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 . We have crossed the Rubicon! Or, if the Rubicon is the Mass Pike, we crossed it.    The Mass Pike from above In my piecemeal walking way we are making our way south. We parked at the Ashland Town  Forest and then did a quick, hot walk to where we left off on the 25th . We did the road walking first number one, to save the forest as a treat and number two, hoping the forest frail will be shaded and cooler as the temperature would be climbing. Community Spirit We passed this place, the Oregon Club (named after the road it's on).  They say it was a speakeasy back in the day and I can well believe it.  B...

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 proposed  bikejoring  today, and though it was forecast to be warm in the afternoon, the morning was cool enough.   So we loaded up the dog and the bikes and headed back to Heart Pond in Chelmsford.   Poor Walter! Since I am BCT obsessed I steered him toward my BCT route and a fun new trail he wanted to try.   I has hoping we’d have tree cover and shade for most of our ride and we did.   We overlapped some of our previous route, so not a lot of new mileage today, but the dog was very happy.   The next leg of the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail goes through Chelmsford Center with lights and crossings and hot sidewalks, so w...

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 . The no-go zone I must take a moment to sing the praises of my Duluth Trading Company gardening vest .   I carry in it the following: car key, headphones, poop bags, Sulu’s nose loop , full poop bags, handkerchief, and water bottle, with room for more stuff if I need it.   So much better than a backpack!   It was very exciting today when I set out on our hike and Google Maps led us out the Mass Pike.  Every other trip has started out Route 2. We must be making some progress in our circuit around the Bay . My first thought on parking the car by the exit of the Sudbury Reservoir trail was “this is going to suck.”  I could...

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 . As pandemic restrictions have eased, I have had more regular stuff to do, so it’s been a few days since my last hike. It’s Memorial Day weekend and I was apprehensive that the trails would be really crowded, but the temperature plummeted today and I was hoping it would put people off.  It did! I parked at Henry’s Hill across the street from my previous turnaround point. Over the hill and down the other side we went, followed by some road walking, but not a lot, and with nice scenery although no sidewalks.  Then we slipped between two private properties on a narrow SVT easement and into some of the best hiking of the BCT to date.  Poison i...

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 . What a gorgeous day for a walk in the woods! And I'm so grateful that it *was* a walk in the woods - two days with no road walking!  We parked on Brimstone Lane (not a hellscape at all) and took a short trail to where we left off yesterday.  Up Nobscot Hill we went (the high point on the BCT ), and had what the BCT website calls "peekaboo views" (copy clearly written by a real estate agent). The ascent, if I may call it that, was not as steep or rocky as yesterday's climb of Tippling Rock.  The trail doubled back and mostly downhill along scantily blazed trails to Wayside Inn Road, opposite Henry's Hill , our next departure point.  The...

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 . Concurrent with the Salamander Trail What a relief to really hike after so many days of road walking so much of my journey.  Today was short because it was actually the continuation of the Route 20 leg I didn’t finish yesterday.   I plan my route based on where the car will be stationed and how much I can cover without duplicating my path (or actually more than that because I already do out-and-back hikes most times).   Tippling Rock turned out to be a lovely trail.   Apparently, here be salamanders , but I only saw one vernal pool and  certainly  did  not  want to bother them.  There was some elevation, which...

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 . "Hiking" Today was a short dispiriting day.  Despite doing such a long day yesterday, I did not even cover half of the two miles on Route 20 to the next conservation area.  I parked at the trailhead for the Tippling Rock trail (super crowded parking lot because it was a weekend) and decided to bite the bullet and do the 1.2 mile road hike to the Dunkin Donuts .  By the time I finished that I was hot and cranky and stressed about needing to prepare dinner before our scheduled Zoom call.  So I just went home and did not actually experience any nature whatsoever. OK, maybe a little nature Yes, 1776 is the zip code for Sudbury....