Last winter, around this time—just as the puddles on mountaintops were freezing into beetle-sized skating rinks—I showed up at the Middlesex Fells forest north of Boston to go for a hike with Darren Josey. Or “DJ” to those who know him.

A friend of ours, Rock Fight podcast host Colin True, connected us after learning about a passion we share; outdoor adventuring in the urban areas where the vast majority of Americans live. Darren, who grew up in Greater Boston and hails from the outdoor gear industry, is the founder of two remarkable ventures with a common thread—building outdoor adventure communities within BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities that have been historically excluded from the outdoors.

In 2023, Darren started First Seed Sown—a sales and marketing consulting business tailored for minority-owned small businesses in the outdoor rec sector. And less than a year later, he introduced the City of Malden (where he lives) to The Great Malden Outdoors. It’s a series of free and low-cost outdoor adventure programs for anyone looking to try their hand at not just hiking, rock climbing, fishing, and bike riding, but also outdoor artmaking and more ways of engaging with nature. In 2024, the City began running the Great Malden Outdoors as a bonafide municipal program, working with local vendors and nonprofits to offer broadly accessible outdoor experiences amidst the local woods and waters. And that was Darren’s plan all along.

I’ve been meaning to talk with Darren about his story and his great work for Mind The Moss for almost a year. I’m glad to report that this week, I finally got my act together.

One of the coolest things about the Great Malden Outdoors program is how it shows us that gateways to the outdoors can open up pretty much anywhere. What did some of your early outdoor recreation gateways look like?

Well, the whole idea and sense of place behind Great Malden Outdoors really began with my own lived experience as someone who grew up in the Greater Boston area. Being Black and Puerto Rican, I didn’t have a lot of friends or family who were deep into outdoor recreation. But I had a handful of one-off experiences as a child. I grew up on the Mystic River in West Medford, and my mom and I would sometimes witness the annual herring run while walking along the water. Seeing all of these fish traveling upstream to lay eggs was fascinating to me. And my mom, who’s a public school teacher, was like, “Okay, we’ll figure out how to do something.”

So we went back home and we made this fishing rod with a branch, shoestring, and safety pin. Then we dug up worms, put ‘em in a cup, and walked back down to the river. I didn’t catch any fish, but it still opened up this world to me. My parents eventually bought me an actual fishing rod, which I used for a while. That kind of got lost once I was a teenager. School, work, girls, and the X-Games had most of my attention. But nothing really opened the gate to the outdoors until I started working for an outdoor retailer called City Sports during college.

Wow, I remember going to City Sports in 2012—when they were still in business—to get my first pair of Vibram Five Finger hiking shoes. What was the connective tissue between your role at the store and getting into the outdoor rec scene?

Funny enough, I had been working there as a footwear manager, and I was selling lots of Five Fingers. And during the recession, I got my first real “office job” at Vibram, as one of their two customer service people at the time. I was joining a company of 13 employees that made $9 million that same year. And at its peak, we had grown to 60 people and were bringing in $93 million in revenue. So it just exploded. I learned so much about the business of outdoor recreation, went to all of these outdoor gear trade shoes, and worked very closely with our CEO, Tony Post, and our head of sales. I actually asked the CEO if I should get a Master’s in business, and he said, “No, you’re getting it right now and you’re getting paid to do it. So just pay attention.”

There was an expectation that all of us learn more about the industry and the outdoor recreation landscape. So I started doing more things outside. A coworker took me rock climbing, I liked it, and I kept at it. When a buyer at EMS sent me two sleeping bags and a tent, as a thank you gift for helping them organize their order books, I started camping. Whenever I came into a new piece of outdoor gear through the job, it was like, “Alright, I’m going to try this activity.”

Something you alluded to earlier, which I’d imagine was pretty palpable as you waded deeper into the outdoor recreation biz, is that the scene has suffered from white homogeneity in the U.S.—due to the legacies of racial segregation, exclusion, and wealth inequality. As a young person making a career in this space, how did you find the courage to put yourself out there?

