Four Great Berkshire Hikes

Filed in archive Hiking on June 22, 2007

For years, I've had a Western Massachusetts listed on my wish list of travel destinations. Particularly because of its art and literary history, but it's also a haven for avid hikers, like myself.

Here are four great hikes in Western Massachusetts:

POCUMTUCK RIDGE: It's a quick getaway for mountain bikers and hikers hoping for some fast scenic payoffs. But Pocumtuck Ridge is also a vantage point for the Connecticut River Valley's geological history and mythic lore.

The 200 million-year-old ridge between Deerfield and Greenfield now overlooks bucolic farms and homes tucked safely in the valley below. But it was once witness to violent changes in the landscape. When glaciers helped carve out the valley, the rock in the ridge was so durable that it resisted erosion. As the water drained away, the ridge was left as a towering overlook, part of a topography that helped establish the Pocumtuck Indian myth of a giant beaver that once terrorized the area.

QUESTING: Hidden deep in the state's southwest pocket is a 435-acre swath of cloistered forest, open meadow, ancient stone walls and crumbling cellar holes. It's called Questing, named for a snake-headed monster from the legends of King Arthur.

The land was completely abandoned by the 1930s and was purchased in the 1940s by Robert and Jane Lehman, who bestowed the Arthurian title and later bequeathed it to The Trustees. The Lehmans allowed the former farmland to grow wild, but the fragments of the area's former civilization are impossible to miss. Walking past the cellar holes and stone walls, it's easy to imagine property borders, boundaries for cattle and plots of tobacco, potatoes and grains

HIGH LEDGES: Sunlight seems scarce in the thick woods near the High Ledges, where trails wind past twisted roots, gnarled branches hang overhead and strange beauty pokes through the damp forest floor. Low-lying ferns and clusters of mountain laurel line the paths that dip toward boggy areas and climb to rocky heights, all under the canopy of towering evergreens, sugar maples and oaks.

MOUNT TOM: From a distance, it's easy to dismiss Mount Tom as an unimpressive hump lurking over Interstate 91. But pull into the Route 5 entrance of the Mount Tom State Reservation, which straddles Holyoke and Easthampton and you enter a 2,000-acre forest with a 20-mile network of trails past trickling streams, through towering trees, leading to some of the most expansive vistas in western Massachusetts.

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