation lies along the Charles River in Medfield and is part of a suite of outstanding parcels owned by the Trustees of Reservations to protect the upper river.

It's the lowland counterpart to Noon Hill and was the beneficiary of a brand new Bay Circuit Trail reroute this summer.

Bay Circuit Trail: Newbury MA The Road to Rowley

Many great basic day hikes for the Bay Circuit Trail are adapted to commuter rail and the southward course of the trail at Joppa Flats works well with the locations of the Newburyport and Rowley stations.

The trail soon meets the Spencer Peirce Little farmhouse, one of the Commonwealth's oldest structures and a fairly unique one in its design.

Bay Circuit Trail: Ipswich To Hamilton.

Old Ipswich River Town Photo

You can get a 6:30 am train out of North Station to Ipswich. It is like an express as it races by all the stops save Salem before it drops you there at 7:17am.

As a non-driver, I’ve been looking for an equivalent to Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary in Topsfield. It’s a long walk from the station and the early morning hours you get should belong to getting to habitat as soon as time allows.

This is essential for experiencing peak neotropical migration. After poring over the data, I decided to just check places along Route 1A south toward Hamilton and I couldn’t be more pleased with the outcome.

As you follow the road curve over the Choate Bridge toward the south, you will immediately find a good first stop to check riparian life at the back side of a human necropolis, Old South Cemetery. A set of railroad tie steps down what appears to be a modest kame terrace draped with floodplain forest gets you a good first river look and I was rewarded with a glimpse of a nesting Flicker in a hollowed out tree carcass off to the right of the steps by around 20 yards. I could see the borehole at first and wondered if it had use and the old binoculars revealed mom Flicker ducking in and out.

This is the essence of bird watching to me, a series of ecotone stepping stones and the first one out of the train station was agreeably lush. The river is really like a pond here as it is the impoundment area made by the Ipswich Mills Dam.

Further along 1A south, one comes upon the Ipswich River Watershed Association with its 15 acre home parcel called Riverbend generously provided by the late Joseph “Doctor Bob” Petranek.

   

There is a small immaculate canoe dock with the Shady Creek Conservation Area on the opposite bank. At this point, it resumes its resemblance to a river. A noteworthy and striking bit of spontaneity came in the form of large wild turkey traversing the driveway toward a wetland ravine due south. It maintained nonchalance until a distance of around 10 feet and then it began its evasion efforts toward convenient dense understory.

It is as if each visited spot had its defining surprises. A further facet of this stepping stone approach I use involves a pause with focused stillness, mainly listening. That is one of the fundamentals of bird watching. It’s really about listening. Sure you can go for maximum zoom with lenses that resemble Light Antitank Weapons but a basic 7x35 binoculars approach wants closeness which wants stillness and pausing and listening.

And this means time well spent learning bird sounds and the ability to pick out things in the ambient boisterous matrix of high spring outdoor New England. Along this hike I will be reliably blown away by the staggering variety of unfamiliar sounds or ones mainly remembered fuzzily.

Waldingfield Road meets with 1A for my next major bearing point, the Northeast entrance to Appleton Farms, the oldest continually operating farm in the US. If you head a bit further west on Waldingfield, the Julia Bird Reservation fans north between the river and the commuter rail tracks.

I opt to head southwest through Appleton Farms to explore some of its Bay Circuit Trail sections. Extensive farm fields make fairly vast welcome mats to accommodate flocks of otherwise hemmed in species, such as bobolinks and meadowlarks, that have been major victims of sprawl and farmland loss. Few holdings in the northeast are as extensive as this. Appleton has meadows, pastures and farm plots in a number of succession stages for maximum variety.

This aspect will be further enhanced in the wilder tracts of Appleton Farms Grass Rides.

The farm road through Underhill and Patch Fields is lined with ancient oaks. I meet the Bay Circuit at the boundary between these fields and follow it south to where it heads west to cross the Newburyport commuter rail line straddled by the reservation. The trail passes through an older pasture called The Plains with scattered old oak groves of well separated trees to convey a park-like sense. Baltimore Orioles are the most avid to be seen and heard.