When I was growing up, my parents were pretty blunt in telling me, “Look, you’re going to be in situations and there may be some where people don’t want to see you there…but there may be some where people do. You just have to go out and try.” In a lot of spaces where I spent time as a BIPOC kid in New England, I would be the only person of color. When I would walk into baseball camp or tryouts with my dad—a Black man— we would often be the only people of color there. And I do remember one time, while heading into a new camp, my dad saw another Black father there with his son. He sort of gave him a nod, and then we walked over toward them. It was just the four of us standing there, but we got to know each other, connected, and in a way, we made a little community right there.

That’s something I carried with me, all the way to the outdoor industry—identifying opportunities for building community. There were a few people of color at Vibram, and Tony Post was pretty adamant about how important it was for brands like ours to be representative of the communities that they were selling into. But I would often go to the trade shows and think, “Huh, I’m not really seeing myself represented in the advertising for all these boots.” One of my first BIPOC friends in the industry was Mario Stanley, a professional rock climbing guide…and I literally walked over to him at this one show and was like, “Hey man, we gotta know each other.”

So by now, you’ve been hitting all of these trade shows and making your bones in the business. Is this when the proverbial seed for First Seed Sown starts to form?

So, at that point, I had been working in the outdoor industry for 15 years. I had done customer service, sales, and operations. I also managed some grassroots marketing campaigns, as well as multi-million dollar global budgets. And I had been laid off a few times. The first time it happened was during the pandemic, and after the second layoff, I felt like the value proposition for working in-house under one employer wasn’t there anymore. But I had been fortunate to learn a lot from working for a range of companies, including several smaller ones. The more I thought about these businesses, the more I felt like, You know what? I think it’s time for me to start my own.

That thought process led to me taking all of the things I had learned from the industry to launch First Seed Sown, as a means of offering sales and marketing consulting for minority-owned businesses. While there are agencies owned by minorities, none that I could find were focusing on BIPOC businesses. And there’s a level of trust that can happen when that focus is there. I had gotten to experience that occasionally, from the helping side. When I could, I had tried to spend my marketing budget with athletes, photographers, and partnerships owned by People of Color; to make sure that I was putting the company money into an area where I knew it could provide an experience that wasn’t there. But until the First Seed Sown launch, the closest experience I had to working in a primarily BIPOC business environment was toward the end of college, when I went to LA and worked for The Smiley Group—Tavis Smiley’s TV and radio production company. It was an early experience that demonstrated how a Black man could own and run a vast business focused on representing and staffed by People of Color. Kind of a “hey, you could do this too” moment.

In the time that you’ve been in the outdoor recreation industry, there’s been a lot of discourse about the historic exclusion of minority communities from the outdoors, and the imperative of supporting more minority owned businesses in this space. One could get the impression that things have improved in some respects. But I wondered, in the time that you’ve been doing all of this, from the trade shows to these early First Seed Sown years, what is your perception of how much has truly changed for the better, and how far we still have to go?

After the murder of George Floyd, a lot of companies seemed to be like, “Oh, we’re going to do something about this.” And I think a lot of people, myself included, felt like that wasn’t going to last. Like we were going to see people pay attention to this for a short while, and then it would drop off. And that’s what happened. I think the biggest change that remains is the community building we saw between people from underrepresented groups that fall into the “Adventure Gap.” This is when you have a gap between percentages; say, maybe Black people make up 9% to 13% of a local population, but they’re only 8% of the folks getting outside locally.

People who are in these groups have helped each other and they’re continuing to do so, regardless of whether that’s politically good or bad. We don’t need any company to put up a black square on Instagram to signal to the world that they’re trying to help. We can do a lot more work ourselves.

Which brings us to what you first told me about back on our Middlesex Fells hike last winter: the Great Malden Outdoors. Creating barrier-free local experiences that get folks outdoors, bridging the Adventure Gap locally, seems like the natural outcome of what you’re describing. But of course, you did a shit ton of work to conceive this and get it off the ground, to the point where the City of Malden now owns and runs it as a municipal program. What were the first seasons of Great Malden Outdoors like? What memories spring to mind?

