When desire reaches a certain height, it can distort the things we see around us. In the days leading up to my first colonoscopy (I had to start getting them a few years earlier than most people do), the bland preparatory diet had me hallucinating richer foods in all kinds of places. A basket of laundry in the basement reminded me of a big bowl of Tonkotsu ramen, with every topping on the menu. The full moon brought to mind the creamy innards of a king-sized Whoopie Pie. Maybe you’ve had an experience like this too; manifesting nourishment from your local environment. It can take on all manner of forms, depending on what you’re lusting after and what exactly you’re looking at.

This past weekend, for instance, I had to make a 48-hour trip down to New York City for work. The soaring air temperatures and hotel prices were a reminder that we’re entering the peak summer travel season; a fleeting window that millions devote to chasing the most superlative natural landmarks like Old Faithful or El Capitan. I have neither of patience nor the travel budget to compete with these golden hordes, which means that I’m often stuck seeking grandiose beauty in more understated places. And on my first night in NYC, I decided to slip into my toe socks and lean into this coping tendency. How? By taking an evening saunter to the Grand Canyon of New York City.

If you’ve spent any time north of Central Park, then you know how the topography of Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx can be startlingly angular. Contrary to the idea that Manhattan Island only has two surrounding rivers, there is a third, much smaller waterway—the Harlem River—that pinches off the northernmost tip of Manhattan from the mainland. And where the Harlem River flows around the northern waterfront of Manhattan, the land on both sides is steep and sometimes densely wooded. A few of you might have crossed over the Harlem River on the Washington Bridge, which is one of multiple arched bridges that span the width of this enormous cleft in the cityscape. I started thinking of that cleft as the Grand Canyon of New York City after crossing a different bridge located there, which is solely used by walkers and cyclists. And once you’ve taken in the Harlem River and its surrounding slopes from that bridge (we’ll get to it shortly), it’s tough to un-see this hidden natural landmark.

My hotel was just a few subway stops away from the 167th Street MTA station in The Bronx, which is a great place to begin a trek to the Grand Canyon. Because the station itself is just a couple blocks from the creaking trees and cacophonous ballfields of Rev. T. Wendell Foster Park and the so-called Joker Stairs. If you watched the film Joker and you lay eyes on this steep set of stairs—from the park’s corner up to Anderson Avenue—you’re probably going to imagine Joaquin Phoenix doing his deranged dance on the stairs, with that Gary Glitter song blaring in the background. Movies and TV shows that were filmed in real locations are a more literal means of visualizing something interesting in a more mundane environment. And it when we visit a place that we’ve seen depicted in a memorable film scene, it can be hard to wipe that memory as we take in the space in its natural state. Halfway up the stairs, I quietly cackled to myself.

From the top, the walk to the Grand Canyon of New York City take about half an hour at a nice, leisurely pace. And up here, the roly-poly nature of the South Bronx is made much clearer by the visible slant of the streets. But on the evening of my urban hike, I encountered something else that made the borough feel wilder and more reminiscent of traditional hiking territory. As is often the case on scorching days in NYC, several of the fire hydrants I passed had been uncapped. Torrents of water sprayed and gushed into the streets, forming countless rivulets that rippled downhill, along the sidewalks. There are thousands of backcountry trails across the U.S. that involve walking beside similar streams, often with frequent crossings. And in a couple of spots, I found myself hopping over these hydrant-fed streams, to avoid soaking the only pair of shoes that I had brought on my trip. It was the same intention that’s often had me testing out the stability of exposed rocks on brooks in the mountains, before gingerly crossing them.

When I finally arrived at Merriam Avenue, the literal high point of my urban ramble to the Grand Canyon of NYC, I could feel a breath of wind coming through the trees of Merriam Playground—not unlike the gusts that can cool you down when emerge onto an exposed ridgeline after spending two hours slogging uphill through deciduous and boreal woods. From here, the grade of the hike is less punishing. A quick descent from the playground down some crumbly stone stairs and a right turn on University Avenue leads to the canyon’s gateway, Highbridge Park. This slopeside oasis on the Bronx side of the Harlem River is named for the car-free bridge that offers stunning views of the Grand Canyon in both directions. The High Bridge, which towers 140 feet above the river, is supported by a huge steel arch that was first welded-together in the mid-19th Century. The bridge was once part of the Croton Aqueduct, which carried water from the Croton River to the city (a 41-mile journey) until its closure in 1955. The woods on the Manhattan side of the High Bridge contain rustly trails that follow the old route of the Croton Aqueduct. But savoring the Harlem River and the “canyon walls” of Upper Manhattan and The Bronx from the bridge is about as ecstatic as walking here gets.

Surprisingly, only a small handful of people were enjoying the High Bridge when I got there, just in time for sunset. A cyclist here, a scooter rider there, and an older couple who appeared to be walking home from a grocery store trip. I wondered if they were so adjusted to the beauty of the Harlem River or the canyon that it no longer inspired a mid-bridge stop to gaze down at the water and at the nearby spires of Midtown. But when I reached the stairs on the Manhattan side of the bridge, I saw a lone gentleman to my left who appeared more humbled by the natural environment. He stood beside the fencing, looking out toward the skyscrapers. I was tempted to approach him and make a comment about the glow of the magic hour, in hope that this might spark a conversation between us about the bridge, the canyon and his familiarity with them.

But I decided to leave him alone—for the same reason why many of us acknowledge fellow backcountry hikers with little more than a quick, friendly nod. When someone is clearly having A Moment with a wondrous landscape, why disrupt that? In a densely populated, pavement-heavy city like NYC, finding those moments can be challenging.

And yet, they’re out there. If you know where to look for them.

CLICK HERE for a map of my hike to the High Bridge

Dear friends,

Have you ever tried walking around the city or town where you live, in the most literal sense? Back in 2024, I did this on assignment for The Boston Globe, spending a week hiking a close approximation of Boston’s strange, squiggly border. And what became very clear within the first leg of this city perambulation was how arbitrary and random the border felt. I would walk into a buzzing marshland, hemlock forest, or residential labyrinth with the understanding that I was still in Boston, only to find that I had just stepped into a neighboring municipality within a few yards; within the same landscape.

So naturally, I wondered: What if there was a different way to walk around a major city like Boston? An orbital journey that played faster and looser with lines that demarcate “cities” and “towns,” emphasizing the interconnected nature of green spaces and built environments around Greater Boston? This was pretty much the same idea that led to Boston’s Walking City Trail from Mattapan to Bunker Hill taking shape—using curious, walkable spaces to link communities that are often misperceived as distant from each other. But the prospect of applying this idea to Boston and neighboring municipalities started to grow more intriguing since my earlier walk around the city. And back in late November of 2025, a group of us Walking City Trails volunteers started discussing this.

Half a year and many, many miles later, that idea has evolved into a very big new trail.

Today, on National Trails Day, I’d like to introduce you to the Boston Boundless Trail.

The latest addition to the Walking City Trails network—our first loop trail, and by far our longest trail—is an epic re-imagining of Boston’s borders. The Boston Boundless Trail, or the “BBT” as I like to call it, passes through every city and town that touches Boston. It’s divided into 12 segments and like all the Walking City Trails, it prioritizes green space and other scenically interesting spaces over directness. Public transit is available along each section of the BBT; even the section that roller coasters through the Blue Hills Reservation over the rockiest and most backcountry territory visited by any Walking City Trail thus far! And the final step to closing the loop, on the BBT’s last stretch through East Boston, is a suggested $2.40 ride on the ferry from Eastie to the North End. That makes the Boston Boundless Trail our first “multi-modal” trail as well.

None of this would have happened without the enthusiasm, creativity, and generosity of the Walking City Trails community. The name of the trail, a real struggle until just a few months ago, was suggested by Wyoma, who came to the first very group hike on the Walking City Trail in 2022 during a blistering heat wave. Joining me on most of the scouting and photography walks that took place between March and June was Patrick Maguire, whose prolific ambling has included walking the length of a marathon in lots of Boston neighborhoods. And two of the leafiest segments of the Boston Boundless Trail actually double as a sneak peek of another landmark trail in Greater Boston that’s going to be coming to the surface in the not too distant future—the Boston Greenbelt Trail, envisioned by David Loutzenheiser, who has been on several of our Boston Night Hikes. Sections 4 and 5 of the BBT will follow the same route as David’s upcoming trail.

All of which is a way of saying that Boston’s culture of exploring and sharing what we find out there seems to compound each year. I hope that the BBT will inspire many of you to wander beyond the edge of what’s familiar—with sunblock, salty snacks, and a watchful eye for ticks—and be open to the social cross pollination that can happen on trails of any type. And just to whet your appetite further, here are several nuggets of information about the Boston Boundless Trail and the ground that it covers…

- From start to finish, the BBT is 90.9 miles long. (We didn’t plan this. It just happened!)

- The BBT runs through over 100 different green spaces in Boston and its surrounding cities and towns, from pocket parks to craggy hills and ridgelines with amazing views.

- The spectrum of environments covered by the BBT ranges from backcountry-esque forests to industrial territory where hidden flecks of greenery still manage to survive.

- Of all the BBT sections, the shortest of the lot is Section 11, which runs 4.7 miles through the town of Winthrop and a bevy of maritime environments found there.

- Conversely, the longest section of the BBT is Section 4 (11.1 milles) which features a literal lost highway in the woods near Canton and multiple forests there and in Boston.

- The most physically challenging part of the BBT is without a doubt Section 3, which enters the Blue Hills Reservation via other parks and follows the roly-poly Skyline Trail.

- The flattest part of the BBT is Section 7 from Oak Square in Brighton to Davis Square in Somerville, and this section is also one of the most thoroughly bike-able on the BBT.

- While the BBT was planned for walking first and foremost, it includes more bike-able stretches than any of the prior Walking City Trails, and you can see these segments by using our Google Map of the BBT and selecting the optional overlay of bike-able areas.

Ready for an adventure? Click here to visit the page for the Boston Boundless Trail for maps, directions, and more information about stuff like transit connections or packing.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about the BBT in regional media over the coming weeks. Will Katcher of MassLive just published a nice story about the trail launch, and in a few weeks, I’m going to be bringing a radio host that a lot of you know out to that lost highway in the woods that I mentioned earlier. In general, one of the best ways to introduce a trail is to invite people out to explore it. And to that end, I’m thrilled to announce a series of introductory group hikes along select segments of the Boston Boundless Trail, all of which will be taking place between mid-June and July Fourth!

You can register for the first hike by clicking here. It’s going down on Sunday June 14th at 5:00 PM. (Ward off the Sunday scaries with a ramble along the intersection of the Mystic and Malden Rivers, on Section 9 of the BBT!) There is no cost to RSVP for these hikes, but if you feel like supporting the Walking City Trails project by grabbing a WCT membership—which includes a sweet patch!—you can do so by clicking here.
And you can get updates on the next hikes by signing up for the Walking City Trails newsletter, which is the best way to stay abreast of trail news and events in general.

Whether your gateway to the Boston Boundless Trail is one of these group hikes or a more solitary jaunt, I can’t emphasize it enough: These trails would not have come to fruition without the curiosity and support that so many of you have expressed, in lots of ways. Thank you for believing in this venture, and most crucially, have fun out there!

Cheers,
Miles

Whenever the phrase “follow your own path” is written or uttered, the context tends to be self-improvement—say, starting a small business or pursuing a degree in post-war film criticism in the U.S.S.R. But sometimes, following your own path can be a lot more impusive and unhinged. Ages back, when I was four years old and meandering around the house on a plastic Fisher-Price tricycle, I decided to “follow my own” path down the stairs from the second floor to the first floor. (Kudos to my parents for not removing the carpeting on those stairs.) And during the 1950s, a man in the Mount Washington Valley of New Hampshire decided to follow his own path up the road to New England’s highest mountaintop, but with a twist. He walked the road backwards.

By all accounts, Alton Weagle was a regular guy—inconspicuously blending into the North Country for most of the year. But during the Truman-Eisenhower era, something inside Weagle began kicking and stirring to life. His backwards ascent of the Mount Washington Auto Road was the first of several experimental walks that defied both convention and reason. He also climbed the auto road blindfolded, and then, he did the climb while pushing a wheelbarrow full of sugar to the summit. And to this day, nobody really knows why Weagle undertook these peculiar walks. The journalist Dan Szczesny came closer than others with his 2018 book The White Mountain, in which Weagle appears as a figure of Mount Washington lore and culture. But still, being able to grasp the “why” behind ventures like Weagle’s may be impossible from a distance.

Instead, the key could be following in his irreverent footsteps, with a walk of your own.

Last week, while reporting a story for Mountain Gazette in Northern Vermont with my friend Dan Brown—a great photographer with a penchant for finding story threads to investigate—we learned about an event on the Mount Washington Auto Road that just took place; an event that we’ve already marked on our calendars for next spring. Alton Weagle Day, which will occur on Saturday May 22 in 2027, is an invitation to invent your own “first ascent” on the Mount Washington Auto Road. In other words, you come up with a method of climbing the auto road that would have left Weagle smiling, you show up at the bottom of the auto road with all the other first ascenders, and then, you make history. A 2013 NHPR feature by Sean Hurley shed light on a few of the first ascents that took place on that Alton Weagle Day. One man did the climb on construction stilts outfitted with 15-foot flag poles, while also wearing a top hat. A group of middle school students climbed the road while dressed up as chocolate chip cookies. They also kicked a soccer ball around during their shared first ascent. But my favorite is Otok Ben-Hvar, who squeezed into five inner tubes and rolled up the road!

The list of Weagle-esque first ascents on the auto road grows more eclectic each year, from climbers dressed as Star Wars stormtroopers to others who used pogo sticks or camels to make it to the top. (I am desperately searching for photos or footage of the latter.) And despite knowing nothing about Alton Weagle Day until 48 hours ago, I’m already in love with this Granite State soiree. Not just because of the batshit creativity it encourages, or the camraderie it must inspire between first ascenders, but because embracing and celebrating the intentional ambiguity of walks like Weagle’s is starting to feel transgressive; at a time when more people seem increasingly uncomfortable with pleasure for the sake of the pleasure, and with life’s many unknowable mysteries.

Maybe, like me, you’ve seen this reflected in the rise of practical articles and features in venues that used to be more devoted to life’s wonders. In the National Geographic “Health” vertical, it’s no longer enough to marvel at the intricacies and unanswered questions about the human body. Now, we’re encouraged to try out biohacks from longevity scientists so that we can stave off death a little longer. Or to organize our homes or offices for improved mood and reduced anxiety. Useful information? Sure, but seeing more and more of this life-optimizing content in NatGeo feels kind of like stepping into an ice cream shop and being offered cookies-and-cream with activated charcoal for gut health. And I’m not making that up. It’s the flavor of the month at the neighborhood ice cream counter where I live. I don’t know what this says about the era we’re living right now—that junk food is being re-branded as an opportunity for wellness and bodily augmentation—but it highlights the beauty of Alton Weagle Day and goofy first ascents. These walks serve no practical purpose, and that’s the point.

There’s a great hunger for this, and it runs deeper than we might realize. Several years ago, when climbing Mount Katahdin for the first time, I encountered a group of young hikers from Nova Scotia with perfect tans, sculpted bodies, and the kind of energy we expect from varsity athletes. But the reason why these friends were climbing Katahdin that day was weirder and more random than I could have guessed. One of them had an ironing board strapped to his backpack and upon reaching the “tableland” of the Kathdin summit, the Canadians had set up the board and whipped out a clothes iron. The ringleader of the pack, a dead ringer for Pamela Anderson in her Baywatch days, started to pantomime ironing laundry. They began with several garments they had packed up with them, and THEN, the hot, young Canadians offered passing hikers the chance to have their sweaty clothes pretend-ironed too! Who was I to pass this up?

I peeled off my fragrant tank-top and handed it over. And that was when I found out that setting up an ironing board on Katahdin was a summer tradition that the friends had been practicing for half a decade. “How’d you come up with this idea?” I asked.

The Canadians looked at each other, chewing on this for a beat or two, and then the blonde woman turned back to me and said, “You know, I really can’t remember.”

My hunch is that you’d get a similar answer from Alton Weagle if he were alive today; if some reporter from the New York Times cornered him in a pub and asked him why he decided to walk backwards up the Mount Washington Auto Road. Or perhaps his response would be a version of what Philippe Petit told the press just after getting arrested for walking on a wire between the World Trade Center towers: “There is no why: When I see a beautiful place to put my wire, I cannot resist.” Maybe that’s how Weagle felt about the windy, winding road to New England’s highest place, or how those Nova Scotia hikers looked at Maine’s great mountain. I’d imagine millions of us have a special place where we can’t help but realize our most bug nuts dreams. Next spring, I plan to find out if the Mount Washington Auto Road belongs on my shortlist.

Perhaps I’ll see you there too?

Now, to close us out, here’s a lovely song about Alton Weagle Day from Dan & Faith!

In case you haven’t heard yet, something BIG has been cooking in Boston lately. The Walking City Trails network of cross-town urban hiking trails, which I founded in 2022, is just a few weeks away from welcoming a new addition: a trail around Boston’s leafy and salty perimeter that will be somewhere between 80 to 100 miles long! Cambridge Day published the scoop the other week, and at the moment, a small of crew of us are in the process of scouting, mapping, and photographing the final sections of the trail, which will officially launch on June 6th (AKA, National Trails Day) at BostonTrails.org.

Naturally, the question of how many people will actually hike 80 to 100 miles around the City of Boston border has come up. But I have an ace up my sleeve; an incentive that could be the difference between “sounds neat, in theory” and “let’s fucking go!”

