local hiking
Great Brook is a state park, and known locally for good hiking. But it's not the only place around here where we can get out in the woods away from people. A few days ago we went north (for about five minutes by car) to an area I know pretty well; today it was west to a piece of woods that I've explored just a couple times since we've lived in Bedford.
Since I've never gotten them lost for too long the boys trust me to lead them into unknown territory, and there's something fun about walking on trails when you're not sure where they're going to lead. (Fun for me, anyways; I don't know that the boys yet pay enough attention to know one bit of woods from another.) When you're navigating blind even small bits of protected land take on the aspect of expansive wildernesses.
Not that we were quite blind entirely: the last link above goes to openstreetmap.org, a great resource for local trail-finding. When I first discovered it I was amazed, for a couple reasons. First, it was really something to see all the little trails by my parents' house, where I wandered as a kid, marked down on a map for all the world to see: so fancy and official! And then, seeing the shear number of off-road paths available in the area was exciting—and inspiring of future expeditions.
But while the internet of maps let me know that there were trails in there somewhere, it didn't really help us with navigation on the ground (not least because the page wouldn't load on my phone in the middle of the woods; but let's pretend the expedition was eschewing technology deliberately). So there was a delightful frisson of risky exploration to each fork we came to. And even if we had had access to trail maps, there would still have been surprises, like the section of trail we came to that was completely covered by a daunting depth of water.
can't go over it... can't go around it...
It might look from that picture like we could just go around, but the whole area was pretty swampy and mostly under water—the trail just happened to go through a particularly low-lying section. And there was no way we were going back, since Zion had reached the complaining-about-cold-hands-and-mittens stage of the expedition. So, as Rascal ran back and forth through the icy water wondering what was taking us so long, we painstakingly inched a path around the deepest water—a path that included a 10-foot-long traverse along a fallen log. I carried Zion, but Harvey did a great job on his own!
It was all totally fun and exciting, and easily as rewarding as any destination we could have looked for farther afield. And we didn't see a single other person out there the whole time! You should totally check out the trails around you, if you haven't already; even if there are some local places that you walk frequently, I bet there are lots more you don't know about yet! And the best part is, you can bring a lunch.
just reward