One of the things I’m most proud of is that we got over 1,400 people outside in less than two years. Also, one of our first and largest programs—for people who want to learn how to ride a bike—is now being run by a local vendor. This was a breakthrough because earlier, before they closed their Experiences business, REI had been offering programs like this. But they cost $100 and didn’t come with a bike to keep. Our program cost only $5 and for those who needed it, they got a bike from the Malden nonprofit Bike to the Sea, who took on management of the program. They also hired teens from the community to teach beginner bike riders. We’ve had more than 450 people participate in this program. So that’s another thing I’m really, really proud of, and it’s a program that the city wants to keep running as long as possible.

Another experience that I remember well: We had partnered with the Boston chapter of a national nonprofit called Trout Unlimited to teach a Learn How To Fly Fish course, and we quickly got 19 signups for what was initially supposed to be a 8-person event with a waitlist. This one Muslim-American mother who was on the Great Malden Outdoors mailing list had learned about the course, she thought it sounded fun, and she reached out and asked if she could bring her whole family. Of course, we said yes. Her goal was to create a new way to have fun as a family, and that’s what they did. In fact, they all caught a ton of fish!

There was clearly a demand here that even I didn’t anticipate. If you bring something to people where they live, promote it across multiple languages, and have it cost little-to-no money…I think about all the possibilities. How many more Massachusetts fishing licenses could you sell each year? How many Orvis fishing rods and reels could have been sold at the time when Orvis was closing upwards of 30 retail stores a year? Imagine if the outdoor recreation industry invested more into programs like this, in urban areas where we have a population desperately underrepresented when it comes to outdoor recreation.

There’s also a lot to be said about the potential for more public investment into these programs. Which is why the City of Malden owning and running Great Malden Outdoors was such a big deal to me, when you first told me about it. What was it like, pitching the program to the city?

The pitch was, “We are trying to improve the health, the connection, and the utilization of the city by Malden residents, regardless of their ethnic or income status.” And at the time of the meeting we had reached a point where people from neighboring cities and towns were coming here to recreate outside, while Malden residents weren’t. So the Great Malden Outdoors was also something unheard of around here; a tourism campaign for residents to get out in their own city.

The meeting really became a learning experience for the city leaders, about some of the open spaces that exist here and how people have been using them. I showed the mayor and the city council images of people rock climbing at Pinnacle Rock in the Fells and up on Waitt’s Mount (a stony hill near the center of Malden with sheer cliffs). We talked about how there’s an official HawkWatch site in the City of Malden. And we talked about the need for showing off these beautiful public spaces with programming that’s equitable and accessible, so that more Malden residents and visitors can start using them.

The Great Malden Outdoors was really designed to be adopted by the city. I’d like to be a bit of a Johnny Appleseed and bring this to all 26 gateway cities in Massachusetts, but also to other states and regions of the country. I’ve seen a lot of other states look to outdoor recreation as one of their primary drivers for growth in economic opportunities, because it doesn’t cost a ton of money to begin with. We’re not talking about building new roads or bridges or stadiums. Even when skating became popular in the 90s, you still had to convince the city to find a space and then build a skate park. We don’t have to do that. We already have the rivers, the ponds, the rocks and the common crags. One of the core messages of the program and recent ad campaigns such as “This is your city, Climb it / Hike it / Bike it” is that these public spaces belong to the public, by right. So let’s use outdoor recreation to promote and share them!

I’m guessing that a couple of you are currently thinking about sand, sun, and mojitos right now. Even with America’s air travel system breaking down after months of traffic controller overwork and underpayment, millions of Northern Hemisphere dwellers are still planning equatorial escapes for January and February. For those of you who want to strike that special balance of reveling in Vitamin D and doing something different, I want to use this week’s newsletter to offer an idea, and rekindle a classic Moss series.

Back in 2023, I wrote a bunch of field dispatches called Hike Every City. It was exactly what it sounded like—first person primers on how to take great hike across a city. We explored bushy mountain bike trails in Philly, the unsung gargantuan green spaces in New York that make Central Park look svelte, and Rhode Island heritage foods like hot wieners and “cabinet” milkshakes. In fact, I’ve spent much of the last two years doing more city reporting, with the long haul intention of turning those dispatches into a book called Hike Every City. So as we trudge into the winter, I’m offering a glimpse of where I’ve been doing some of this field research: the salty coastline of Miami Beach.