I am going to offer a free, commemorative patch to anyone who completes the trail.

Now this might sound absurd—the idea that people would spend days or even weeks out in the sticks, putting distance on their soles and micro-tears in their calves, just so they can claim a 3-inch woven patch with the name and logo of the trail they’ve hiked. But for some reason, which I don’t pretend to understand, the allure of a prize, grand or pithy, can inspire some truly unhinged ventures in the outdoors. If you traverse the 365-mile Erie Canalway trail across upstate New York and record your miles using a special logbook from the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, you can receive a finisher’s kit that includes a pennant, a car magnet, and….drum roll, please.…a sticker!

Or consider the Bay Circuit Trail; a C-shaped trail through the woods and wetlands of Greater Boston that stretches for 230 miles from Newburyport to Duxbury. In 2017, the Appalachian Mountain Club’s director of operations for the Bay Circuit Trail, Kristen Sykes, created a program in which anyone who completes the trail can claim a nifty AMC pin. I think it’s safe to say that these programs would not continue running if people were not finishing the trails and claiming the prizes with some regularity. And I can attest to that because shortly after the launch of Boston’s Walking City Trail (the namesake 27-mile trail that started the network), I launched a similar program through which you can receive a free “WCT” trail patch after completing the trail. The number of people who have claimed the patch is modest enough that I’m not worried about cheating—most of these programs run on the honor system—but the claims hit my inbox frequently enough in spring, summer, and fall that I’m pretty much covinced that the power of patchwork can help activate any trail or outdoors-based challenge.

It’s a fascinating psychological paradox—doing so much for so little—and I wonder if some of this is rooted in nostalgia for a bygone era when opportunities to claim free shit were ubiquitous in American life. You could find them on a box of cereal. I fondly remember rifling through boxes of Berry Berry Kix when they carried X-Men trading cards, in search of the elusive Professor X. I can also recall how the arrival of a box of Red Rose Tea in our house meant adding a new porcelain figurine to our collection. Each box included one of these little creatures, which were crafted by the legendary English pottery manufacturer Wade Ceramics. You could even save up the tiny comic strips from rolls of Bazooka Joe chewing gum, mail them to the Bazooka Joe HQ, and claim a prize comensurate with the number of comics you amassed; like X-ray glasses or a whoopee cushion. Rising manufacturing costs, and the widening realization that marketing molar-rotting foods to kids with prizes might be unethical, killed the party.
But those of us who lived that era know: It was a hell of a party, and worth the fillings.

You might say that the growth of prizes for walking, hiking, and outoor adventuring is an evolution of this lost tradition—prizes in the service of activities that are great for our health and happiness. Nonetheless, I still find myself surprised by just how far a number of people are willing to go, in pursuit of their prize. Some years ago, a family of New Hampshire hikers named Trish, Alex, and Sage put together a list of seriously exposed, vertigo-inducing hikes in the Granite State that they called The Terrifying 25. It didn’t take long for New England hiking communities to find this list and treat it like a quest. And for the finishers, a special Terrifying 25 patch was created. list. But having done a handful of the hikes on the Terrifying 25 list—most traumatically, the Six Husbands Trail up Mount Jefferson, which includes a dismount from the top of a tall wooden ladder to a slick, sloped cliff that left me shuddering—I’m not sure if the luster of the patch would have gotten me through all 25 of these hikes. Even Adam Hoyt, an outdoor influencer with a greater tolerance for terror, found the Six Husbands Trail freaky.

Nonetheless, there’s always someone out there waiting to empowered or enabled by a “free” prize, no matter the cost that’s actually paid in labor or exposure. Several years ago, a white-hot bagel vendor here in Boston upgraded from a farmer’s market stand to their first brick-and-mortar store. To ensure a crowd, they offered one free bagel to every customer who visited that day, until they were cleaned out. It was a windy, rainy morning in late April, still bitter enough to numb your fingers, and my friend/current housemate Katie and I decided to jog over there and leave a trail sesame seeds in our wake. We figured the bad weather would be a deterrent…and we could not have been more wrong. The line of people waiting to get into the tiny bagel shop didn’t just spill out the door. It ran the length of the block and then it wrapped around the block and disappeared from sight. There were several families with small kids and babies in line, hypnotized by the promise of a free bagel and unbothered by the likelihood of being stuck at home with runny noses the next day. Hungry as we were, Katie and I couldn’t get into the zone like that. So we went home. And we still talk about this sometimes.

Maybe you were one of those people, enduring the drenching rain so you could sink your teeth into a pillowy ring of dough that would have cost $2.50 on any other day. Perhaps you’ve done something even more reckless and inspired outside, driven by the promise of acquiring something that you can wear on your jacket or slap on the bumper of your car. If so, I’d love to hear about it. Sound off in the comments below, by all means! And even if you haven’t earned a prize for doing something challenging outdoors, I’d love to hear what you would be willing to do, and for what prize. Would an engraved butter knife be enough to get you training for the Cactus to Clouds Trail up California’s Mount San Jacinto, in which you gain more than 10,000 vertical feet in 19 miles? Could you imagine cold plunging into each of the Great Lakes in December and uploading a selfie of each plunge if it earned you a special beanie with the shape of the lakes embroidered into the hat? (I think I already know my dad’s answer.) And above all, why do you think that patches, pins, and other prizes have this effect on us?

We may never know, but we can certainly keep chasing answers, along with the prizes.

Spend enough time outdoors in any region and you’ll get to know a few high profile locals without ever crossing their paths. A few years back, when my friend and current housemate Katie was living in Western Massachusetts, I would visit her often and we would search for local venues with gnarled trees and bristling tallgrasses for taking a walk-and-talk. One day, near the town of Hadley, we found ourselves walking along a boardwalk through a viney wetland known as the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. I assumed the place was named after some guy who had nursed a blue heron back to health in his barn, or donated a giant parcel of land to the state. And then, once Katie and I headed back to her house, I forgot about Silvio O. Conte.

Until nine months later in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where I bumped into him again. My friend Adam and I were up there for a spritzing weekend in mid-May and we were searching for a place to go for a muddy ramble. Having bought a house up there, Adam was tapped into the local landscape and suggested a boreal woodland near Island Pond, where we could follow the North Branch of the Nulhegan River. A quick look at the map brought on a sense of Deja Vu. Because this enormous green splotch was also labeled “Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge.” Again, I presumed a massive, cross-regional land transfer from someone with seriously deep pockets. But just a couple weeks later, while driving through the White Mountains in New Hampshire, I decided to take a quick walk into the Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge to visit Cherry Pond; a gorgeous, watery mirror for the Northern Presidential Range. And when I got to the parking lot, I noticed something on a sign that had eluded me on prior visits. While informally known as the Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge, this parcel is the Pondicherry “division” of the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge.

What on earth is going on here? I wondered. And who the fuck is Silvio O. Conte?

The short version is that he was a Massachusetts Republican who served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 16 terms between 1958 and 1991—when he died from prostate cancer and was buried in his hometown of Pittsfield, Mass. But Conte was also an avid fisherman who spent a lot of time in the wetlands and shallows that make up the Conneticut River Watershed. This 7.2 million-acre zone covers the full length of the river from its humble origin on the New Hampshire-Canada border to its terminus at Long Island Sound. It’s a vast stopover point for migratory birds and fish (including salmon!), and its habitats cover everything from northern forests to salt marshes. But during Conte’s years in Congress, the Connecticut River was suffering from decades of damming and industrial pollution. This inspired Conte to introduce federal legislation that would establish a series of protected refuges throughout the gigantic watershed.

Like many bills, it stalled and languished for years. But not long after Conte’s death, as public awareness of environmental desecration expanded, Congressional leaders saw a dualfold opportunity. By dusting off Conte’s wildlife refuge bill, they could do some good for the regional environment and offer a belated tribute to their old colleague; kind of like the way that Academy voters will literally wait for decades to give Oscars to cinematic trailblazers such as Martin Scorsese. (Getting passed over for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull is still unbelievable to me.) And so, in 1997, Congress and the Clinton administration formally minted the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. The refuge includes 17 pieces of land in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and several of them offer gentle, groomed footpaths for visitors.

Of all the possible ways to leverage a seat in the House or the Senate, protecting your favorite fishing and birding territory is a worthier cause than others; especially if the mechanism of protection yields trails and infrastructure, thereby making it easier for the public to enjoy the territory. When Adam and I squelched through the woods of the Nulhegan Basin division of the Silvio O. Conte refuge, chasing the North Branch of the Nulhegan River and watching its mists shroud the pine trees, I was reminded of another federal wildlife sanctuary in a very different part of America. A couple years back, while visiting Philadelphia, I spent a hazy afternoon perambulating the marshes at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tilicum, which is located next to the airport yet somehow acoustically protected from the planes taking off and landing. I did a little post-hike digging into the story of John Heinz, an heir to the Heinz fortune who left the family business to serve in both the House and Senate during the 1970s and 80s. Like Conte, he was a moderate Republican who didn’t fully buy into Ronald Reagan’s vision for a government small enough to drown in a bathtub. Heinz was an outdoor enthusiast and a conservationist who saw federal land protections as a vital intervention, in a country ruled by industry and wealth. The Philly refuge, established in 1972 to protect the city’s last tidal marsh, was a project long-championed by Heinz.

And in 1991—the same year of Conte’s passing—the marsh was re-named after Heinz.

I suppose this is how most of us become a conservation advocate. We fall in love with a green space in our orbit, we come to see how that green space is vulnerable, and we act on the human instinct to protect it. But when I look back on the advocacy of Silvio O. Conte and John Heinz today, from the scorched earth vantage point of America in 2026, I find myself someplace between respect and sadness. Both men recognized the inevitable consequences if industry had been allowed to run rampant across America’s landscape. Their conservation projects were a reflection of that prescience. But rather than question whether the power of industry itself—and the wealth behind it—should be reined in, Conte and Heinz decided to protect their own corners of the landscape from extraction and desecration. Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful that both of them took these proactive steps to establish some of the most beautiful wild oases in the northeast. I just wonder where we might have found ourseles today, in an alternative universe, if more moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats looked at wealth and industry not as godlike forces, but as powers that a government can regulate too.

In any event, connecting those dots seems to be the generational task bequeathed to those of us who are alive today, as the Trump administration and the Republican Party strip environmental protections away from places like Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. If this week’s newsletter inspires some of you to explore the woods and waters of Silvio O. Conte’s rustling divisions, or the boardwalks and birding towers at the John Heinz refuge, or any green space named for a politician who devoted themselves to keeping it green, think about why these environmental protections are so urgently needed. Or what the United States might look like if protecting the great outdoors from industry and wealth wasn’t such a steep, uphill battle. I hope we live long enough to find out.

CLICK HERE for a map of the Silvio O. Conte refuge in Hadley (MA)

CLICK HERE for a map of the Silvio O. Conte refuge on the Nulhegan River (VT)

CLICK HERE for a map of the Silvio O. Conte refuge at Cherry Pond (NH)

CLICK HERE for a map of the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tilicum (PA)

Those of you who’ve read Mind The Moss for a while will know that I’m something of a skeptic, if not a militant, when it comes to the role of generative AI in our lives. It’s not that I’m unwilling to recognize scenarios or applictions in which Large Language Models (LLMs) could eliminate some of the unneccessary friction from daily life. The work of organizing gathered information into something like a spreadsheet is fairly tedious work that an AI program could do in five seconds (though I would strongly prefer to outsource this work to a form of technology that doesn’t require obscene levels of electricity and water, as AI data centers consume.) What concerns me most about generative AI is the way it can remove human deliberation from activities that require inquiry and debate; sanding down the types of friction that are good for us.

Consider the last great hiking trip that you planned for yourself or a group of friends. Maybe you spent some time leafing through guidebooks or trawling online forums or Reddit communities to get ideas for where you should hike, where you should eat, or where to park your carcass at the end of the day. At some point in the process, it was necessary to have a dialogue, internally or with your fellow travelers, about the things that should be avoided. If I had been part of that group, I would have suggested that we eliminate trails with freestyle cliff climbing from the list of possibilities. (But if the cliff had ladder rungs or climbing chains, no problem!) Someone else might pipe up and request a hike with limited rock stairs, due to an old knee injury they suffered in high school while playing varsity soccer. These deliberations can feel like work, but they can also be fun. As the specifics of your voyage come into focus, the anticipation grows. And even if it all goes to hell, you can rest assured that hey, you did your best.

So, you can understand why I’m not exactly thrilled about the just-announced news that AllTrails—one of the most user-friendly resources for hiking ideas, online and in app form—has now joined with Claude and become “the first major trail app to live inside Anthropic’s AI assistant.” (Is it just me, or does the thought of “living inside” an LLM bring to mind the gaping maw of a gargantuan sea monster covered in lice?) It was an announcment that I’ve spent the last two years dreading, after watching the integration of generative AI into search engines, email platforms, social media, and pretty much every other venue where information can be summarized into bulleted points. It was only a matter of time before the labor of planning a hike became new terrain for cognitive offloading. And while I could go on at length about the roots of my strong disdain for this trend, no one has time for that. Instead, I’m going to try explaining, as succinctly as I can, why you should not use AI to plan your next hike.

First, AI will never know your comfort zone—or your friends’—as intimately as you can. As an experiment, I decided to try following AllTrails’ suggestions for how to use Claude to generate hiking ideas. This involved literally copying a pre-prepared question from AllTrails, pasting it into Claude, and making a couple of choice tweaks.

Here’s what Claude—culling from AllTrails—spat back out me, after just a few seconds.

These aren’t bad hikes! But already, I could see potential problems. The trail to North and Middle Sugarloaf, which I wrote about a few years ago, includes a rather tall and steep wooden ladder that could give a lot of experienced hikers pause. This level of elemental specificity about the North and Middle Sugarloaf hike is unlikely to come up in a conversation with Claude if you’re using AI to bypass the labor of talking with your hiking party about comfort levels and things that some folks may wish to avoid on trails. Or opening a guidebook. Or even visiting AllTrails yourself, reading the user reviews of the trail, and looking at crowd-sourced photos, which reveal the tall ladder.

Similarly, the Boulder Loop Trail offers hikers two choices; a steep climb and a gentle descent, or vice-versa. Once again, this is the kind of thing that’s not going to show up in an AI summary of hike ideas unless an LLM knows that you’re curious about it. Why would you be curious? Maybe you’re skittish on steep descents, or perhaps a member of your hiking party struggles with ascending tall rock steps. As is the case with AI chatbots, the results tend to be better when you have something of a back and forth with an LLM, giving it more information and sharpening the answers. But this begs a question; Why not just have that dialogue with your real hiking buddies?

I guess one reason why somebody—not you—might choose to dodge such dialogue by using Claude or ChatGPT to plan a hike is because negotiating a trip plan among friends can be awkward. Expressing the limits of your comfort zone requires being vulnerable, and choosing how to respond to such expressed boundaries is a delicate step to take. Conceiving of something together is inherently going to involve some amount of friction. But there’s a tremendous satisfaction to be enjoyed from dealing with that friction together, and coming out with something that you’re excited about. Several years back, when I huddled with my friends Natalie and Adam to plan a 4,000 footer hike, I was only a year or so past an awful back injury that had severely limited my ability to hike uphill. When they suggested the iconic Franconia Ridge Loop in the White Mountains, I had to explain that I wasn’t up for this level of elevation gain just yet. They took it well, absorbing my limitation, and we ended up setting the controls for Mount Moosilauke instead; a less relentless climb, but still a big old rock monster that left us scenically dazzled and sated, when we finished the hike around sundown.

That’s the other thing that makes me wince at the thought of people using AI to plan their next hikes. Finding ideas for hikes can be a rewarding social experience, and using LLMs can deprive you of making connections to hiking communities. Take the growth of groups like Outdoor Afro, the Venture Out Project, and Unlikely Hikers; all of which are built on the goal of making it easier for people who’ve been excluded from mainstream outdoor culture to get onto trails, with the guidance of folks from their communities. Even if you’re not planning on attending an upcoming joint hike with a local group, connecting with that group in-person or online can still open the door to hikes that you might want to pursue in the future, solo or with accomplices.

Even forum-based websites like Reddit can be a fruitful place for getting great intel for where to go hiking, and connecting with other users over a shared affinity for a trail, or fierce disdain for it. One of my favorite hobbies, as a member of the WMNF (White Mountain National Forest) subreddit, is to steer people away from skin your shins mountain hikes toward trails that sound more fitting for their group. Often, I’ll see posts like, “My 7-year old son and I are going to take our first White Mountain hike this summer. He’s a bit nervous with heights and I’m wondering which trail on the Tuckerman Ravine headwall offers the least exposure on the way up and down.” This is when I slide in and suggest the more serene pleasures of Zealand Falls and its adjacent beaver bogs, or—if a climb of any sort is necessary—a jaunt up to Mount Willard for a banger view of Crawford Notch that punches way above the relatively short and gentle trail to the summit. If I’ve offered some solid ideas, other Reddit users will chime in and affirm the suggestions. Often, they’ll add other good ones. And I’ve been on the opposite side of this: venturing into some hiking forum with a rough grasp of what I’m looking for, and re-emerging enlightened and empowered.

Hiking is often misunderstood as a sport of individualism. So it makes perfect sense, in a really depressing way, that tech companies with products that can super-charge social isolation are now getting on the action of the hiking renaissance. And as more people start turning to these products for tasks and decisions that are better hashed out with real people or the resources they’ve created—books, blogs, forum posts, or even GoPro videos posted on YouTube—the consequences will come in the form of more hikers getting into trouble outdoors, more search-and-rescue calls, and more missed opportunities to connect with other people who are interested in hiking. The good news is that resisting this cognitive offloading is extremely simple. If you don’t like the sound of using AI to plan your next hike, don’t use AI to plan your next hike.

