I live in a working class community just north of downtown Boston and when I moved here about 20 years I had no idea that some of the best hiking and rock climbing south of New Hampshire was located within a mile of my house in an area called the Middlesex Fells Reservation. This is a 2000+ acre preserve that links the towns of Winchester, Stoneham, Malden, Melrose, and Medford. It contains a surprisingly diverse set of habitats including rocky hills, meadows, lakes, wetlands, and oak and hickory forests and supports a biologically diverse array of animals and fauna including coyotes, fishers, red fox, white tail deer, snakes, lizards, bugs galore, and rare shrubs.
The Fells are peppered with hiking trails and I hike or showshoe there at least once a week with a full pack. I don’t consider this abnormal, but I’m often asked if I’m camping (illegally) or training for a big hike when I meet other hikers or runners on the trail. I went for a long hike there yesterday after spending the morning seam sealing a new tent. We had torrential downpours the evening before and I hoped that some of the ice on the trails that I had experienced last week would have melted. This happened, and although temperatures were in the mid-forties (F), we had winds up to 30 mph making it a blustery day.
I chose the skyline trail for my hike. This is one of the more difficult trails in the Fells. It’s just over 7 miles long with about 1000 feet of elevation gain. There was a lot of water on the trail and the streams were overflowing their banks. A lot of the ponds remained frozen but had several inches of water from the rain storms on top of them. All of them had this strange milky Mylanta color because the fresh rain water covered their frozen surfaces.
Toward the end of my walk I came across a small frozen waterfall where the rain had frozen on the cold rock the night before. All of the surrounding rock was completely dry and so the runoff from the previous night must have been concentrated on this one spot.
On this hike, I was carrying some of the new gear that I plan to use to section hike the Massachusetts AT in early spring and I wanted to get used to the extra weight. The weather conditions were also similar to what I expect to encounter this spring and so I wanted my thermal regulation skills sharp. I hiked in a Patagonia Capilene 1 jersey and my OR wind shirt with stretchy REI tights and was quite comfortable. The only temperature regulation that I needed to do was to take off my Polartech hat and gloves when the sun came out and to pull down my wind shirt zipper.
It’s funny, I’ve probably walked hiked the skyline trail (white blazes) in the Fells a hundred times, but I always lose the blazes in the wintertime and get ‘lost’. I spent about 1/3 of the hike yesterday bushwacking but I have a very good sense of direction, so I knew where I was, more or less, the whole time and made it to my dinner date and excellent Peking Duck, on time.
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