October 5, 2020 - Medfield to Walpole

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the Bay Circuit Trail.  To get new posts in your inbox, please subscribe (see the little "subscribe" oval above). The rest of the past posts can be found using the little menu on the left.  If you are curious how this all started, go here.

This trip was noteworthy for the luxury amentities.  Where I parked my car at Wheelock School in Medfield, there was not only a row of porta-potties, but trash cans!  So exciting to use the porta-potty not once, but twice, and not carry the poop home with me in my car. 

The sun came out shortly after we started

Our walk was divided into two parts. The first was “back” to where we ended last time.  We found the trail from the school parking lot fairly easily. It’s always harder to follow the trail backwards because the directions are reversed, but we found the railroad crossing and from there it was easy to find the turnaround from last time. It turned out to be a little more than half a mile. Sulu got some off leash time as soon as we cleared the school grounds, and saw that his recall had definitely degraded.  His loose leash walking remains a work in progress and I find it very frustrating.

View from the turnaround point

This is something I'm going to start paying attention to!
Time to put Sulu's orange vest on.

We returned to the school lot to find an American eco-crime in progress - a long line of SUVs and mini-vans, engines running, waiting to pick up the kids.  I know there’s a pandemic on, so carpooling might no longer be a thing, but as I left the parking lot toward Walpole, the sidewalk ended at the school property. Kids a few hundred yards from the school have no sidewalk to safely travel to school on foot even in the most favorable weather.

It didn’t help my mood that High Street was not the safest road to walk on. It was pretty heavily trafficked, not only with said SUVs and minivans, but trucks to support the new construction and the support vehicles of the suburban lifestyle: landscapers, invisible fence installers, paint and repair contractors, and of course UPS, Fedex and Amazon. Two good sized trucks can’t safely pass each other and make room for a dog-walking pedestrian.   

"Birthplace of Hannah Adams, 1756, Pioneer Authoress of America"
High Street, Medfield

Fortunately, shortly after we crossed the Medfield-Walpole line we turned onto a trail along a power cut (judging from the map, the same power cut as last time), and from there onto “The Old Indian Trail”. 

I couldn’t find any supporting evidence on the Internet that actual Indians used this trail other than a mention from the donor of the conservation land (and thank you for that, donor), but what it was, was an esker.  Two cool things about eskers: the word is derived from the Irish, and they are glacial.  It’s basically an elevated stream bed, left behind when the glacier surrounding the stream on all sides melted away.  The esker trail meanders like a stream bed, and is uneven underfoot, but it’s interesting to be on a natural ridge through the woods.

Our recall returned over the course of the off-leash walk on the power cut and esker as we  regained the rhythm of paid check-ins and trust that coming to me did not automatically equal leash on. 

I missed a turn on the trail and Sulu took the opportunity to make his own water break, emerging remarkably two-tone.  He got ahead of me, I heard some quacking and flapping followed by some loud splashing, and he came bounding toward me looking like he had been dipped in dark chocolate.  

This was probably Mine Brook which is supposed to parallel the trail. To add insult to injury, Sulu had initially led me down the correct route, and I called him off.  But it gives me great pleasure to watch my muddy dog barrel full speed up the trail and then back to me.  The small piece of cheese I give him for checking in is well worth it.

I picked a relatively arbitrary turnaround point that I hope to recognize when I come at the trail from the other side.  I took some photos of landmarks to be on the safe side.

A bed of dark stones crossing the trail - hopefully a good marker