I promise, you will be happier for it. And I don’t often make big promises in public. But that’s small potatoes next to what Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have been hawking.

As a habit, people tend to bristle at changes that don’t pay out immediate dividends. In Boston, where I’m based, and a number of other American cities, the installation of bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes on streets—to reduce the number of vehicles and traffic accidents on the roads and to improve the local air quality—has been met with fierce backlash from residents and commuters who only see the inconveniences of the transition. When new housing is proposed, in cities and towns where there’s a critical shortage of housing, a lot of the opposition (though certainly not all of it) is fueled by the prospect of having to deal with the sound of construction, the presence of trucks, and the influx of new residents who will also need to use local resources. The horror!

This aversion to accepting short term “pain” for lasting rewards is chronically human, and these days, it seems to be holding us back from making changes that would yield a lot more health and happiness. This week, as I was driving up to Montreal for work and thinking about this rut that we seem stuck in, my thoughts wandered in the other direction. I tried to think of long game investments that cities, states, and nations are more open to embracing. The answer hit me like that first blast of springtime aromas—fresh mud, flowers, and grass—that lots of us experience sometime in April. Parks!

In a way, public parks are one of humankind’s greatest deceptions. While a handful of them are naturally occurring green spaces, preserved in their scraggly glory, most city and town parks are works of architecture. The woods, waters, rocks, and floral displays are installed and allowed years to grow and weather. The promise of their maturation and the escalating beauty of the parkland is usually enough to get residents on board with the breaking and seeding of the ground. As I chewed on this, waiting in a line of cars at a Vermont-Canada border crossing, I remember something in Montreal that I had read about years ago. Something BIG, in the literal sense. And I realized that I was on my way to a perfect city for seeing how patient we can be, when parks take shape.

Maybe you’ve had the curious experience of visiting a park that looks like a mound of bright green gumdrops, where the grass is abundant but the little trees have barely made it beyond their sapling stage. Then, you learn that this sun-soaked park used to be a town landfill. Transforming a trash disposal site into something more ecologically responsible isn’t a new idea. For Mind The Moss, I’ve sometimes visited parks like this, such as Berlin’s Volkspark Hasenheide, where people threw illegal raves in the woods during the early years of the pandemic. But in north central Montreal, in a residential neighborhood called Saint-Michel, a landfill greenification on a massive scale is now underway. And while the space has years to go, on its long journey from a dump site to a rustly green space, you can walk there today and see how far the land has come.

Frédéric-Back Park, named for the late Québécois animator behind an Oscar-winning short called The Man Who Planted Trees, was once a 474-acre limestone quarry. It was so thoroughly scraped out during the early 20th Century that by the time it shut down in 1963, the sprawling pit was over 230 feet deep and the city had to decide what to do with this gigantic hole in Montreal’s cityscape. By 1988, the quarry was being used as a landfill for garbage, construction debris, and even some of the snow plowed from streets during the winter. In less than a decade, 40 million tons of waste had already accumulated in the old quarry, and the city was trying to leverage some benefits from the odorous mass—like setting up an onsite power plant that could capture some of the biogases wafting out of the landfill and convert them into electricity. Somewhere up or down the chain of city planning, another idea was hatched. Why not convert the landfill into a public park, on the same epic scale as Parc Mont Royal or Jean-Drapeau?

From inception, this was no light undertaking. Mont Royal, Montreal’s woodsy crown jewel, weighs in at nearly 700 acres. It connects city neighborhoods and it has its own namesake mountain, which Frederick Law Olmsted identified as the natural heart of the park when he started designing it back in 1874. It’s worth noting the Olmstedian origins of Mont Royal, because it took a century for the park to become the thriving green space that many of us know today. Frédéric-Back Park—the old quarry turned landfill turned public park—has an even longer and steeper road ahead of it. Filling the space with soil, woodchips, compost, and sand was only the beginning. Over the last several years, 525 trees and 17,800 bushes, perennials, and herbaceous species have been planted here. But beneath it all, there’s still over 40 million tons of waste decomposing at a near-glacial pace and producing all kinds of troublesome gases.

The latter explained one of the most peculiar things that I noticed just after I entered Frédéric-Back Park from Rue Paul-Botet. Across the rolling plains of the park, more brown than green in early spring, I gazed at hundreds of white pods planted in the ground. Each was the size of a smartcar, and the number of pods scattered across the park gave the space an otherworldly energy. I felt as though I had stumbled across a piece of land being surreptitiously used by the alien colonists in The X-Files. Through a glass window on the nearest pod, I saw a valved pipe, which immediately suggested that these strange objects had an important utility, given how many there were. The pipes, I would soon learn, are connected to gas capturing wells that collect Methane and other fumes that continune to emerge from all the garbage! As to why each of the well casings is spherical, there may have been some intention to giving Frédéric-Back Park a distinictly extraterrestrial vibe. A barely-adolescent park with nearly 500 acres of space is going to look somewhat lunar to begin with. It’s a unique landscape that can feel both fertile and barren. The vivid color of the grass and flowers hints at greater things to come, but the lack of shade trees—especially in a northeastern city like Montreal—is a departure from the parks or conservation lands that many know.

And yet, the inherent weirdness of a young park and its limited natural amenities don’t seem to dampen public enthusiasm for these projects. Somehow, in this context, more of us are able to connect the dots between making substantial near term investments for our health and happiness, getting some strange early results, and one day, ending up in a much better place. Perhaps the indignity of living near an enormous landfill is bad enough that any proposed environment change is seen as an improvement, warts and all. Or maybe being able to walk in the rehabilitated space, even as the trees and plants remain in their infancy, is enough of a reward to stave off misgivings about the price tag of the project or the development timeline. By nature, millions of us crave more spaces where we can amble freely, without worrying about getting clipped by a car or being told that we have to buy something. New parks, including those derived from landfills and other sites of ecological desecration, are one way of addressing this need. Maybe this makes us predisposed to support something like Frédéric-Back Park.

Still, you have to wonder what life might be like if we applied this open-minded, long game thinking to other facets of daily living. Once again, Montreal offers a glimpse of what this can look like. The bike lanes there, for which is the city is globally renowned, are as much a foundational part of the city as the streets. They’re used throughout the year by cyclists, and the city even plows them. It would be easy to assume that when the lanes were proposed during the 1970s and 80s, Montrealers were somehow more open to the project due to the European influence throughout Quebec. But in fact, the bike lanes ran into much of the same opposition that rages in American cities today! The thought of having to share more of the roads with bikes was anathema to drivers. This is what happens in pretty much every city and town that tries to install bike lanes.

The difference in Montreal, however, was how generations of city leaders responded to the backlash. They refused to abandon the project, recognizing its long term perks for mobility and health. There were setbacks, delays, and other hurdles. But in the end, Montreal got its labyrinthine, protected bike lanes, and the city is better off for them; just as the development of green spaces like Frédéric-Back Park can be an upgrade for our surroundings. And as other place-making projects run into reactionary skepticism, I have to wonder if more mayors and governors in the U.S. might choose to take that second page from Montreal’s book; keeping their eyes on the prize, not retreating in the face of harsh pushback, and accepting that this may cost them another term but will benefit their constituents in the long haul. One can dream. But it would be nice.

CLICK HERE for a map of Frédéric-Back Park

I don’t know about the rest of you, but last week, I was really starting to get worried about spring in the northeast. The trees were still skeletal and barren, and the ground brought to mind the contents of an ashtray, except for some one-off flowers here and there. Maybe it’s a reflection of the times we live in, when a global economic collapse or World War III seems more feasible each week. After all, spring happens on different regional timelines each year. But as I drove to Southern Maine last Thursday for work, I couldn’t help but wonder, What if spring never arrived this year? What would that even be like? Living in a primarily brown and gray world that grew hotter each week?

Thankfully, in the 24 hours between my arrival in the Pine Tree State and my return to Massachusetts, the big event that many of us have been waiting for finally came. The greening. You know it by sight. The emergence of electric green grass on the ground lights up the landscape. It’s complimented by the sudden explosion of buds on all the tree branches, as if the understory and overstory have coordinated their schedules. In the grand scheme of the landscape, the sudden materialization of the green elements is a “small” event, but the psychological effect can be downright luminous. As I drove south on I-95, heading back to Boston, I could feel the nearby glow of the new grass from the freeway, and that’s not something one will be able to say in May—when the novelty of the grass has burned off—or in August, after the higher temperatures have turned much of that grass into yellowy straw. In the same way that being on the street in New Orleans and unexpectedly witnessing a jazz funeral might inspire you to chuck your plans and spend the rest of your day clubbing, I decided to make the most of the 2026 greening by making a side-trip to an environment where I could really admire it.

Mass Audubon’s Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary, a 1,955-acre expanse of marshes, meadows, and drumlins, is one of those places that looms enormous and aquamarine on maps, while occupying a much smaller and more specific place in my memory. As a kid, I logged some miles here with my parents and my sister, and we were particularly bowled over by a unique feature of the reservation called The Rockery. It’s a jumble of boulders and stones, assembled in the early 19th Century like a primordial LEGO set. It features multiple caves that you can walk through and winding stone stairs that lead to little decks and lookouts atop the rockery. It’s the sort of feature that feels tailored to parents who are trying to instill some appreciation of nature in their children, and I remembered its dank recesses and ingenious construction so vividly that I wanted to see what revisiting The Rockery felt like during the greening (and less than six months from my 38th birthday.) But this time, instead of hiking to The Rockery from the main visitor parking lot, which is located very close to the rocks, I opted for a longer and far more scenic alternative route, from a sleepy residential street in the town of Topsfield.

It was late afternoon on a Friday, which made it possible to park in the lot at Steward Elementary School, nestled in the pine woods on the north edge of the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary. A few paces from here, up Perkins Row, a gate on the right marks the beginnings of a gentle trail through the trees, which I spent a good 15 minutes following. The abundant chirping overhead hinted at what was ahead, in the heart of the marshlands. But I was so taken by the green resonance of the ground and how it imbued the forest with energy that the birds barely registered. Transitioning into the refuge this way felt like a recalibration of my consciousness; making my eyes and ears more perceptive to signs of life that were popping up around me. And as I crossed a series of wooden bog bridges and boardwalks onto Averill’s Island—a wooded piece of land completely surrounded by floatsam and jetsam—I managed to glimpse a pair of tiny turtles sunning themselves on a rock beside the bridge. The texture and color of their shells, and their stoic posture, felt in concert with everything surrounding us.

Still, as much as I enjoy briefly letting go of everything by being outside, and thereby getting outside of my head, it’s only so long before a forgotten ember of information starts glowing again. As I gazed lovingly at the turtles and thought about their place in this localized natural world, I remembered another context with which a great deal of Americans got to know the word “greening;” a context that’s also worth revisiting.

Maybe this is borrowed nostalgia speaking, but the 1970s were a unique time when you could smoke on a plane, walk into a sex club in Times Square, or write an essay for The New Yorker and quickly land a publisher’s deal to turn that essay into a book. (This still happens for writers occasionally, but way less often than it used to.) And at the start of the decade, a Yale Law School professor named Charles A. Reich wrote a piece called “The Greening of America,” which read more like a manifesto. Harnessing the countercultural movements of the 1960s, the ongoing horrors of the Vietnam War, and the discontents of the Nixon presidency, Reich envisioned a sweeping change in the American consciousness; a “greening” of the barren individualism and corporate logic of America, from which a more collective, human-centered society would grow.

“There is a revolution under way,” Reich’s New Yorker essay began. “It is not like revolutions of the past. It has originated with the individual and with culture, and if it succeeds it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structures are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.”

Having spent a great deal of time with students at Yale, who were among those on the frontlines of the counterculture movement—and being a gay man himself, a few years away from coming out—Reich was better equipped than most to see the roots of this possible revolution of American thinking and culture. When he turned the essay into the 1970 book, The Greening of America, he expanded on his thesis by identifying the three layers of consciousness that would soon change. The first two levels concern the lopsided economic system in the U.S., and how the average American sees themselves being part of that system…or outside of it. Today, that certainly feels prescient, given the number of Americans who have found themselves downsized and marginalized by corporations over the last several decades (and the great many who could soon join them, as the same companies turn to generative AI to automate more of their labor.)

The third layer—Consciousness III, as Reich calls it—is somewhat murkier, and also the most elemental. It’s the crossroads where an individual establishes a spiritual harmony with their natural environment. This, according to Reich, is where a release from the scarcity-minded thinking of consumerism may finally happen. “Once a person reaches Consciousness III, there is no returning to a lower consciousness,” Reich wrote. The implication here is a numbers game. As more Americans go, so goes their culture. In the early 1970s, after The Greening of America was published, the question of whether millions of peaceful and individual revolutions could change the course of things was the subject of debate in magazines and on talk shows. There were optimists, and also plenty of critics; some of whom dismissed the third chapter of Reich’s vision as naive.

I find myself somewhat on the fence. Or rather, on top of a floating log, which I had to gingerly creep across shortly after reaching the end of Averill’s Island and getting back onto a waterlogged piece of the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary mainland. The vision that Reich laid out helped seed the ground for the environmentalist movements that emerged from the 1970s. Millions of Americans underwent a change of consiousness, so far as their relationship to the natural world was concerned. But all these atomized revolutions failed to generate something bigger and more sweeping. After all, the 70s were followed by Ronald Reagan’s presidency—a broadly supported steroid injection for American individualism, corporate greed, and structural poverty. In a way, we are living in the wreckage of Reich’ vision today. At least, that’s what a pessimist might say.

But as I made the final push to The Rockery, over a floating boardwalk where each of my footsteps sent panicky birds shooting out of the nearby tall grasses, I felt my own thoughts about the greening of America wandering down a more hopeful road. The Rockery itself seemed to encourage them. Here was this beautiful oddity that people came together to build; schlepping heavy stones, fitting them into place, and seeing how The Rockery would compliment the natural elements of the Ipswich River basin, especially as age left The Rockery mossier and muskier. And some level of underlying curiosity and affection must have preceded this landscape project. Similar to how the Occupy Wall Street protests caused millions of Americans to become more mindful of widening wealth inequality—despite the lack of tangible outcomes produced by the movement—I think it’s possible that continued exposure to the magic of the wetlands and woods on the river set the stage for a shared idea like The Rockery to be realized.

I suppose that’s where we are today, as a country; long-primed and overdue for the “greening” that Charles A. Reich foresaw during another challenging chapter of our recent history. The question of when this happens and what it looks like remains as unknowable as the arrival of spring’s grasses and flowers. And of course, there’s no inevitability that undergirds this greening or its outcome. Nonetheless, I do believe that something is coming. And unlike this spring, it may arrive sooner than we think.

CLICK HERE for a map of my Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary walk

PS: Speaking of watery spaces outdoors and spring rituals, those of you who live in or near Massachusetts might enjoy this recent piece that I wrote for The Boston Globe’s Travel section on spectating venues for spring herring runs! Grab some coffee and an extra chunky donut, plunk down on a bench, and cheer the fish on as they swim hard upstream to get it on (externally) in the lakes and ponds around the Commonwealth.

One of the essential struggles of being human is realizing that you might be doing something bad. Maybe it was a one time fuck-up, or maybe you’ve been unwittingly transgressing for years. Whatever the case, once that possibility sinks in, you have to decide what to do with it. Two weeks ago, I experienced this while doing something I love—going for a late day hike amidst the gloppy glory of Mud Season in Vermont.

”Mud Season” is how spring is often described in the highlands. Prodigious snowmelt from the mountains mixes with warm rain, transforming the earth into a musky stew worthy of an existentialist Herzog documentary. Over the last five years, I’ve written about the scenic and olfactory bliss of Mud Season several times. Getting to witness the landscape thawing after the lonesome darkness of winter is special and cathartic. Getting to squelch through that landscape in waterproof boots is even better. That’s what I had driven up to Vermont to do. I had managed to nab a fire sale priced hotel room in Stowe (pro tip: New England ski towns in spring are usually killer deals) and my plan was to spend the day splashing my way down muddy trails to big, thundering cascades like Bingham Falls and Moss Glen Falls. But in the haste of planning this last minute road trip, I forgot something about Mud Season in the Green Mountain State.

For all its mucky beauty, Mud Season is a vulnerable moment for backcountry trails made of packed dirt. The wet ground is softer than usual and too much foot traffic on any dirt trail has the potential to reshape it in a bad way. The intermittent warmth and cold of spring, plus the perpetual dampness, dissuades enough hikers from hitting the trails that Mud Season damage is usually limited. But that could always change. A viral Instagram reel about a world class waterfall could send an early surge of hikers to the cascade when the access trail is at peak moistness. Vermont, more so than the other New England states, seems to have taken this possibility quite seriously. And so, as a precaution, the state closes many of its hiking trails during April and May to allow for the ground to dry up and firm up for the heavier summer and fall crowds. This isn’t a problem for most visitors, but for those of us who experience primal, full-body desire to get out and slosh around during Mud Season, showing up in Vermont with boots and a daypack, only to find a TRAIL CLOSED sign—as I did—is a disarming experience.

There was the obvious sting of dejection. I was not going to spend a Saturday staring at rip-roaring plumes of whitewater, as I had planned. But on a much deeper level, I felt something that hadn’t registered on prior spring hikes. I had come to Vermont to do an activity that the Vermont government did not want people doing. And despite the fact that I had enjoyed the same activity in New Hampshire and Maine—hiking in Mud Season, on spongy trails that remained open to the public—part of me couldn’t help wondering if I had been engaging in something unethical, by clomping up and down all these spongy trails and then encouraging my friends to try the same thing.

