A Minor Adventure

Within two and a half hours, I was able to hike through boggy skunk cabbage swamps, along crystal clear babbling rills, over rolling foothills, up to the top of a cliff, and down into a valley of waterfalls, and I didn't even have to drive anywhere! The Robert Frost Trail meets my road on the other side of the pond in my backyard, and I simply followed the orange blazes through Amherst's level swamp and forest, all the way up, up, up into the hills of Pelham - a landscape littered with rocky outcrops and shady hemlock groves. The extremity of my trip was atop the rocky ledges of Mount Orient, where I paused at the barren summit to drink some water and look out on the flat pancake of Amherst where the land tapers towards the river.

From such a height did I descend directly down into the depths of a valley, to the confluence of Buffam and Harris Brooks and their locally famous falls, where Amethyst Brook begins, shrouded in cool mist and the perpetual shade of hemlocks and pines. The falls are not as grandiose as those at Bashbish, but given the beauty, the solitude, and the proximity to my home, these falls are infinitely more dear to me. I was filled with delight as the tannin-stained water (Harris Brook being noticeably darker) bubbled and tumbled along its rocky course for my eyes alone. Wading barefoot across the frigid stream was a pure and savage thrill, and is surely the only way such wild streams should be crossed. I saw brook trout fry darting about in pools, coyote tracks crossing at shallow parts of the stream, fifty-foot sheer cliffs dripping with condensation, and falls upon falls upstream and down, many more than I had ever cared to discover before. If ever a brook trout swam, it was to live in streams like these. It is a marvelously special place, a secret place, concealed by nature herself, such that even the trail leading down to it is perfectly obscured by two overlapping hemlock branches. The roar of the falls gives away its location, which is how I discovered it in the first place, so any curious traveler may find it easily enough.

My course home was primarily by road, which I expected to be uneventful, but just before I reached home, I was proven wrong. There in the road, at the narrowest and most treacherous point, was an Eastern Box Turtle, putting himself in harm's way for reasons known only to box turtles. In Massachusetts, this species is listed as Special Concern, since its range has shrunk over the last fifty years, so I now get to fill out a Rare Species Report and submit it to the state! Plus I get to add it to my log of species encountered in my neighborhood's natural community. I placed him high up on the shoulder of the road, just in time to escape an oncoming car, and thus completed my wild and adventurous loop.