Bay Circuit Diary

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the  Bay Circuit Trail .  Feel free to 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 . I was saving today’s destination, Concord’s Hapgood Wright Town Forest , for a weekday because it’s mobbed on weekends during the pandemic. Concord has banned off leash dogs recently during the pandemic, although I didn’t see anyone paying attention.  However the trails were busy enough that Sulu got very little off-lead time and was mostly on the long line (I have a 30 foot long biothane long line for occasions just such as these). I parked on the edge of a giant mud puddle in the last available non-resident space. For this section of the trail, the BCT is concurrent with the Emerson Thoreau Amble .  This is said to be the trail by which the two...

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the  Bay Circuit Trail .  Feel free to 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 . Walter likes to bike, not hike, so I like to include him when the BCT follows a rail trail.  Today we  visited the Narrow Gauge Rail Trail   that runs from Bedford Depot Park where the Minuteman Trail ends up for about three miles to the Billerica town line (I am learning so much - who knew that Bedford abutted Billerica?).  I limit Sulu to five miles of bikejoring per day, so that meant 2.5 miles out and back for us,  so we did not complete the trail.  Also, the BCT does not run the entire length of the rail trail, so I figured we’d just do the rail trail and I’d sort out the details later.  We parked by Fawn Lake (site ...

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the  Bay Circuit Trail .  Feel free to 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 . There are these bits of the trail that I need to connect up.  Today I did a completely on-lead part of the trail through the North Bridge section of the Minuteman National Historic Park and through Concord Center to the start of the Emerson Thoreau Amble .  I put the wrong directions into the GPS, I parked in a stupid place, I misread the trail instructions, and apparently there is no coronavirus in the suburbs as virtually no one was wearing masks.  However, Concord Center is really very charming and this is the first time I have been through it on foot, so I saw some good stuff. Right behind the houses on the main street This hous...

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the  Bay Circuit Trail .  Feel free to 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 . Today was a non-hiking journey - a leash walk from Concord Center over the Old North Bridge and through Colonial suburbs to the point on Barretts Mill Road I left off the previous day. The homes really are charming and their spring flowers were on full display.  However sidewalks are in short supply and I was a bit footsore toward the end. Previous Post                                                                            ...

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the  Bay Circuit Trail .  Feel free to 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 . Today I began the journey south from the Spring Hill network of trails.  Since all my trips start and end at the same point, I parked near the end of my planned journey and walked up Barretts Mill Road (historic mill and farm) , then up Strawberry Hill Road (Colonial suburbs) with a tiny amount of off-leash running, then back on the road until I got to the intersection where I stopped last time.  Previous Post                                                             ...

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the  Bay Circuit Trail .  Feel free to 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 . Today I did the last part of the Spring Hill network of trails that I had not previously done.  I parked at the Nashoba Brook trailhead (interesting history stuff there).  It was actually a little hard to pick out the trail as BCT signs went in two directions from the trailhead yet neither seemed to go in the correct direction.  A little flailing around and consulting the BCT website (I really don’t know how hiking worked before smartphones) put me on the right path with some off-lead opportunities.  It was a pretty short piece of woods and I decided to follow the trail north onto the Bruce Freeman rail trail .  I had never heard of t...

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the  Bay Circuit Trail .  Feel free to 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 . For reasons unknown to me, the BCT looks like a Y in map 6.  There’s a fork in Concord center and the left/west fork goes to Carlisle and the right/east fork goes to Bedford.  A chunk of the Bedford arm uses the Reformatory Branch rail trail , an unpaved (great for bikejoring ) trail that goes alongside the otherwise dog-hostile Great Meadows National Wildlife Reserve .  Having sampled the delights of the Reformatory Branch, I invited Walter to join me for the second leg.  Because the weather was crap when I visited the rail trail for the first time, I underestimated the popularity of the trail on a sunny day.  So many people! Cars wer...