That afternoon, over a consolation ale at The Alchemist, I decided to do some digging into the question of why Vermont closes so many trails for Mud Season, compared to its neighbors. One of the answers is reflected in the landscape itself. If you’ve crossed the border of Vermont and continued into New Hampshire, you’ve probably noticed how the terrain dramatically shifts from placid green hills to more angular peaks and ridgelines. New Hampshire, “The Granite State,” has a lot more underlying crystalline rock than Vermont does. And this provides something of a bedrock buffer for trails in New Hampshire during Mud Season. Trails built on top of firmer surfaces don’t have the tendency to get as waterlogged as trails on softer terrain. Understanding this, I breathed a sigh of relief and chased it with a glug of beer. My Mud Season exploits in the White Mountains and the Great North Woods weren’t as likely to have left scars.

But even if they had been, the odds of getting called out and chewed out by a Granite State authority or busybody would have been near zero. Because land use ethics are regional, and the question of what amount of trail damage is acceptable during Mud Season has a different answer in each place. The lopsided granite ratio between New Hampshire and Vermont partially explains why the neighboring states have their own approaches to trail access during spring. But there are other differences between New Hampshire and Vermont, beyond the elemental. One of these states keeps sending Bernie Sanders to Washington DC and came close to implementing its own universal health care system. The other was invaded by libertarians from the Free State Project and is now slated to suffer public education funding cuts. None of this is to dunk on New Hampshire. I love both of these states, they share a lot of qualities, and they’re more culturally eclectic than many realize. But politically, there is a stark difference in the ways of thinking that drive the respective state governments. In Vermont, a more communitarian mindset prevails, and I suspect that’s another reason why the state bars access to more of its trails in April and May—asking hikers to make a seasonal sacrifice. I can’t really imagine New Hampshire’s current elected leaders asking this.

Thankfully, there are enough rock-hard trails throughout Vermont to offer at least a few alternatives during the Mud Season closures, and the one in Stowe (pretty much the only game in town, as far as I could tell) is the paved, winding Stowe Recreation Path. Branching off from Stowe Village near VT-100, it follows the bends of the West Branch of the Little River for 5.3 miles, gradually heading up toward Mount Mansfield and Smugglers Notch. The path crosses the river in several places with the help of footbridges, and it often skirts past VT-108 before dipping back into the woods or cutting across a meadow. That proximity to the road may seem like a buzzkill at first, but it actually offers something kind of cool: the chance to experience Stowe on foot.

Think about it. The vast majority of towns around Vermont are experienced through the windshield of a car. Sure, you might get out of the car and bumble around the commercial center of a town, or on a trail. But getting from place to place is almost always an automotive task. The Stowe Recreation Path allows you to walk between many of the things that people come to Stowe looking to do. My hotel was steps away from the path, and shortly after I checked in, I followed the path downstream against the sunset and I ended up at Doc Ponds, which does a killer Big Mac-style burger. The next day, I set off in the opposite direction, taking the path toward the mountains. I stopped over at GiraKofi for a small black coffee (which I enjoyed on a wooden bench flanked by carved giraffes) and then I pressed onward to the more rustic northern reaches of Stowe. This quieter stretch of the trail, away from all the eateries and lodging options, offered the kind of creaking woodland immersion I craved from the forbidden muddy trails. It wasn’t the same thing, of course. There were places where the Stowe Recreation Path would emerge from the trees to pass municipal infrastructure or the grounds of another motel. But its existence and the number of people I saw walking it on an overcast morning in early April hinted at good times to come, when the Green Mountain State’s trails finally open up again.

If nothing else, my two brief jaunts on the Stowe Recreation Path left me feeling less conflicted about my Mud Season urges, and the question of whether they were ethical urges. There’s nothing wrong with the desire to squelch across the countryside as the snow melts; just like there’s nothing wrong with accepting an invitation to a friend’s family dinner and showing up at their house licking your lips, ready to chomp some chicken. But of course, you wouldn’t just rip off the fattest drumstick and gnaw away. (I assume.) You would take your cues from your friend and their family, watching how they share and pass the food, and seeing if there’s a grace or anything offered before the eating commences. Going on a Mud Season hike in any state is like being a guest in someone’s house. Observe their customs, follow their footsteps, and enjoy a nice day of squelching; bothered by nothing except the black flies that have just hatched.

CLICK HERE for a map of the Stowe Recreation Path

I found it impossible to focus on anything yesterday. Plugging numbers into a project spreadsheet, paying credit card bills, and taking out the recycling felt less like routine tasks of daily living and more like an absurd way of coping with the ground reality that our president was threatening to destroy an entire country. “A whole civilization will die tonight,” was the beginning of what Trump had posted on his TruthSocial page at 8:06 AM yesterday. “I don’t want that to happen,” he added. “But it probably will.” Whether this was an allusion to dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran or leveling enough power plants and bridges to send the Iranian people “Back to the Stone Age” (Pete Hegseth’s recent words), being alive and aware the other day was a cascade of awful feelings. I wandered from rage to shame to anxiety that the world might actually end, if no one in the White House had the courage to rein in Trump’s homicidal impulses. It was clear that most members of Congress—terminally obsessed with re-election, and unwilling to re-evaluate their paths to victory—were not going to do anything; which is almost as horrifying as Trump’s genocidal rhetoric and the damage it will inflict on any prospects for peace and on the world economy. I’m also rather horrified that the Democratic Party mainstream’s response to Trump changing his mind at the eleventh hour is essentially calling him a pussy. All of this is reckless, stupid, and unsustainable.

For me and my buddy Adam, also reeling from everything, our day ended at a quiet bar, where I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the other patrons were calming their nervous systems with alcohol because of the news cycle or irrspective of it. The healthier thing to do, which I’m trying to find the energy for this afternoon, would be taking a walk outside; something I’ve recommended time after time, whenever Very Bad Things happen. The boost of endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine may be short lived—I learned about Trump’s “civilization will die” post immediately after meeting another friend, Patrick Maguire, for an early morning walk around a pond in Boston. But at this point, we have to grab those boosts whenever and wherever we can; for the good of our health and our stamina. To say that we, as a nation, are in uncharted territory is describing the present situation lightly. I agree with Paul Krugman’s recent assessment that this is America’s “darkest hour;” that “the fate of the whole American idea is on the line.” I have a difficult time imagining this crisis ending in ways that are familiar and precedented. Nor can I picture America coming back from this without a big step in a new direction for America—culturally, economically, and governmental.

Reaching the edge of what’s familiar is a strange and sometimes scary exprerience. It means putting yourself in the way of chance, which can yield good things or go south. Stepping beyond that boundary doesn’t necessarily mean going into unknown space completely blind—usually, we have some idea what we’re getting into when we tread beyond our “normal” environments, whether it’s going on a birding walk with a bunch of strangers or trying a new sex position with a partner. But still, there’s often a pretty significant gulf between how we imagine these explorations playing out, and what they actually lead to. Once, when stopping in Worcester to search for a big rock in the woods that’s covered with fire and brimstone inscriptions, I ended up getting chased away by an angry dog from one of the houses near the edge of the forest. But more recently, a different and more local leap of faith opened my eyes to new possibilities that were hidden right under my nose for all the years that I’ve been living in Boston.

Since the price of gas is rapidly escalating across the world—making a weekday road trip and hike less practical for millions of us—I had been studying the commuter rail network map for Greater Boston. I was especially curious about the terminus of each route. I imagined taking one of the trains to the end of the line, setting off from the station platform with a backpack, and finding my way to someplace beautiful, weird, or unsettling. When the phrase “end of the line” is used in the context of train or bus travel, it often evokes this sense that a consequential transition is happening. When I hear or read the phrase, I think of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, in which a journey from the world of the living to the afterlife is taken on a train that crosses the watery expanse of a dead-calm ocean. Or, if I’m in a saltier mood, I remember the beginning of Jim Jarmusch’s anti-western, Dead Man. Johnny Depp is riding the rail from Ohio to a new job in a town called “Machine,” somewhere in the Rockies. It’s not a good sign when the greasy train conductor (Crispin Glover) tells him “That’s the end of the line.”

The lack of commuter rail options from the station closest to my apartment made the decision for me, and the ashen clouds and sleety rain that materialized that morning didn’t feel like a great sign either. I spent about 20 minutes riding the train southwest from Boston to the adjacent suburb of Needham, which is separated from the city by the Charles River. Given that some of the other trains run all the way to Rhode Island or the North Shore, I was a little bummed to be taking an “end of the line” adventure that barely breached the Boston perimeter. But a quick look at a map while I waited for the train at least gave me something to aim for in Needham—a splotchy green chunk labeled “Ridge Hill Reservation” and a smaller, neighboring green blob marked “Needham Town Forest.” At the very least, I could walk from the train platform at the Needham Heights station to a pair of forests, for some spruce and granite therapy.

The first few minutes of my hike began on West Street, which took me down a steep hill—the literal height of land behind “Needham Heights”—which was covered with single family homes. When I’m walking through residential territory to get to a more grandiose green space, I often try to make the connective walk more interesting by identifying possible places of interest on the map, like a pocket park or a sculpture that I could dart by. My map of Needham Heights suggested that it might be fun to pivot from West Street toward a little water body called Rosemary Lake. Not just to see the lake, but to explore a short path that appeared to serve as a car-free bridge between the two places. On Google Maps, paths like these are often represented as thin green lines, and they’re routinely unnamed. At the bottom of the hill, I kept my eyes open on the left, searching for the beginnings of a walking path and expecting something fleetingly charming, like a stitch of oaks between houses. But pretty soon, it became clear that I was approaching something that the map had really undersold.

On the final stretch of its journey to the lake, Rosemary Brook sloshes through a vast bogland with twisted trees covered in bright green moss. It’s a swampy oasis tucked between town streets and developed land, and a grassy path runs straight through the bog—from the edge of West Street to the beginning of Tillotson Road. It seemed likely that this cross-bog path may have been a lost or unpaved segment of Tillotson Road. It was wide enough to accommodate a horse and buggy, if not a Ford F-150, and the Town of Needham was founded centuries ago in 1711. Whatever the case, I found the scale and color of the bog thrilling to behold. It was so unexpected that I ended up walking the cross-bog path three times. First, I used it to reach the north banks of Rosemary Lake, and the next two times were just for the sheer pleasure of walking down an unlikely hall of grand trees, past pools where skunk cabbages will soon be thriving. I had to remind myself to press onward to Ridge Hill Reservation.

As I passed the lakeshore once again, heading westward toward the woods, I saw a lonely bike abandoned in the parking lot. I wondered if its owner was miles away, or down by the water’s edge smoking some weed. Perhaps this lake was a foundational place for them, but what might the periphery of their world—their normal—look like? Would it include the evergreen and deciduous expanse of a place like Ridge Hill? The 352-acre forest offered more seclusion from the burbs and the local highways, but it was a more predictable immersion, not unlike stepping into the trees of familiar green spaces like the Middlesex Fells or the Blue Hills Reservation. Stumbling upon the bog along Rosemary Brook had surprised me enough that I was now intent on detecting other surprises nestled in the landscape. Toward the end of my Ridge Hill traverse, I found a smaller one; a sodden stuffed animal that someone had positioned on a tree branch. There were no plush companions in sight, here or anywhere else on the trail.

The smaller Needham Town Forest, on the other hand, proved more bounteous. I entered the woods on the far west edge and I followed a squiggly trail through an especially lumpy section of the forest with mossy glacial boulders and pond-esque vernal pools. According to my map, the Needham Town Forest isn’t just municipal property. A chunk of these woods is owned by Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America) and the gnarly little trail I had just picked up was part of a camp frequented by Boy Scouts. The path struck me as an ideal place for introducing Boy Scouts or any young, beginner hikers to the rocky and rooty rigor of what to expect across New England’s open spaces. The placement of the trail, in such a chunky part of an otherwise demure town forest, felt intentional—like its creators wanted to use this tiny, hairier piece of the forest to offer a concentrated showcase of hiking with a capital H. I wondered if this could be replicated in other forests in cities and towns; a tiny trail that offers a generous taste of how grueling and messy a good hike can be.

The questions of how to make it easier for more people to get outside—and how we can break down real and perceived barriers—has rarely been more centralized in the outdoor recreation community. But answering those questions still requires treading past the end of our lines, seeing what’s out there, and considering the possibility that some of these things may be worth holding onto and exploring further. In doing this more often, we might change the course of things and “discover” opportunities and directions that were hidden in plain view. Even when life is good and most things are working out, a trip to the end of a line and beyond is an excursion worth taking. But when it feels like the world is ending and there are no obvious answers within reach, “beyond” is the only place left to go. We may be surprised by what we find out there.

If you go weak in the knees at the thought of watching a freshly thawed waterfall roaring back to life—yielding a torrent of snowmelt, tree branches, and other forest detritus—you might instinctively look toward towering cliffs and boreal forests. In New England, most of the April waterfall chasing happens in places like Maine and Vermont, where the sawtoothed topography makes for some big ass, aquatic gods. But in 2026, after previously covering waterfall spectating in the Green Mountain and Pine Tree States, I want to focus on a less intuitive destination for this event. It’s a state which might appear smaller in stature, but which actually packs a real wallop when it comes to rivers or creeks spilling down hills. So this year, we’re going to Connecticut.

The Nutmeg State often gets pigeonholed as a kind of transitional backwater between New England and New York City. And while there’s definitely some cultural truth to it, this characterization makes the mistake of reducing the entirety of southeastern New York to the NYC area. The westernmost border of Connecticut is a much gnarlier place where the Taconic Mountains spill over from the Empire State and form the backbone of localized ranges like the Litchfield Hills. (The modern process of snowmaking was invented there, at the Mohawk Mountain Ski Area, back in the 1950s!) The foothills of these mountains keep rolling eastward to form the Connecticut River Valley. And from there, heading toward the Rhode Island line, the landscape calms down considerably.

My point is that Connecticut boasts some seriously chunky terrain. That means plenty of rock faces, crags, and precipices for water to crash down—a seasonal event that’s happening as I type. And so, for those you who want to savor the messy glory of the spring thaw, I beseech you to find a car and brave The Connecticut Waterfall Crawl.

Unlike prior Mind The Moss waterfall crawls—which were cross-state Point A to Point B driving routes—the Nutmeg State version is a nifty loop that takes about 4 hours to complete by car (without traffic). The orbital journey begins and ends in Hartford, and you might as well consider plumping for a hotel in the state capital; to allow for a nice post-crawl dinner at which you and your fellow waterfall chasers can toast your victory at high volume. So that people at other tables will look toward you, with one of them traipsing by to ask what you’re all so excited about. At which point, you can gush over Connecticut’s cascades, and how you took in seven of them in a single mid-spring day!

Each of the falls on the Connecticut Waterfall Crawl is located pretty close to the road—some require a short hike of a half mile or less, while others are waiting mere steps away from the parking lot or the shoulder. In clockwise order, here is the full lineup:

#1: Wadsworth Falls. Initially, you’ll follow the Connecticut River south from Hartford through suburban territory; a misleading first step for a drive that willl involve quite a bit of elevation gain and loss. And as you approach the woods around Middlefield, the blue bends of the Coginchaug River will reveal themselves. And just a few paces down a set of stairs and leafy path from the edge of the road is Wadsworth Falls. While it’s “only” around 20 feet tall, the formation of this rip-roaring cascade is what makes it so special. The steep drop and the massive volume of water from the river makes this fall look like a baby cousin of Niagara. Even in the early winter of 2021, just when the Coginchaug was beginning to freeze, the immensity of Wadsworth Falls stunned me.

#2: Buttermilk Falls. A somewhat short-lived stretch of I-691 is all it takes to enter the rustly foothills of the Taconic Mountains, where Buttermilk Falls gurgles away in the woods of Terryville. Significantly taller than Wadsworth, at roughly 60 feet, this cascade is a quieter, more serene creature. And what really makes it stand out are the adjacent ledges from which you can sit and gaze down at the pathway of the falls. In spring, the half-formed canopy offers partial views of the surrounding forest as well. Park on Lane Hill Road and head south into the woods to intercept Buttermilk Falls.

#3: Knife Shop Falls. As you approach the actual town of Litchfield—your best bet for a mid-crawl lunch, especially if you like the sound of oyster tacos or broccoli rabe and sausage rigatone—take a minute to pop by Northfield Pond. In the late 19th Century, one of America’s most innovative pocketknife makers (the Northfield Knife Company) ran a factory here, and that’s why the multi-layered falls that spill from the pond are known as Knife Shop Falls. Like Buttermilk Falls, the way to find these hidden beauties is to park on the edge of Knife Shop Road and crunch southward through the trees to reach the brook and its cascades. Be ready to schlep yourself over an occasional log.

#4: Kent Falls. A major escalation in every sense, Connecticut’s tallest waterfall is on the far west edge of the state, which means ascending through the mountains past the Mohawk Mountain Ski Area. But once you reach the doorstep of Kent Falls State Park, little is left to the imagination. The falls, which descend 250 feet down slopes of exposed stone, have their own pavillion at the base. But you can take in the total heft of Kent Falls thing by climbing the short trail alongside the drops, with its rock stairs and observation platforms. There’s a $10 fee for each car without Connecticut plates, and it’s bumped up to $15 over the weekends. But bear in mind, that’s about the same price as a single adult ticket to the inevitable Deadpool & Wolverine sequel.