From there it skirts a larger pasture called ‘The Old Pasture’  and turns south toward Appleton Grass Rides which it meets at a stone wall.

There are a few confusions to attend to. One comes upon a fork where the signage has opposing directives.

One fork is for equestrians and the other is for pedestrians. 

This resolves further on at the edge of the Grass Rides tract where horses are verboten but dog walking and bicycles are okay, (both are not allowed in the Farms). Generally, if you are riding shanks mare, you are okay in all situations.

Appleton Grass Rides has a fairly complex trail matrix as it was made for horseback rides. Contrary to a few assertions out there, this potential confusion is alleviated by smart placement of the characteristic white blaze patch that indicates the Bay Circuit Trail. The reservation is a newer acquisition but the trails are old.

They pass through a veritable showcase of area forest ecotones such that one moves through hemlock and pine groves, lowland wooded maple swamps and older growth oak tracts with a wetland or two for punctuation. Oddly, I still didn’t run into significant black fly and mosquito swarms and there weren’t even any ticks.

There were an abundance of thrushes in the upper forest canopy. Hermits, Woods, Veerys and Swainsons’ were all sounding at different stretches of the trail. The last were probably stopping over enroute to the boreal forests further north.

The understory was also alive with activity from various warblers that I was unable to spot. I could readily hear Yellowthroats. Warbler spotting is probably the most challenging bird chore. They are tiny, hyper and their calls are often very faint.

And then there was the Pileated Woodpecker contingent. I’d forgotten their calls and how eerie they are but I could sense the similarity to a Flicker. They stayed up in tree tops well concealed and kept a wary eye on me.

One arrives at a special spot along this trail segment where a multi trail juncture forms something like a star pattern with a relic from Harvard as the center. There are several of these in various spots of the Appleton properties. They are called Pinnacles and evidently once adorned a now extinct Harvard Library called Gore Hall. Appletons have been going to Harvard since John Harvard invented the place.

The trail continues on a southerly course and leaves Appleton Grass Rides at Cutler Road to cross into a tract that includes one of many bits of former Harvard forest land found around the region. This particular one is joined to the Pingree Reservation, an Essex County Greenbelt Association tract noted for eskers and an odd device called a Beaver Deceiver.

I work my way along one esker before heading south to Hamilton where I’ll grab a train home. On the way I stop by Patton Memorial Park and revisit the tank I once crawled over as a kid while wondering what might have happened if the old general didn’t get in that jeep accident long ago and actually made it home.

When I was a kid, people were profoundly proud of the old man’s brief presence in the Commonwealth.

This particular hike may well be one of the best ever and I intend to do a follow up as soon as possible. Ipswich is an unusual epicenter in the array of area preservations and the height of spring neotropical migration may well be the best time to go. It is fitting that the town has its own dedicated blog in addition to the many converging land preservation entities that focus on it.

Bay Circuit Trail: Moose Hill Convergence.

Sharon, Massachusetts, along what I call the Southern Arc of the Bay Circuit Trail system is a counterpart activity hub to Andover. It has a number of protected lands including a cluster at Moose Hill consisting of the Massachusetts Audubon Society Sanctuary and Moose Hill Farm, owned by the Trustees of Reservations.


Moose Hill itself is also the height of land point for the southern arc and the swath of Southeastern Massachusetts rolling toward Providence.


Here is a handy summary.


"“A nice place to live because it’s naturally beautiful,” says a welcome sign in Post Office Square, and Sharon lives up to this motto.  “Lake Massapoag--the treasure of Sharon for its fun, beauty, and peacefulness,”  writes a student. “The Lake is about 400 acres of water. When the sun sets, beautiful, vibrant colors reflect off the Lake.”  Lake Massapoag is known for its concerts, fireworks, fishing, and good swimming on Memorial Beach.  From the 1800s until the 1940s, Sharon was a summer resort to which people would come to stay at inns and hotels to enjoy the clean air and the Lake. The Town proudly holds the 2,250-acre Massachusetts Audubon Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary, and has 60% of Borderland State Park comprising 1,260 acres within its borders, as well as the Warner, Massapoag Brook, and King Philip’s Rock nature trails.  In addition, the Town has been successful in preserving an additional 1,500 acres of its area of 24 square miles as public conservation land, totaling more than 5,000 acres of protected open space in Sharon."