#5: Dean’s Ravine Falls. Of all the cascades on the Connecticut Waterfall Crawl, the one that’s sequestered in a mossy ravine near Canaan requires the most hiking. It’s a half mile round trip from the junction of Music Mountain Road and Cream Hill Road (what great names!) to the hidden place where Reed Brook forms a gorgeous duet of horsetail falls that add up to 50 feet in height. If you’ve ever visited Crawford Notch in New Hampshire and laid eyes on Ripley Falls, the angle and shape of Dean’s Ravine Falls might give you a kick of Déjà vu. The path does get slippery, so tread gingerly.

#6: Campbell Falls. Now this one is a bit peculiar. A muscular cascade, with a 50-foot plunge and a frothing pool and rapids at the base, Campbell Falls is the crown jewel of Connecticut’s Campbell Falls State Park Reserve. The reason why I spell out the full moniker and its qualifier, however, is because Campbell Falls is technically located in Massachusetts! The waterfall occupies a tiny piece of forest that could be interpreted as Nutmeg or Bay State land, and it appears that Mass. just decided to let Connecticut have this one. The sloped half-mile trail to the falls starts at the state’s northwest tip and crosses into the town of New Marlborough, MA to reach the foot of the cascade. I’m still not sure how Campbell Falls became a Connecticut landmark. Maybe a former Massachusetts governor lost their dog around here or something. Either way, it rules.

#7: Enders Brook Falls. Descending from the Litchfield Hills back to the Connecticut River and the Hartford metro area might leave you feeling bittersweet…if the novelty of Connecticut casades hasn’t faded after taking in six of them! But you’re not out of the woods just yet, thankfully. West of Granby, the immersive Enders State Forest has its own sequence of falls—the most elegant yet varied of the day! Enders Brook Falls basically amounts to a buffet of waterfall genres. Horsetails, plunges, slides, you name it. The tallest of them is around 30 feet, and a boardwalk path that offers primo views of each fall. Think of Enders Brook Falls as the final number in a musical, in which the entire cast that you’ve spent two hours watching gets trotted out to belt out the song. You could also liken it to the finale of a fireworks show, when the pyrotechnicians take whatever is left in the arsenal and set it off at once, letting the whole place fucking rip.

Alternatively, if you decide to do the Connecticut Waterfall Crawl in counterclockwise order, then visiting Enders Brook Falls will be like those times when firework handlers accidentally ignite all the rockets and flares at the start; which is special in its own way.

CLICK HERE for a Google Map of the Connecticut Waterfall Crawl

As far as outdoor recreation is concerned, there are the four seasons that most of us live by, and then there are the micro-seasons; special, short-lived events that can turn a routine walk outside into a treasured memory that you’ll revisit for years. It might be exploring the Providence Riverwalk just in time to spot tens of thousands of herring in the water, swimming upstream and down to fuck. Or you might be visiting Southern California and hiking an oceanside trail on some evening between June and October, when higher concentrations of bioluminiscent plankton can cause the waves to glow.

Either of these are reason enough to plan a trip. But this week, to my horror, I realized that I’ve been sleepwalking through one of the most unique micro-seasons in places that experience colder and soggier conditions during the winter. Regions in which the conditions that materialize between November and April are enough to make people look out their bedroom windows and say, “I would not want to be playing golf today.”

We’ve visited golf courses in Mind The Moss before—between the subversive joy of trespassing on a golf course, to the unsung landscape architecture that make some mini-golf courses better than others. And every time I’ve written about golf courses, with their sculpted beauty, recreational exclusivity, and dodgy ethics, a lot of you have responded with comments, rants, and policy ideas; all of which I appreciated. The golf course seems to be an object of shared fascination and frustration for many of us. So as we approach the last days of March, I want to encourage you to take advantage of your dwindling opportunity to go for a hike…across a municipally-owned golf course.

According to the National Golf Foundation, there are around 2,939 municipally-owned golf courses in America—which boils down to 18% of our total golf courses. Contrary to what one might assume in our age of inequality, privatization, and austerity, public golf courses are actually doing well, with strong visitation rates and sustained growth against a broader backdrop of golf course shrinkage! Think about that for a moment. As total golf course real estate declines, municipal golf course territory is expanding. That’s pretty special in this moment of American culture and history. The problem is that this expansion of land and opportunity for golfers comes at a cost, paid by folks who enjoy hiking, birding, forest bathing, and other activites that don’t pair well with flying balls that can crack skulls. For those of us huddling under that umbrella, there’s a seasonal window when municipal golf courses become accessible to us, and it’s now.

Consider Franklin Park, the southern crown jewel of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace park system, which connects several neighborhoods here in Boston. Nearly half of Franklin Park’s 527 rustling acres is occupied by the William J. Devine Golf Course. In the summer, it’s a forbidden zone for anyone who’s not wielding a club, but now—if you can look past all the Canada Goose shit—the hills of this golf course are downright romantic. On a sunny late winter/early spring day, you can even detect a hint of green in those hills. Their topography is not unlike the verdant humps of The Shire, as seen in The Fellowship of the Ring. To freely walk across such humps, in a city no less, is a special type of outdoor excursion. So that’s what I did on a bright Tuesday morning this week. I got up early, threw my laptop and work supplies in a backpack, and instead of jumping on the bus or train, I spent a lovely hour squelching my way across the William J. Devine Golf Course and enjoying the solitude of being there at the end of winter. My eventual destination was a bus stop near Egleston Square, on the north side of Franklin Park, but hiking there via the course allowed for the most naturally immersive morning walk I’ve had since Boston’s first snowstorm of 2026.

That’s just one example of what a municipal golf course hike can look like. A planned scenic detour on your morning commute, if you happen to live near a golf course. The municipal golf course takes many forms, and some of them are palatial enough to be worthy of regional travel. At the far eastern edge of Long Island, New York’s Montauk Point is packing a monster municipal golf course—buffered by woodlands, ponds, and of course, lots of sand traps. And since the Montauk Downs State Park Golf Course is ultimately a small piece of a vacation destination that draws hordes of visitors every summer, the golf course is within a short walking distance of other curiosities that can make for a full day of exploring; like the Arthur W.B. Wood Windmill House (the only house in Montauk with a windmill!) to the Fort Hill Cemetery (moody as hell!) Better yet, the Montauk MTA train station offers direct rail service to New York City and it’s less than an hour from the Montauk Downs golf course by foot. You can experience Montauk’s canopies, slopes, and seabreeze in a most unusual manner if you go ASAP.

Most golf courses in places with wintery climates tend to open back up for tee time in early-to-mid April. So I’m not exaggerating when I say that these next few weeks are your final chance to experience a golfscape that’s truly accessible to the greater public until this time in 2027. Probably, at least. I imagine that as summer droughts become more regular in more regions of the U.S., the question of whether maintaining golf courses is ethical will keep flaring up. (If a town or city is using limited resources to keep public land healthy and safe, it will be tougher to justify those expenditures if a large piece of land is only usable for a niche segment of the public.) As that question looms, it’s possible that some municipal golf courses could be converted into public lands of more uses. There’s already a precedent for cities buying private golf courses and turning them into parkland. Last year, Denver scooped up the 155-acre Park Hill Golf Course and voters there approved a $70 million public investment to transform the course into a rewilded park with trails, athletic facilities, and community gathering spaces. The architecture firm Sasaki is co-leading the project with Denver’s Parks and Recreation office, and the completed park will be one of the Mile High City’s biggest.

For now, most of us will have to imagine what a rewilded golf course could look like. But if you’re able to take a walk across your closest municipal course this weekend or next week, savoring all the soggy grass beneath your feet and the immense quietude that follows you from hole to hole—on the eve of golf season firing back up again—you might get a slightly sharper picture of how these polarizing green spaces could facilitate good health and happiness for a lot more of us, somewhere down the road.

I didn’t think I was going to be able to publish Mind The Moss this past week because, well, the last two weeks have been kind of insane. I’m not sure where to start. I had to deal with multiple health emergencies—including one of my own, that almost led to a broken toe—and this meant dealing with all the structural problems and indignities of our for-profit health care system. And while I’m relieved to report that the crisis phase seems to be over (pounding hard on wood), I can’t say the same for what’s happening beyond the localized scope of my daily life. Our president is dragging us into a war of choice that’s becoming deadlier each day. The cost of everything we need to survive is getting higher and forcing people to make terrible choices. And here in Boston, we’re still bracing for the possibility of an ICE surge, like the one inflicted upon Minneapolis.

All of which is a way of saying that millions of us are hacking our way through a world of shit right now. And this would be overwhelming and exhausting enough if all these things amounted to a recent detour into chaos—a sudden change in topography after you’ve been walking through a gentler, placid landscape. But what makes the stress of 2026 even more burdensome is that it’s just the latest escalation of a prolonged time period that’s been shaped by mass anxiety, instability, and trauma. Some people will cite the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s first presidential term as the beginning of this chronic nightmare, when the wheels of daily living started falling off. Personally, I would point to the COVID-19 pandemic. Horrendous as Trump’s first term was, there were still some “guardrails” to protect the world from his most sadistic impulses. And the pandemic marked the end of any breathing room that people found during those first four years. It was a global crisis characterized by mass death, illness, and isolation. And I feel fairly confident in saying that millions us have not recovered from that crisis.

I was talking about this with my friend and decades-long hiking buddy George a few weeks ago—not long after I followed him into some scrubby woods in Plano, Texas. It was the final 15 minutes of our hour-ish call, the topic had turned from the alarming state of the world to a possible path forward, and George proposed an idea that you don’t often hear in American life. What if, before moving forward, we took a minute?

Think about the crises we’ve weathered over the last decade. Again, we’ll go with the pandemic as the Godzilla of these crises. When was the last time you saw or heard a national political leader or public figure create a space in which the enormity of what was suffered and lost during the pandemic could be felt and honored? In which the millions who struggled in solitude during the pandemic could finally feel seen for a moment, beyond the bounds of their respective lives? If you’re having a tough time identifying a moment when we did this on a national scale, well….I’m not faring any better than you are. Because we never really had an intentional moment for national acknowledgment of the pandemic. Just as we never had a moment to recognize the things that occurred during Trump’s first term and how dangerous those years were.

Instead, as is often the case when control of the government changes hands from one party to another, the Biden/Harris administration primarily chose to “look forward, as opposed to looking backward.” Those were the same words that Barack Obama used in 2009 to explain why he wouldn’t pursue investigations of war crimes that occurred on George W. Bush’s watch during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Biden and his team at least pursued prosecution of the insurrectionists who had stormed the U.S. Capitol and killed a police officer in January 2021, the first Trump administration and its architects mostly escaped any accountability for their actions. Just as the architects of the 2008 financial crisis, the Bush-Cheney wars, and other calamities were spared.

What this pattern yields is a dual-fold crisis of mental and civic health. When we fail to acknowledge a moment of profound, mass suffering—and the decisions that created this suffering or made it much worse—what we’re really doing is avoiding the work of healing. And that’s the thing which is often underappreciated in American life. Healing isn’t just something that happens with time. It takes a lot of intentional work, and this can be tough or even painful. It requires coming together to build something close to a consensus as to what happened, and what can happen next. In a personal context, it might mean talking with a health care provider and family members. But in a political context, this means more dialogue between elected leaders and communities, and an understanding that “looking backward” is often the first step of truly moving forward.

Last week, I took a short breather from the chaos and met up with my aunt Jorden for a walk on a trail that she had wanted to show me for months. The Clipper City Rail Trail is a recent addition to the North Shore realm of Newburyport, Massachusetts. It sets off from the commuter rail station outside the town center and it shoots through corridors of trees and power lines to the local Harborwalk. Right now, the Clipper City Rail Trail covers 3.9 miles, but it can be used as a means of connecting to additional rail trails and walking routes around Newburyport. Within a minute of hopping onto the trail from the Henry Graf Jr. Memorial Skating Rink (you can park here for free, if driving), we were encountering several forms of artwork and historic relics that have been staged along the trail. At one point, I posed for a photo in a replica of an early 20th Century steam engine. And a while later, as we segued to the waterside path of the Harborwalk, we found something else that inspired a literal moment of silence.

At first, all I saw was a wheel of dark granite, on which a school of white fish appeared to be swiming in circles. And then, I read the words. “For those who died and those who survived and all we lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. We shall remember.”

This pandemic memorial was installed on the Harborwalk back in 2023, after the worst of the crisis had passed. It was created by Michael Updike, a local sculptor and artist whose first intricate public project was the gravestone for his father, the author John Updike. It’s a beautiful sight in itself, but the surrounding landscape and the weather that afternoon amplified its power. The sky was the color of ashes and it was sleeting intermittently. Piles of rotten snow still dotted the grass nearby. But there was a faint warmth in the air—a tangible sign of spring. And just a handful of yards beyond the little white fish, swimming in their circles, Jorden and I watched the watery heft of the Merrimack River flowing forward, out and into the indefinite possibilities of the ocean.

Before our saunter, while toggling around various maps of the Clipper City Rail Trail, I had found a possible way to walk a much longer scenic loop around the Merrimack, on a patchwork of rail trails that run through Newburyport and nearby Salisbury. This loop walk would take the better part of a day, being around 13 miles in length, and it starts and finishes at the Newburyport train station—nixing a car from the equation! I had hoped to take the commuter rail back up there this coming weekend and spend some more quality time with Michael Updike’s pandemic monument and the nearby riverscape and wetlands, after a longer and more contemplative walk. Unfortunately, this past weekend, I slammed my pinky toe into the wooden leg of the couch at my apartment. And while I managed to avoid a bone fracture, I’m currently wearing a stiff soled surgical shoe and taping the little guy to his slightly larger neighboring toe. It’s an injury I’ve had before, and I should be back to walking and hiking in a week or so. But maybe you could get to Newburyport sooner; for a short walk, or the longer one.

It’s not often that a small piece of the landscape seems to offer a window to what a future could look like. But the Newburyport pandemic monument is in a league of its own. It is a depiction of our ability to remember and to continue living, with its white fish swimming around and around, and the flow of the Merrimack beckoning. Right after Trump’s re-election, I lamented the absence of a future that acknowledges the anxiety and immiseration that so many of us are still suffering…and how this deficit of vision made it easier for Trump to return to the White House, by promising the hellish inversion of such a future. As has always been the case, our job now—as a nation—is bringing that better, kinder, more humane and opportune future back into focus. The nightmare that we’re suffering at the moment won’t last forever. And when it ends, by election results or less conventional mechanisms, we’ll once again be presented with “looking backward” and “moving forward,” as if the two are binary, either/or choices.

The case for moving forward, without acknowledgment or accountability, has always been a way for politicians—and to some degree, the rest of us—to dodge the labor of doing both of these things. Making this mistake over and over again has brought us to this crux. For the good of our health, the next turning point should be different. It must include the space for recognizing what tens of millions have been forced to deal with since Trump re-entered the Oval Office. It must lead to prosecutions, for the laws that were broken. And it should bring us to a place of re-imagining what a real future can look like. Only then will we be ready to move forward, into something that can last.

CLICK HERE for a map of the 3.9-mile Clipper City Rail Trail walking route

CLICK HERE for a map of my 13.2-mile Newburyport riverscape walking route

I try to resist the temptation of using this newsletter to push my cinematic taste onto all of you too aggressively or frequently. But since the Oscars just went down, I want to use the footnote of this week’s dispatch to recommend one of the movies that was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film—not only because it’s my favorite movie from 2025, but because it involves walking through the landscape. That film is Sirāt, directed by Galician filmmaker Oliver Laxe, and the setup alone had me running for the nearest theater. A middle-aged father is searching for his daughter, who’s been missing for months, and he ends up at an electric music rave in the Moroccan desert (on the tip that she might be there.) He strikes out, but he also meets a small chosen family of nomadic ravers who are heading to another rave that’s even deeper in the desert. And that means another potential opportunity to find the missing daughter. But the desert is an incredibly harsh place, rife with elemental dangers. And to make things worse, a global war seems to be breaking out, just beyond the horizon line.

”Sirāt” is an Arabic word that describes a razor-thin bridge between paradise and hell. And that’s what the desert trip in Sirāt starts to resemble. Sometimes it mesmerizes, and other times it’s horrifying. But what sets Sirāt apart from other movies that have trafficked in merciless landscapes is its lack of nihilism. This movie is grounded in the idea that kindness is stubbornly persistent, even in the worst of times. Don’t get me wrong; Sirāt is an intense cinematic experience that had me periodically gasping. It stares at mortality without flinching. But when I staggered out into daylight, with the film’s techno beats still echoing in my head, I felt something that surprised me. Hope.

A couple of weeks ago, two friends and I were watching Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy; my thirtieth viewing, at least, and my housemate Emma’s first. And as we made our way into the climatic battles in The Return Of The King, I was struck by how many of the ensemble characters are driven by the will to fight for Middle Earth. Even the hobbits, small in stature and raised on leisure, find internal depths of bravery that surprise them, as they take up swords and take on legions of orcs and goblins. The original books by J.R.R. Tolkien, and Jackson’s masterful film adaptations, are largely about courage and perseverence in the face of fear that’s entirely reasonable—like watching your verdant corner of the world burnt beyond recognition. At a moment that’s existentially dangerous, courage and hope are two of the most vital resources.

But what does courage look like during a war of aggression? A war of choice, where the stakes are measured in dollars and extractions? Naturally, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this during the last few days—particularly when I watched toxic, black clouds form over Tehran (a metro area with over 14 million residents) after American and Israeli forces blew up several of the local oil refineries. Even during the carnage of the Iraq invasion, energy infrastructure like refineries was largely spared from bombs. Not this time around, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promising “Death and destruction from the sky all day long,” like someone furiously jerking off in public.

During a war like this, does desertion become an act of courage?

It’s a provocative question that I’ve been mulling, starting around the time when the U.S. started double tapping alleged drug boats in the Carribbean; blowing them up, and then circling back to kill any survivors. This was when Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy pilot and NASA astronaut, took the unusual step of vocally imploring military service members to disobey illegal orders. It was cathartic to hear this from a standing Senator and a veteran, and I would imagine that it may have planted seeds which could germinate as the Trump administration’s war against Iran expands and escalates. Whatever resistance manifests could take many forms. But I suspect that when faced with the prospect of becoming an accomplice and a statistic in a war of aggression, some people may choose to walk away, by going abroad or into hiding.

Historically, desertion in wartime has been viewed as one of the most contemptible, cowardly things that a person can do. Choosing physical or spiritual self-preservation at a moment when others are putting their bodies on the line for The Cause. During the American Civil War, the Union Army paid bounty hunters to track down deserters and deliver them to the courts, where they were sentenced to hard labor or death. In the southern states, desertion became such a crippling problem for the Confederacy that militias known as the Home Guard were dispatched to ferret out deserters and kill them on sight. Those of you who’ve read Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain or seen the Anthony Minghella adaption may recall the Home Guard as the main antagonists of the story, which is about a Confederate soldier who decides that he’s had enough.

But there are other, lesser known tales of what happened to deserters during the dark chapters of U.S. History. Last week, I walked into one in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

The southernmost woodlands of the Granite State are a strange place where suburban development is buffered by vast parcels of sticks and water. One of these green blobs, less than 20 minutes from the Massachusetts border, is the Musquash Conservation Area—a 1,000-acre menage of deciduous forests and bogs, which you can roam on a trail network that exceeds 20 miles. I first wandered through this space on a purple-ish summer night in 2020, while seeking a respite from the pandemic in the only northern New England state that hadn’t imposed restrictions for incoming travelers. I was a bit too distracted and stressed to really appreciate its immersive beauty back then. But I held onto the memory long enough that when I found myself needing to test a new pair of winter hiking boots on powdery ground, a return visit in March sounded nice.

In the late 1760s, a small group of the British soldiers who had been dispatched to the colonies to quell frustrations over taxation without representation found their way to Londonderry too. They were also struck by the bucolic charm of the area, to the point where they decided to find accommodations and shack up locally. In other words, the soldiers abandoned the cause of keeping the colonies in line, joining them instead. A 2024 Concord Monitor story by Ashley Miller sheds some light on the moment, thanks to archival digging, and while it’s hard to know exactly what may have inspired these British soldiers to desert, I can take a few guesses. By 1769, it was clear that colonists’ frustrations with the British Empire were reaching a boiling point; that violent conflict could be on the horizon. In a dangerous climate like this, any solider has to ask what they’re willing to suffer or give, between the punishing working conditions of wearing the uniform, to the possibility that your life could be a footnote in a chapter of history that people talk about in hushed tones. And then there’s the matter of the other lives that a soldier might find themselves tasked with extinguishing, when war breaks out.

While we don’t know when and how the British deserters started breaking bread with the townfolk of Londonderry, what happened shortly after their deseration illustrates how successfully these soldiers had ingratiated themselves to the town. (Population: 2,590.) Somehow, word got out that Londonderry was harboring the soldiers, and a unit was sent out to arrest them. But as the British army detained the deserters and began marching them out of Londonderry, something remarkable happened. As Miller tells it, 11 villagers—some of them veterans from the French and Indian War—grabbed their guns, crashed through the woods, and intercepted the soldiers. They managed to free the deserters without firing a single shot, and after bringing them back to town, the conflict was pretty much settled. The British army didn’t send in another detachment to find the deserters again. (They had bigger fish to fry.) New Hampshire’s Governor at the time, John Wentworth, did his part to help the British upon learning of the so-called Londonderry Riot. At one point, he had the region leafleted with written warnings about the punishment for harboring deserters. And yet, no one gave up the Londonderry deserters. Presumably, they continued living in Londonderry to the end of their days. Or at least, to the end of the Revolutionary War.

If you want to explore the 2.6-mile Betty Mack Loop, which encircles the heart of the Musquash Conservation Area on a mix of dirt paths and creaky boardwalks, you have a few options for where to pick up the trail. I chose a short connector path branching off from Sarah Beth Lane. Initially, it follows a power line corridor before veering right into the forest. And through the trees, I could see the back decks and palatial yards of the houses built on the periphery of the forest. And something that I noticed about a few of these houses was that they appeared to have rather large finished basements; the type that you can enter through a door at the back end of the abode, beneath the deck. Back in the time of King George III and the Londonderry Riot, deserters who hid out in southern New Hampshire had a lot of options for hiding spots—the livable kind where you could have your bed and provisions, and the more urgent refuges in which you might squirrel yourself away if a garrison or a militia suddenly marched into town.

In present day Londonderry, a large basement in a house on the edge of a 1,000-acre wood is a space that might provide a similar cloaking effect, amidst a landscape that’s now replete with security cameras and digital infrastructure that can be used to track one’s footsteps. I imagined what it might feel like to spend indefinite weeks or months in a basement, not unlike those who found themselves quarantined in one during the worst times of the pandemic. I thought about what emerging from the basement for a walk in the adjacent woods could feel like under the newer context of an unjust war, which some will refuse to participate in—at their own risk. When it becomes clearer that this is happening, in our own backyards, I wonder what will resonate harder with Americans: the false solidarity of unity during a time of cruel and bellicose leadership, or the real solidarity of taking care of your own, in the face of psychotic governance.

Like Londonderry did, before America was a thing.

CLICK HERE for a trail map of the Musquash Conservation Area

At this point, it’s no longer news that regular snowstorms in formerly blanketed winter locales are a thing of the past. “Winter” is now a soggier, clammier event in regions that have seen steady temperature increases in the last few decades, and we’re doing our best to adjust to this new reality. Nonetheless, there are still some occasions when low pressure systems lift moist air high enough to form clouds and unleash the fury of Old Man Winter on places like the Mid-Atlantic and New England. Those of us who live near the east coast between Baltimore and Boston are shoveling our way out from the powdery offerings of Winter Storm Hernando—which broke snowfall records set by the notorious blizzard of 1978 in northeastern cities like Providence and Fall River, Massachusetts. Governor Maura Healey actually went so far as to place a temporary travel ban on southeastern Mass., so that state and municipal workers could focus on clearing the roads and freeways without having to deal with vehicles sliding off them.

These humbling, snowbound events can trigger Proustian flashbacks for those of us who grew up at a time when monster blizzards meant extra time for being cozy and rambunctious; an age when Snow Days were a thing that millions of families, couples, and single adults got to enjoy a few times each winter. A storm, by definition, forces the world to slow down. While juggernaut blizzards can be dangerous—in the event that local power lines are knocked out—they are a sleepier kind of storm and they lack the destructive power of a hurricane. The hazards posed by a blizzard are more connected to activites that we might choose to do when the storm is unfolding, such as trying to drive somewhere, or shoveling heavy snow when you’ve got a history of back injuries. So, if we’re confronted by a storm and told to stay home from school or work, many of us do exactly that. We treat ourselves to a day doing whatever may feel instinctual during a storm; reading, watching movies, solving a puzzle, cooking a stew, trying a new yoga pose, grabbing some late morning delight, you name it. And I’m sure plenty of people along the eastern seaboard got to experience this on Monday.

But Snow Days—arguably one of most essential, nourishing force majeure events of the human experience—are in a recession that’s worsening. And the catalytic force behind this recession is not climatological. It’s an injury we’ve inflicted on ourselves.

In December of 2019, around 10 million people were logging into Zoom each day to host or join remote meetings. Less than half a year later, as ICUs kept filling up with intubated COVID-19 patients and governments ordered their citizens to stay at home until the first lull of the pandemic, 300 million of us were using Zoom daily. At the time, video call technology that was relatively simple and user-friendly provided actionable solutions for a catalysm. It allowed people to keep in touch with friends and family in distant locales (and, in the worst cases, to say goodbye to loved ones who were taking their last breaths in quarantined hospital rooms.) But remote video calls also allowed workers to hold onto their jobs at a time when gathering inside a workplace wasn’t feasible. Given how many of us lost work, this was a serious relief.

Still, speaking as somebody who’s been working remotely for a decade, I watched the normalization of Zoom and video calls with trepidation. I was thrilled for all the people who were finally getting a breather from driving or taking a bus to work each day, and I was happy that they could hold onto their livelihoods during the pandemic. But the question that haunted me was whether Zoom would keep on growing once the worst of the pandemic was over. Unsurprisingly, as the storm began fading, those who once commuted to their jobs weren’t too keen on being forced back into a workplace. Most businesses responded in three ways. Some told their employees to come back or find another job. Others allowed everyone to continue working remotely. And quite a few adopted “hybrid” systems in which workers would do their tasks in-person some days and at home on others. The second and third approaches were hailed as victories for workers. Part of me used to believe this too. But in retrospect, I think this was actually a loss. It was the dissolution of a boundary that made it somewhat easier to separate working and living. A boundary that had already crumbling for American workers.

The growth of remote work, from a mid-pandemic crutch to a new normal, allows our employers to demand more from us; including special moments that we once had to ourselves, until recently. Most of the people I know in Boston had to spend the better part of their Winter Storm Hernando “Snow Day” logged onto whatever platform their employer uses for remote work. Any indulgences that they undertook between dawn and dusk were things they managed to squeeze in—as opposed to the pillars of their day. They lost more than just time. They lost the opportunity to revel in the beauty of a winter storm that people will probably be talking about for generations. Some of the kids whose schools closed for the day were partially spared, but others had to fire up laptops and participate in remote learning exercises, just as millions of students were doing when the pandemic was at its most infectious.

This is one of the things that I’ve feared, as a long-time remote worker. If you work for a variety of clients, on an irregular schedule, it’s somewhat easier to tell yourself, “I’m not going to look at emails today” when you’re feeling burnt out or when a major life event like a blizzard demands your attention. When you have a single employer, it’s a lot harder and riskier to brush directives and expectations aside, even just for a day.

None of this is good for us. It’s adding anxiety to our lives, it’s turning our homes into something less comforting, and it’s making people more estranged from the here and now—even during incredible, deeply humbling events like Winter Storm Hernando. It may sound fanciful, but I’m beginning to wonder if a flexible, work-free Snow Day is a right that should be guaranteed for all non-essential workers by the state. Something as basic and enshrined as the weekend (which was adopted as recently as the 1920s!)

Even those who get sniffy about the idea that people should be given more time for relaxation could probably appreciate the practical benefits of placing a hard limit on remote work during snow emergencies. Snow Days can be fun, but they also require their own forms of work, such as shoveling steps and walkways, or dealing with power outages or a window cracked by a falling tree branch. I spent over three hours outside between 8 AM and 5 PM on Monday, helping neighbors dig out their cars. I couldn’t have done that if I had been glued to a computer screen for eight hours! Getting time back isn’t just a victory for each of us. It’s a net gain for communities, because we can invest more of that time in each other. In the long run, I think it’s a win for businesses too. Employers benefit from having happier, healthier workers. But when you’re living in a cultural moment driven by short-term rapacity and the fiduciary duty that drives large businesses—rewarding shareholders, at any cost—you need the state to step in.

Again, it wasn’t that long ago when FDR legalized the 48-hour weekend by signing the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938. And the instructive word there is “labor” because if we are going to get anything close to Snow Day protections, it’s going to happen through the power and organizing of unions. Given that the Democratic Party abandoned labor unions back in the 1970s—to court upper-middle class voters—and seeing how the party’s current leadership still can’t decide whether it might be a wise idea for the party to realign itself with unions, we’ve got a grueling climb ahead of us.

But here’s a pithy sprinkling of good news. In 2025, membership for American labor unions pretty much stayed the same; as opposed to declining once again, like we’ve seen during other recent years. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center poll, most Americans now see the disempowerment and membership decline of unions as bad for not just workers, but for America in general. Whether this might have anything to do with our president gleefully gutting what few labor protections remain in place is anyone’s guess. Probably just a coincidence—similar to how pro-union sentiment is widening as more businesses turn to generative AI to replace some workers and to overburden the ones who survive the layoffs. By all indicators, we are building toward some kind of realignment with labor in the U.S., and if this actually leads to anything resembling a sequel to the FLSA, we could bake a LOT of good stuff into that policy.

So between now and then, I will continue to make the case for adding legal Snow Day protections to the mix. Because no one should have to tune out the howl of wind as it rattles the window, to better focus on spreadsheets, CRM templates, and video feeds. It’s not often that nature gives us the opportunity to witness a storm that’s titanic yet comforting—massive enough to widen your eyes and your appetite at the same time. For centuries, society managed to keep functioning amidst the seasonal humblings of blizzards and Snow Days. We can afford to preserve this tradition for winters to come.

As a New Englander, I made it all the way to my late thirties before I joined the crowds briefly fleeing the ice each February. But as a budget traveler, I didn’t head for Miami or any place where hotels are surge-priced at $300/night. Most recently, I sprang for a flatter, more parched locale that’s roasting by summer, but balmier during the winter months. Dallas is the city that my friend George relocated to from Seattle a few years ago, drawn there by a new job opportunity and intrigued by the chance to familiarize himself with a very different corner of America—which has been growing quite rapidly.

New York remains the fastest-expanding city in America, which isn’t surprising when you consider that it’s pretty much the only major city in the U.S. that’s not daunted by the prospect of building upward. (Propose anything taller than three stories here in Boston and you will be inundated with angry phone calls and emails on the ruinous impact of shadows.) But nipping at NYC’s heels in second and third place are Houston and Dallas. And instead of reaching for the heavens, the growth of both Texas cities is horizontal; the sprawl we typically see in regions with a large amount of level-ish land waiting to be developed for residential or commercial use. Since sprawl means having a vaster geospatial footprint, the main mode of moving around cities like Dallas is cars.

In 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that less than 10% of the people living in the Dallas-Forth Worth metro area got around on the public buses and trains run by DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) in the year 2019. And that was before most public transit agencies experienced a sharp drop-off in ridership during the pandemic; a gut punch that they haven’t fully recovered from. Some of this anemic buy-in for public transit in Dallas can be blamed on the limitations of DART; the modest roster of places where the train or bus can take you. But those shortcomings reflect a choice on the part of Dallas-Fort Worth leaders and by extension, DFW voters. This consensus—that shared transportation is something to be shrunken and avoided—is written in the landscape.

This is not unique to Dallas or Texas. It is a trans-regional mindset which has stunted mobility in plenty of other American cities from one coast to another, as millions of us give up on the idea that having fewer cars on the roads is good for public health and happiness. And for me, few things have illustrated the logical outcome of this mindset quite so grimly as a walk that George and I took at one of the few nature preserves in Plano; the suburb on the north side of Dallas where Frito-Lay and JCPenney are based.

I first heard about Arbor Hills—without quite realizing it—back in 2025, while reading a two-part essay from the journalist Hamilton Nolan on the expansion of conservative Christian mega-churches and 16-lane super highways around Dallas. The kicker of the first part is a scorcher. “Weary after a long day at church, I drove to Plano’s one nature preserve,” Nolan writes. “But I had to turn around and leave. The parking lot was full.”

There’s a 50/50 chance that Nolan was alluding to the 200 acres of upland forests and prairies that make up Arbor Hills, which is one of two Plano nature preserves offering wooded trails for walkers and runners (the other one is the more expansive Oak Point Park.) George and I ventured up there early on an overcast Sunday morning, enticed by the prospect of being surrounded by trees. This is not exactly an easy experience to have in Dallas. The scale of local development means that even at the few larger scale green spaces like White Rock Lake reservoir, there’s always infrastructure visible nearby. Parking there had proved to be a challenge for us on prior visits; a clear case of not just demand exceeding supply, but the means knocking the end out of reach.

So we braced ourselves for disappointment as we pulled into the crescent-shaped lot at Arbor Hills, already bustling and full of gleaming metal at 9:40 AM. We circled the parking area like a shark, looking for an opening that we could claim. Maddeningly, a couple of the vacant spaces that we did find had been rendered unusable by big-ass SUVs or trucks spilling over from the neighboring parking spaces. There’s something deeply emasculating about gearing up for some time outdoors, only to find yourself crawling at 5 miles-per-hour between rows of vehicles, hoping and praying that one of them will be merciful enough to leave soon. Luckily, our third pass was successful, as we saw a family piling into their Honda CR-V. We didn’t have a fourth pass in us.

Again, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I’m indulging some sort of prejudiced resentment toward Texas (given that I’m from New England, which is not exactly known for being charitable to southern states, I think this bears repeating.) If you have ever gone hiking in Amercia, then you’ve probably experienced a version of trailhead gridlock. In the backcountry, this is inconvenient—the reality that parking capacity in conserved lands can’t be easily expanded. But in suburbs of major metro areas, where far more of us actually live, this is a more elemental problem. Frederick Law Olmsted, who basically created the public park as we know it, saw parks and city-adjacent conservation lands like Arbor Hills as spaces in which anyone who needed a breather from the stressors of the Industrial Age could find it. But when the only way to reach the closest green space is driving there and finding a place to park your car, the barrier of entry rises considerably. Both of these things are indirect admission fees, paid in money and time. And the result is fewer folks visiting or knowing about parks.