Rick Ripley (above) has prepared a valuable series for his public access cable show.

It has it's own grassroots community organization, Sharon Friends of Conservation with an impressive content mix that includes a great overview.

The unifying element here is an array of trails. The Warner Trail leads of to the south all the way to Cumberland, Rhode Island. It parts company with the Bay Circuit Trail to the southwest near the borders of Foxborough and Walpole.

The eastward leg of the Bay Circuit Trail dips south along Lake Massapoag to meet Easton at Borderland State Park.

(Image Courtesy of Boston Public Library Photo Collection.)

This intrepid crew caught the annual rites of toad mating at Borderland.

Note For the Urban Carless. The wonders of Sharon are yours to discover through the capacities of commuter rail. 

Bay Circuit Trail: Andover Village Improvements.

Courtesy of the Norman P. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.

Andover is a microcosm of the entire Bay Circuit Trail System. It began to think about land preservation in 1894 when the Andover Village Improvement Society, (AVIS), was born. Since then, it has put 1100 acres under protection with a fairly comprehensive run of ecotones, glacial terrain traces and spots touched by the long history of the place.

And the spirit of volunteerism couldn't be more lively. Participation in the Bay Circuit system varies by town and Andover could be considered a hub if not the hub because the Bay Circuit Alliance has long had its home there and its Conservation Commission is comparably exemplary. 


It even has an organization given to weaving all the protected jurisdiction strands into a handy mosaic, the Andover Trails Committee.

I identified five areas of the town to provide a sense of its relationship to the Bay Circuit Trail and the other features that have shaped it over time.


1. Bay Circuit East.
This part is defined by the highest point in the area, Holt Hill, in the Charles W. Ward Reservation. The other anchor is the venerable Harold Parker State Forest. Between these two lies a string of gems including the Skug River/Hammond Reservations and the Mary French Reservation.


2.The Main Street Corridor.
Route 28 was cobbled together from a north to south patchwork of old turnpikes that began with a road from the market town, Medford, to the farm settlements along the Merrimack Valley edge.

Foster's Pond, at the southern edge with North Reading, has its own organization in addition to The Peggy Keck and Goldsmith Reservations. Heading north the Pustell Reservation follows. 

3. The Shawsheen Watershed Corridor.
This is also joined by the offspring of the Andover and Wilmington Railroad. It runs along the eastern edge of the river.


This may well be a defining feature of the town and considerable effort has been expended to make it shine. Following the river from south to north, the Sanborn Reservation is the first of these efforts followed down stream by Pole Hill, site of a ghost resort long gone to nature. Further downstream lies Pomp's Pond, home to a freed slave in Thoreau's time.


The Vale Reservation and the Shawsheen River Reservation form a centerpiece cluster that ties the Ballardvale neighborhood to Andover Center. And, at the point of confluence with the Merrimack, Den Rock Park is a collaboration with the city of Lawrence.


All these and other preserved lands are part of an ongoing creation, the Shawsheen River Greenway.


4. Bay Circuit West.
The trail continues to Tewksbury and beyond until it's eventual terminus in Duxbury.


As the trail rises from the Shawsheen river heading west, it immediately meets another cluster of parcels beginning with Indian Ridge Reservation and followed by Bakers Meadow and West Parish Meadow and the nearby cemetery,which has a thoughtfully designed walking tour.


There is a second cluster further westward built around the Harold Rafton Reservation, the largest property protected by AVIS. From there the Bay Circuit Trail heads toward the Merrimack. One additional parcel in this area lies at the edge of Tewksbury, the Nat Smith Reservation.

5. The Merrimack River.

The river's southern side is shaped by the bluffs of a kame terrace draped with white pine and returning oak forests. The principle parcel given to its southern side is the Deer Jump Reservation, a long and sinuous thing of beauty.

This is but a handy overview. These areas will get more detailed visits in future posts. As it is, we just finished several hours of video shoots to augment Andover's inventory.


Note For the Urban Carless. The wonders of Andover are yours to discover through the capacities of commuter rail.