Maybe that’s why I had never heard whisperings of Arbor Hills on previous visits to Dallas, or why it took so long for George and I to scope it out, drive up to Plano, and take a look. The paved pathway that winds through the preserve’s grasslands and its twisted woods, with trees that looked almost blackened in their leafless state, was the main artery for hikers, runners, and families with strollers. The more raggedy dirt trails that tunneled through the dark branches and waterless gulches were strangely empty, and we decided to take advantage of their quietude. For the first time since I touched down at DFW airport—or maybe for my first time ever in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—-I felt like I was communing with something primordial. Something that had taken root in this region centuries before American Airlines and Texas Instruments went public.

This was pure, raw Texan wildness; something you would have to drive beyond the city limits to experience, were it not for the conservation of the Arbor Hills. Near the top of an especially tall and exposed hill, we arrived at a wooden bridge that connected the trail to an observation tower, where several visitors were drinking in the grandeur of the park. The view was layered, like sections of an onion. The first layer, surrounding us on all sides, was shaggy and rustic. But beyond there, wrapping around Arbor Hills, was a vaster sea of pavement and steel, stretching as far as we could see. It felt like an inversion of a typical mountain view, as you gaze out from the wilderness toward the glimmers of society beyond the trees. From Arbor Hills, that sprawl of pavement and steel felt like the real wilderness—dangerous, unforgiving, and difficult to get through.

That is my nightmare. A future in which we ask parks and green spaces to offer things that the broader landscape of our cities and towns should offer. Many of these places will need to get bigger soon; to accommodate more housing, as prices skyrocket! But the direction of growth is overlooked. Building farther and farther outward, instead of upward, can contribute to public perception that personal vehicles are the best way to move around town. It’s a misguided perception that lacks historic insight. (Hell, it used to be possible to ride trolleys from the city center to the bushiest burbs, which I wrote about a few years back.) And I suspect that’s one of the reasons why we still can’t quit car-centered planning, even as the costs and risks of driving everywhere keep adding up. Relying on a publicly operated train or bus to get across town might mean a little more effort than jumping into your sedan and hitting the road. But the conveniences that seem to come with driving are paid for indirectly, in far too many ways to count.

If George and I hadn’t been able to park the car at Arbor Hills—if we had been forced to abandon our hike—I hope the disappointment would have inspired introspection. As another friend once said to me, “You’re never caught in traffic. You are the traffic.” That reality doesn’t seem to have permeated the Arbor Hills vicinity though. A late 2025 story for the Quorum Report by journalist James Russell found voters in the northern Dallas suburbs, including Plano, on the verge of clawing back their shares of public funding for DART; on the divergent premise that DART’s trains and buses are under-used and bringing in crime and vagrancy from Dallas. The alternative, if Plano chooses to pull out of DART funding, could be lower-cost rideshare services from a company called Via, which already operates nearby in Arlington and Denton. By early February, Plano and DART leaders were engaged in a series of compromise talks. The outcome is still undertermined. But as I read the latest coverge from North Texas’s NPR station, KERA News, the headline image caught my eye. It captured a group of Plano residents who had turned up at Plano City Hall with signs, in support of DART funding. Two of the signs read, “KEEP TRANSIT PUBLIC.” It somehow left me feeling inspired and gutted in the same moment. This is where we are—on the razor’s edge of witnessing one of the most vital public utilities privatized in more American cities and burbs, generating more traffic and fewer opportunities for people who live there.

But even in Plano, overwhelmed by cars, some of those people were venturing out to fight back; stubbornly dragging the clear and healthier alternative back into the light.

• So many of you responded enthusiastically to the recent Mind The Moss story on the block party-like shoveling that took place on my street during Winter Storm Fern that I decided to pitch a similar story to The Boston Globe, which gave me the green light to revisit the moment. You can read the Globe story right here.
  

• Also, on the matter of appreciation, it’s been almost two months since I kicked off the newest incarnation of Mind The Moss, removing the paywall for all new Moss stories and digging deeper into the intersections of the outdoors, culture, and politics. That so many of you have continued to support the newsletter as paid subscribers means a lot to me. This financial support is what makes it possible for me to devote time to researching and writing a new Mind The Moss story every week; especially stories that involve field reporting. To be able to sit down each month, poring over the ideas on my story calendar (yes, that’s a real thing that I cobble together) and thinking, “Maybe I could go there and look into this,” has been the creative equivalent of nitrous oxide—making some of the most widely-read Moss stories possible. Thank you to all of you who have made this happen. And for anyone who wants to add some logs to the Mind The Moss woodstove for 2026, you can do so today with a monthly or annual paid subscription, which also includes the hundreds of stories and trip ideas nestled in the Moss archive.

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Most of us have at least one dream gig that we would sell assets or cross oceans to accept. And now, in the aftermath of Super Bowl LX, I’ve added a new dream job to my shortlist—playing a bush, as a backdrop extra in a Bad Bunny performance. The King of Latin Trap put on a barn burner of a halftime show on Sunday evening, and much has already been said and written about how Bad Bunny re-imagined what it means to be an American; at a moment when older versions of that idea are being used as a pretext to tear communities apart. But another awesome thing about the show and setlist was how deeply they were rooted in an orchestrated environment.

Instead of assembling one of those starship-like stages that most musicians use for stadium shows, Bad Bunny and his team transformed the football field into a Puerto Rican village. The rippling green tallgras was actually “played” by lots of background extras wearing bush costumes. Many of the backup dancers were dressed as sugar cane field workers, sporting Puerto Rico apparel staples like pavas—straw hats made from palm leaves. And those sparking telephone poles that Bad Bunny climbed while performing “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”) were a reflection of the song’s inspiration: the ongoing electricity outages in Puerto Rico, exacerbated by stronger hurricanes, the privatization of utilities, and gentrification. Throw in a real wedding, officiated in the midst of the show, and we had something bigger than a show. We traveled into a little world, full of characters, symbols, and stories. Orchestrated for one night only!

So you can understand why—if Bad Bunny ever orchestrates another environment in which people are needed to play the flora—I am getting my ass on a plane. If there’s any irony to how many of us have been inspired by Bad Bunny’s human bushes, that’s probably because dressing up as a bush or a tree is often seen as a humiliation; the pity prize offered to someone who tried out for the school play and couldn’t land a role with dialogue. But here’s the thing. While there’s plenty of prestige to be won from headlining a show or even being a part of an ensemble, the silent background extras receive a different kind of prize. Basically, they get to live in the orchestrated environment of the show for a few hours. And speaking as a two-time background extra myself, I can confirm that living in an orchestrated environment is a lot of fun.

Since the late 2000s, when The Departed won Best Picture and put Boston on the map for moviemakers, as a veritable hotbed of townie ritual and aggression, a ton of films and TV shows have been shot here. About a decade ago, intrigued by the chance to bump shoulders with visiting celebs, I joined Boston Casting (New England’s premier entertainment agency) by creating a free “hire me!” profile for background extra gigs. Yes, I lied in a few places, such as claiming that I had experience handling swords. And within a couple months of joining the agency, my ship came in. It was a thriller titled “American Odyssey,” about an unlikely trio—a soldier, a lawyer, and an activist—who discover a conspiracy involving corporations funding terrorism. Part of the pilot was being filmed in Boston’s Financial District, against the backdrop of an Occupy Wall Street-inspired protest encampment. They needed a lot of people to play protesters.

I got the call, along with a couple hundred other New Englanders with varying levels of experience or investment in the entertainment industry. We were booked for two days of shooting, in the middle of winter. Most of us weren’t fitted with costumes ahead of time and thus, we were asked to bring our own wardrobe. “You should look like you haven’t been home for a while!,” the instructional email from Boston Casting began. “Layers are good, things that keep you warm, nothing fashionable. Think ex-hippy, grunge, quirky, funky, artsy, alternative. Nothing bright. Stick to dark, muted colors. Jeans are good. Jeans with holes that we maybe see a thermal underneath is good. Nothing cute. Like you’ve just been outside, knits, hats, sweaters, etc.” Paired with a 5:45am call time, this gig had the trappings of an adventure. When I showed up at Post Office Square for Day One—bundled in a rattty wool coat that had I found in the back of my dad’s closet—I entered another kind of orchestrated environment.

The production team had done their homework. The replicated encampment, large enough to occupy more than half of Post Office Square, had built elements which I recognized from my 2011 visit to the Zuccoti Park encampment that materalized at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests. There were tents, a library, a kitchen, a medical station, a bicycle-powered charging station for phones and laptops, and lots of drums and prayer flags. From dawn to dusk, the assistant directors shuffled us to various points of the encampment and gave us temporary background parts to play. Near 11am, I was on the frontlines with a throng of protesters shouting and shaking my fist at a bunch of well-dressed corporate lawyers exiting an adjacent building. By 6pm that evening, I was taking part in a big group yoga session in the encampment, doing my best downward dog and sticking my butt in the air just as the director and the camera crew swung by to shoot B-Roll footage that might make it into the pilot.

It was one of the most strangely enjoyable experiences that I’ve had: being part of the orchestrated environment of American Odyssey. Essentially, we were immersed in this alternative reality where we had limited agency—someone else was making most of our decisions for us—but where we were all working together to create something interesting. Meanwhile, our basic needs are taken care of. The production crew kept everyone fed and hydrated. A nearby office was procured for the extras, so that we could warm up indoors when the crew was setting up new shots. Of course, we got paid for each 12-hour day of shooting. But the check felt almost secondary to the more rarefied reward of getting to play Make Believe with so many other people, in this built environment with too many details to capture in the course of one scene.

That last part really resonated with me a couple years later, when I scored my second background extra gig for Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women. This time, I was an upper middle class Concord gentleman, dressed in a heavy black overcoat with extensions in my beard and a large stack of Christmas presents for my imaginary kids. For the first shot of the day—the March sisters walking down the main street of 19th Century Concord, which had been built from scratch in the nearby town of Harvard, Massachusetts—the assistant director placed me halfway up the wooden staircase on the bank building. I thought about the structural engineering it must have taken to ensure that actors could stand on the staircase, which would be lucky to get a second of coverage in the finished movie. That’s the thing about orchestrated environments, whether they’re assembled for a film, a play, or a concert. They need to be capable of hosting many actions and moments, including some that won’t actually be seen by an audience. I learned this the hard way when one of the assistant directors brought me down from the stairs and instructed me to walk past Saoirse Ronan. Every neuron in my brain was buzzing. She was on my left, the camera was to my right, and I took this as a sign that I had lucked my way into the final cut. But the moment barely made it into the trailer. In the movie itself, I was nowhere to be seen in downtown Concord.

But I would go there again in a heartbeat; just as a lot of us would consider spending four figures just to make it to Bad Bunny’s next orchestrated environment, if he ever decides to build one again. That’s number two on my aspirational list of background extra roles. The top slot belongs to the unlikely event that George Miller is allowed to make one more Mad Max movie. (The most recent sequel, Furiosa, was acclaimed by critics, but its box office gains paled to Fury Road.) If that happens, and if the call for extras makes it to Boston, I will be flying to Australia; driven by the dream of being outfitted with post-apocalytpic warts or tumors, dressed in leather and metal, placed on a moving vehicle in the desert, and given a name like “Splooge Boy” or “The Bone Carpenter.” That’s my hope, when it comes to visiting an orchestrated environment.

And I’d like to know what yours might look, or where it could ideally take you. Clearly, the Bad Bunny halftime show has inspired a lot of us to chew on that question—to envision a temporary world, shaped by the imagination and brought to life en masse, and the prospect of enjoying that world together. Some might see this as a means of coping with the uglier reality that we live in. But if we are ever going to transcend that scorched landscape, we should probably get into the habit of envisioning another one.

Of all the creative ways in which Minneapolis residents have been hamstringing ICE agents over the last few weeks, my favorite has to be the militarization of ice—as in, literal ice that forms within seconds in subzero temperatures. The thing you have to understand about people such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is that when they suddenly receive more than $170 billion in federal funding—as the DHS did last year—the money goes toward things like two Gulfstream G700 private jets, and not toward basic squad gear, such as footwear suitable for a winter city like Minneapolis. That’s why social media has been full of videos in which ICE agents are seen slipping and eating shit on ice while chasing Twin Cities residents. Some of the ice on the ground was naturally occurring, but other patches were the product of carefully-deployed buckets of water in areas with escalating ICE activity.

This is what creative grassroots resistance can look like, but it’s also a reminder that ice is one of the most understated hazards of winter. Each year, at least one person in my social network slips and lands hard on ice. Sometimes the result is inconvenient, like incurring a bone bruise, and other times, it’s completely debilitating. In August of 2021, I went on a few dates with someone who had spent the entire spring and early summer recuperating from an ankle fracture—which happened when she slipped an icy stretch of sidewalk that her landlord hadn’t salted yet. And with winters across the northeast getting soupier and less consistent in their conditons, those wretched days when every surface is glazed with bone-shattering ice are becoming more frequent.

Luckily, there’s something you can do about this; a tactical and material intervention that’s common in backcountry snow sports, but a lot less ubiquitous to the urban or suburban winter experience. If you live in a climate where ice is a recurring concern from December to April, then it’s time to start assembling a small arsenal of traction.

But before we begin, a housekeeping note. Those of you who’ve been reading Mind The Moss for a few years will know that I only write about outdoor gear on those rare occasions when it seems like highlighting a piece of equipment might help to address an acute problem or need. And I should also mention that I am not being paid by any manufacturer or PR firm to write about the gear that’s featured in the newsletter this week. (If any of you know someone who could make that happen, please hit me up!)

So…what is traction? It’s an accessory that you attach to the bottom of your shoe or boot; often a piece of flexible rubber that contains metal elements, which can dig into slippery surfaces like ice. Crampons—the razor sharp spikes that mountaineers use to scale snowcapped summits—are probably the form of traction that most people are vaguely familiar with. I find that ironic, because crampons are the monster truck of traction devices. Until we invent rocket boots, you can’t level up past crampons. And for somebody who’s just trying to get around town without slipping on sidewalk ice, crampons will be comically impractical. But just as there are trucks and cars more usable than a Monster Jam Megalodon, there are overlooked genres of traction that can be the difference between a more mobile winter, and winter spent in traction.

These are the ones that I consider to be the civilian-level “trilogy” of traction devices:

COIL TRACTION

Traction devices usually take one of two paths, and coil traction is the path that I’d imagine most of us have some experience with. Have you owned a pair of Yaktrax, or borrowed one from a friend? If so, you’ll recognize the structural design of a coiled traction device. It’s a slip-on piece of rubber, and the spiderwebby bottom that goes against the sole of your shoe features metal coils. And it’s the edges of those coils, combined with your bodyweight, that create traction and stability on winter ground.

Or at least, that’s the idea. I suspect that coiled traction like Yaktrax is one of the more common traction devices found in urban and suburban regions because they appear a world apart from the aggressive style of mountaineering crampons. And you can wear coiled traction without worrying about whether a misplaced footstep could pierce an artery in your opposite leg. The problem with coiled traction, however, is that people sometimes ask it to do too much. Coils tend to perform best on packed snow, when it’s still soft enough to dig into, yet still slippery. On ice, coiled traction is less reliable.

For that, you need something with bite.

MICRO-SPIKE TRACTION

When you live in a glazed residential area and coil traction isn’t cutting the mustard, I guess it makes sense to wonder, “What if we could have a baby version of crampons?” That’s what micro-spike traction is—miniature crampons that you strap to your boot with the same flexible rubber that coil traction devices use. The spikes are duller and much smaller than those found on traditional crampons, but with the power of your footsteps, they can still crunch into solid ice in a satisfying way. Micro-spikes are a common addition to a winter hiking toolbox, but more of us are starting to discover how useful they can be after winter storms in places we don’t associate with hiking.

Still, there are limits to consider. Because micro-spike traction is a device with literal teeth, there needs to be a certain amount of ice that the spikes can fully pierce. If the ice on the ground is a half-inch thick or greater, you’re in micro-spike territory. But if it’s paper-thin black ice, you might have trouble staying upright with spikes on your shoes or boots.

The other challenge with micro-spikes is that their surface-breaking ability doesn’t just apply to ice. When I was an early winter caretaker at one of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s huts—Lonesome Lake Hut, in the shadow of Cannon Mountain—I constantly found myself asking hikers to remove their spikes before treading across the wooden floors of the building. But nobody’s perfect and a few times, I forgot to this when I returned to the hut after hiking. Once, I actually left a visible bitemark in the floor of the kitchen. (If anyone from the AMC is reading this, please don’t NARC me out to executive management.) All of this is a way of saying that if you wear micro-spikes, you have to be ready to take them off as needed. On some viciously cold, chap-your-ass day in February, that can grow really annoying.

But what if there was a happier medium between the gnashing of micro-spikes and the gentler grip of coiled traction? Something that you could strap to your footwear before going outside in winter weather and basically forget about, with each step on ice and snow? This brings us to the traction device that I use most often each winter.

STUD TRACTION

Last January, when getting ready to lead scouting walks for Boston’s relatively new City On The Hills Trail (31 miles from West Roxbury to Castle Island!) I realized that I needed something a notch or two below micro-spikes, to safely navigate icebound parks and sidewalks. And a trip to the used gear section at my local REI yielded the solution—ice studs. It’s the same concept as micro-spikes and coiled traction, but in this case, the bottom of the strap-on rubber is dotted with tiny metal studs; sort of like the one that you often find at the tip of a hiking pole. The ice studs are modest enough that walking on clear pavement or on other hard surfaces doesn’t feel too weird, and the studs aren’t going to pierce those surfaces. But when you do bump into thinner stretches of ice, the studs dig in just enough to provide a safer passage.

While I wouldn’t trust ice studs to keep me from falling while ascending a seriously iced-up mountain trail, I’ve found them to be trustworthy on level-ish ground and stairways. And in the instances when I do forget that I’m wearing the studs, such as stepping onto the escalator at a subway station or ducking into a supermarket or a friend’s place, I don’t have to worry about leaving a trail of light damage in my wake.

So where does that leave you, as the potential traction owner and user? Should you plump for all three of the devices outlined above, or test the waters with just one? It really depends on the environment you live in, your budget, and your comfort level.

• If you live in a city or town where the winters regularly bring ice into the picture, I would invest in a pair of ice studs and a pair of microspikes. This will give you the ability to toggle between different levels of ice density and coverage.

• If you prefer to start with one device before spending more money on additional traction, go with the ice studs. (We’ll get to prices and models shortly.) This type of winter traction is the most versatile of the three models outlined above.

• If winter conditions on the ground make you feel very uneasy, then you might as well spring for the entire trilogy of traction devices. Coil traction, while probably the least helpful, still works on packed snow, and it’s the cheapest.

These days, you can pick up coil, micro-spike, and stud traction devices from most big box retailers that offer recreational gear. And that brings us to pricing and brands. The widening popularity of micro-spikes and studs had flooded the online market with a lot of low-priced options from manufacturers that you’ve most likely never heard of. The advantage of going with one of these mystery brands is the price, of course. But they usually don’t offer much of a warranty. And since we’re dealing something that’s kind of elemental, like not slipping on ice and cracking your femur, you might want to consider purchasing your traction device from a more known and vetted manufacturer.

So here are the brands I recommend—after years of field experience—for each device:

For coil traction, Yaktrax still reigns. A limited 90-day warranty is included and the price from the manufacturer is $22. (But look for for better deals from other retailers.)

For micro-spike traction, Kahtoola leads the way. The warranty for these puppies is 4 years, and they come in larger sizes than other spike models do. The price is $84.

For stud traction, Kahtoola also crushes it. That 4-year warranty applies to their NANOspikes (which are really studs in their shape and design) and they run for $64.

One last thing, before I attempt to venture outside without making a mess of myself. It’s pretty easy to pick up lightly-used traction on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist throughout the year—even during the height of winter! A lot of people buy this stuff with the intention to use it for winter sports like hiking, only to find that winter sports aren’t really their bag. And by then, the return window has usually closed. So they’re forced to pawn the traction off to the masses. You probably won’t be able to get the warranty passed over (you can always ask the seller if they still have the receipt), but scoring a pair of barely-used spikes or studs from a good brand for $30 is a victory worth savoring. Maybe with a crunchy, post-storm saunter to the local park or pub.

If you live east of the Mississippi and you got the hell out of dodge this past Sunday morning or earlier…congratulations, I guess. The rest of us? We ain’t going nowhere.

For the next few days, at least. I’m writing to you from a neighborhood in Boston that looks more like a labyrinth of frozen Stalingrad trenches, surrounded by triple decker apartment buildings and snowbound vehicles. Winter Storm Fern has already earned its place on the Top 10 List of snow events in the city. There may be another round of accumulation this Sunday, but I’m actually not worried about it. Because last Sunday and Monday, I witnessed and participated in something rather beautiful on my street.

I enlisted in the Shovel Patrol.

When you live in a winter city or suburb, nothing ruins the ethereal ambience of snow like having to shovel it—before all that powder hardens into something heavier and more slippery. As someone who barely dodged a full-on lumbar disc herniation some years ago, I have to be really careful about rounding my spine too much when lifting shovelfuls of snow up from the ground. And if you’re shoveling your steps, sidewalk, or car for more than 20 minutes or so, maintaining proper form becomes increasingly difficult. I was dreading this as I stepped out of my apartment the other day, ready to spend at least an hour chipping away at drifts with my blue Snow Joe—as I did on the last street where I lived. But on my current, recently-adopted street, which two friends and I moved to last spring, the act of shoveling fresh snow is more like a block party.

The first sign that shoveling was going to be different this time greeted me as soon as I opened the door and saw the stairs leading down to our street completely cleared; compliments of our next-door neighbors, who had to get up extra early to clear their stairway and get to their hospital jobs on time. They had decided to shovel our steps too, as if they were an extra plate or mug that someone had left on the counter. And down on the street, I caught a gilmpse of the Shovel Patrol—small bands of roving neighbors, snow shovels in hand, digging out vehicles with verve and alacrity. Flakes were falling hard, miniature mountains of jettisoned snow were building up between the parked cars, but the air was alive with small talk and gallows laughter. All that was missing was a cooler of drinks and a portable speaker pumping out Van Halen songs.

Contrary to what you might assume, the Shovel Patrol was not organized in advance. While our street does have an email list, which people use for sharing information on local developments—whether it’s a yard sale or incoming ICE agents—the first round of collective shoveling seemed more instinctually spontaneous. For me, seeing those earliest rotations of the Shovel Patrol was inspiring enough to spark a major wave of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). And that’s how I spent the next hour hacking away at one subsumed vehicle after another, with people I hadn’t met yet, despite the close proximity of our apartments. Once the bitter cold had fully seeped into my gloves, I peeled off to thaw my fingers and rest my back muscles in the apartment; as each of us did at some point, on the understanding that someone else would show up soon.

Again, that’s pretty much how a good old rager works. You show up at the party and you contribute to the chaos for an hour or two. Then you stagger outside when you need a few gulps of fresh air or a stomach-settling snack from the closest 7-11. And then, when/if you’re up for it, you venture back into the melee and you run into new arrivals that look familiar—giving you a second wind and the power to rally. As the afternoon got darker and snowier, word about the Shovel Patrol’s latest exploits hit the neighborhood email list. “There’s a car in front of #47 and the owner has mobility limitations,” one person wrote. “I’m gonna get started on it!” Not wanting to miss this, I clomped back down our stairs in my snow pants and parka, already psyching myself up for re-joining the Shovel Patrol. The first person I saw was my landlord, wandering down the street with his own shovel. I couldn’t tell whether he was looking for some new action to plug himself into, or coming back in from his latest snow clearing shift.

As four of us worked on digging out the sedan parked by #47—with the snow piles now surpassing some of us in height—I found out that one of the patrollers actually lived in another neighborhood on the other side of town. His girlfriend, local and also part of our crew, had conscripted him when he arrived to ride out the storm with her.

“Does this sort of thing always happen here, when there’s a big storm,” I asked her as we scraped out the heavier road salt-infused snow from beneath the vehicle.

”Usually, but not always,” she replied. “This is the biggest turnout I think I’ve seen yet.”

By the time we finished our work on the sedan, I expected to feel physically wasted; in need of a shower beer and a protein-heavy meal. But to my surprise, I wanted to keep going! As did the rest of the crew. So we spent the next 40 minutes or so finding more facilities that needed some shoveling. Sometimes we worked together. Other times we would splinter off and tinker away at drifts individually, but within sight of each other. When I finally did climb the stairs back up to our front door and porch, which offers a nice view of the street below, I could still see Shovel Patrollers under the streetlights.

I’m assuming that Shovel Patrols are a seasonal feature for plenty of neighborhoods. My parents, who live in the suburbs north of Boston, were pleasantly surprised to find that one of their neighbors had shoveled their stairway mid-storm. Why these acts of mutual aid happen on some streets and not on others is an intriguing mystery to dig into. I have some loose threads to poke at. The last street that I lived on was the kind of place where you would often see gardening crews hard at work on lawns, while the people on my current street tend to approach landscaping by rolling up their sleeves and popping an Advil. But bearing in mind that last weekend’s Snow Patrol may have been the largest in a long time, I wonder if a more acute force could be at work here.

These last few weeks, millions of us have been watching one of America’s major cities struggling under what’s basically an occupation by ICE. And the horror of what ICE is inflicting on Twin Cities residents right now is at least matched by the power of how the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul are helping each other weather the storm. It’s incredibly humbling to see people risking their own safety to monitor and record the activities of ICE agents; to offer groceries and safe rides to neighbors who are at risk of being targeted. It’s an escalation of the mutual aid that many people who live in communities impacted by structural inequality have been practicing for a long time.

If nothing else, the events of these last few weeks in Minnesota have shown us that reaching out to help someone struggling can be deeply instinctual for a lot of us and less intimidating if approached collectively. As the writer Adam Serwer observed in a great essay for The Atlantic, that seems to have been a fundamental miscalculation by Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump, in their joint decision to invade and brutalize the Twin Cities. They were banking on a majority patchwork of indifference and support for ICE operations. Instead, they’re running into just the opposite; a city that’s full of people who feel driven to protect their neighbors and push back. We’re seeing glimpses of the same thing up in Maine, where ICE is now targeting Somali-American communities across the state. In other words, they took us for a bunch of assholes, when in fact, millions of us are kind at heart, and compelled to act on this.

When I finally took my hot shower after the last round of Shovel Patroling, I changed into fuzzy pajama bottoms and queued up a classic episode of The Simpsons which I had suddenly remembered earlier that day. The opening is among my favorites. It’s movie night and Bart has procured a VHS tape; the real-life Clint Eastwood Western Paint Your Wagon. (“With blood, I bet!” Homer exclaims, practically salivating as Lisa and Marge roll their eyes.) But then, within seconds of Bart pressing PLAY, Paint Your Wagon reveals itself to be a jovial musical, with all the townsfolk square dancing and singing about exactly what the title suggests. Painting a wagon, and painting it good.

”They’re singing, Marge!” Homer cries, dismayed. “Why aren’t they killing each other?”

Winter in New England is one of the all-time great seasons for what I sometimes call Contrarian Travel—going against tourist wisdom and visiting a place at a time when most people wouldn’t think (or want) to be there. If you’ve ever witnessed a blizzard from the desolate beaches of Cape Cod in December, or shuffled your way across icy streets in Providence to some club where a hardcore punk show is imbuing the night with unlikely warmth, then you know what I’m talking about. The hulking mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont aren’t quite as forsaken during the snowiest months, given the regional popularity of skiing and winter hiking. But on the south end of the White Mountain National Forest, there’s one particular recreational feature that does feel strangely forgotten once the last wisps of the fall foliage have been blown away.

That feature is the Kancamagus Highway; the Granite State’s storied scenic byway that snakes and squiggles just over 34 miles from Lincoln to Conway, passing through the nexus of the Pemigewasset Wilderness and the Sandwich Range. This is a patch of the White Mountains that doesn’t incur the same level of feverish visitation as Franconia Notch or the Presidentials. But every September and October, the world suddenly remembers that this gorgeous mountain-climbing—and descending!—highway exists. And during those two months, “The Kanc” regresses into a ribbony parking lot, with thousands of cars competing for autumnal vistas from roadside overlooks, and top notch foliage immersion in places where the road weaves through deciduous forest.

Now, given the steep dropoff in Kancamagus action once the leaves have gone, you might assume that the highway is closed during winter; when a single snowstorm can easily blanket a scenic byway with 3 feet of powder. But The Kanc doesn’t close. Plows and road salt are deployed to keep the road passable and safe. This is remarkable for a coupe of reasons. It costs New Hampshire a lot of money to clear a highway like The Kanc, and yet, there’s no superlative recreation destination alongside the Kancamagus Highway that might easily explain such an investment. The closest downhill ski resort, Loon Mountain, is located at the western end of the highway in Lincoln. What you do find along The Kanc are quieter natural wonders. Hiking trails to curiously overlooked mountains. Waterfalls and ponds that stir in solitude. And the rocky bends of the Swift River—a roaring behemoth that’s upstaged by the neighboring Saco River. It speaks to the Granite State’s confidence and pride in the White Mountains that this byway is accessible to the public at a time of the year when most folks are hunkering indoors.

And this winter is your chance to visit The Kanc and see where that pride comes from.

When spending a shivery day on the Kancamagus Highway, I generally like to start at the west end in Lincoln. There’s something uniquely satisfying about launching from a place that’s teeming with ski resort traffic and transitioning into a calmer and ethereal realm; where you can really appreciate the luster of ice on evergreen boughs, and the occasional flare of color that breaks through the overcast sky, while you’re enjoying a mountain view from one of the highway overlooks. If there was ever a time and place for having a couple of Cocteau Twins albums in your car, it’s midwinter on The Kanc. The Scottish dream pop band’s magical melodies fit in perfectly here. But regardless of where you end up starting a Kancamagus drive, you’re in for a shitload of serenity.

What happens next, once you’re gliding along the undulations and occasional hairpin turns of The Kanc, really depends on your mood and your appetite for being outside amidst freezing temperatures and abundant snow or ice. If you sprang out of bed that morning, stared at yourself in the mirror as you brushed your teeth, and said, “I must climb something big on this day” (I imagine this is how most mountain climbing trips begin) the Kancamagus offers a nice range of doorways to summits. You could spend a few hours slogging uphill through boreal forest zones to Mount Hancock or the two Mount Osceolas, if you’re thinking of conscripting yourself into the 4,000 Footers club. And if you’ve logged some miles on winter peaks, you could challenge yourself with a Mount Chocorua ascent. The remarkably steep, pointy peak of this visually distinctive, 3,490-foot mountain often necessitates crampons—not microspikes—when it’s solidly iced up. Then there’s Hedgehog Mountain, a less severe destination that used to be the home of a University of New Hampshire forestry camp, for which the trail to the summit is still named. It’s a shorter, less quad-tenderizing hike, but it will still get you huffing and puffing—and sweating beneath all those insulating layers of winter wear.

Occasionally, I’ve found the inspiration to rally and set off for one of the summits off of The Kanc. But each time I’ve turned into the parking area for the Champney Brook Trail (the beginning of the route to Mount Chocorua) my actual destination has been well below the treeline. 1.5 miles of moderately graded climbing along this trail is all that it takes to reach the base of Champney Falls, which spills elegantly down a series of cliff faces during the summer, only to be frozen solid into a curtain of ice in winter. Better yet, directly across from Champney Falls is a deep gorge where an even taller cascade is hidden. Pitcher Falls, a 50-foot plunge cascade, is one of the finest White Mountain waterfall deep cuts. Odds are you’ll have it all to yourself on a winter visit.

The same goes for a more broadly recognized cascade near the midpoint of The Kanc, which requires less than a mile of gently angular hiking. Sabbaday Falls spills 35 feet through an even more impressive gorge, and while the wooden boardwalk and bridge at the top of the falls are closed each the winter, the real pleasure of seeing Sabbaday Falls is feeling engulfed by the elements. The plunge, the sheer cliffs, the prehistoric rock formations, and of course, all those pine conifers that creak in the winter winds. Should you feel the desire to spend more time with these natural elements, you can do that by following the Sabbaday Brook Trail beyond the falls to North and Middle Tripyramid mountains (also part of the 4,000 Footers list) and—if you really feel like tempting fate—to the mysterious and view-less peak that’s called “The Fool Killer.”

Personally, I prefer taking those gambles during seasons when other hikers are more likely to be around and in earshot of my profane cries for help. On my last midwinter visit to Sabbaday Falls, I ended up driving further eastward toward the Conways, so that I could finally lay eyes on a subtler water feature that’s mobbed in the summer. Lower Falls is more like a series of frothy rapids in the Swift River, occurring where the waterway starts descending into the valley. The roadside rest area beside Lower Falls is one of the most popular points along The Kanc—a proven place for picnicking, sun bathing, and actual bathing on the toastiest days. It’s probably dreamy on an evening in July, and the heft of the river seems somewhat understated then; especially if rain has been in short supply. But each winter, when the rapids and mini cascades freeze solid, the chaos and violence of the Swift River (as Werner Herzog might say) become much more visible and compelling. Lower Falls, in its frozen form, is the opposite of some glassy waterway winding through the countryside. It’s a jagged mass of ice and boulders. The occasional exposed jet of water surging amidst the riverscape can look like an arterial wound. It’s beautiful, in its gnarly, disordered quality, and I was the only person standing there gawking at it on the afternoon in January when I paid my visit.

Maybe I’m overestimating how essential these eerie, quieting midwinter experiences are to New Hampshire residents and state leaders. Perhaps the 4,000 Footers and the spells they cast are the raison d’être for plowing and salting The Kanc each winter. 10+ years of writing about walking and outdoor adventure has made me keenly aware that staring at a chunky frozen river on a zero degree day is something of a difficult pitch. But even if the prospect of some good midwinter brooding doesn’t speak to you at the moment, the year-round accessibility of The Kanc keeps that door open; should you change your mind one day. Our impulses and needs can transform unexpectedly, and what we do with our time outdoors is no exception. The idea of winter camping used to make me shudder. The thought of arriving at a tentsite, liberally marinated in sweat after hiking and crawling into a sleeping bag to stay warm, was repellant to me. But when my friend and hiking comrade Laura floated the idea of getting our feet wet with an overnight hike up to Mount Kearsarge near North Conway, something shifted in me. The prospect of a new, shared experience with someone whose company I like was enough to make me re-evaluate my strong feelings about winter camping. What made this possible is the fact that Kearsarge isn’t just there—it’s also easy to get to.

So my hat is off to the Granite State for resisiting its more libertarian-ish impulses and making it possible for people from all manner of backgrounds to experience The Kanc and its frost-burnt gems each winter. It’s easy to imagine a parallel universe in which the state allows the Kancamagus Highway to get so powdery and iced up that it’s only passable with snowshoes and quads of titanium. Luckily, despite the challenges we’re facing right now, we still live in a reality where this corner of the world is considered too enchanting and essential to lose for a quarter of the year. For that, I’m Kanc-ful.