Just so no one is confused, Miami Beach is very much a part of Miami proper; a city within a city. But it’s also a long barrier island, connected to the hub of Miami by the MacArthur and Tuttle causeways and fully exposed to the thunderous power of the Carribbean and the North Atlantic. South Beach—with its Art Deco buildings, coiffed and tanned specimens, and neon-lit clubs—is only the beginning. The titular beaches of Miami Beach run north of there for several miles. And earlier this year, I wondered what it would be like to hike across this sandy expanse. From the hedonistic glitz of South Beach to a more quietly storied place north of there. But where might that be?

A natural answer was planted in my mind several years back, by a close friend with Miami roots. Haulover Beach, which occupies 177 sandy acres at the north end of Miami Beach, is the home of the largest (sanctioned!) clothing-optional beach in the entire United States. As the crow flies north, it’s just over 11 miles from the heart of South Beach to the nudist utopia of Haulover Beach. The “trail” from between the two beaches could involve sand, pavement, little hidden parks, Cuban restaurants, couture showrooms, public art, and of course, a few of Miami’s iconic midafternoon thunder showers. In other words, a hike across Miami Beach would be a feast for the senses.

But—as I discovered on a partially overcast Saturday back in September—it’s also an elemental adventure, on par with an exposed ridge traverse in the White Mountains.

When people ask, “What’s the difference between a walk and a hike?” (a question I still don’t have a strong answer for), the first thing that springs to mind is weather. When you’re out for a walk and the sky starts rumbling or dripping, you’ll often try scurrying indoors. But if you’re in the middle of a foot journey that you’re calling a hike, surrender may not comeas swiftly—because you’ve committed to being outside for the next few hours, even if “outside” becomes slightly less comfortable. Moments before I set off on my hike from South Beach to Haulover Beach, the meteogological reality of what I was about to do started to hit me, as I sat in the shaded patio at the News Cafe finishing my second cafe con leche. There were clouds overhead but those merciless Miami rays were already scorching the sand and the streets nearby. I had a broad brimmed hat and a giant bottle of sunscreen, but doubt was already setting in.

Things started off pleasantly enough as I followed the winding paths through Lummus Park, which runs parallel to the literal South Beach itself. Roller bladers—basically the equivalent of red squirrels on a Maine Woods hike—skirted past me. An old guy with parrots on both shoulders deftly nodded as I checked out his feathered friends. A few bodybuilders were making good use of the squat rack and barbells in a beachside free weights station. And the crashing of waves nearby was peppered with the laughs and shrieks of families wading into the pastel blue surf; against a steelier looking horizon.

Several blocks north of the park, near 20th Street, I decided to give my body a break from the direct exposure to the sun—super-charged by the reflecting power of the ocean!—by turning inland and continuing north alongside the Collins Canal. It’s one of several waterways that remind you that Miami Beach is ultimately a series of small islands connected by roadways. And whether you’re a wide-eyed visitor or a barnacle encrusted resident of 30 years, these canals also highlight the environmental fragility of Miami Beach. There are ominous What If scenarios to chew on here, as hurricanes in the North Atlantic are strengthened by warming waters. But the existence of Miami Beach is also a wonder to behold. The colorful and unlikely physicality of this thriving and eccentric city is so unlikely that it’s thrilling. Hiking through it all, I had the same rictus grin that forms when I’m ascending a rock staircase or iron rungs up in Acadia.

Still, there’s only so much that the beauty of the backcountry or a cityscape can keep you distracted from the physical tribulations of being outside during intense weather. By the time I returned to the beachside trails outside the Fontainebleu Miami Beach resort—where the current nightly rates start at $449—every inch of exposed skin felt hot. I was experiencing that amorophous and uncomfortable limbo between getting sunburnt (which I was not) and being cooked by the latent heat of the environment (which I would describe as a slow roasting, in this instance.) One thing was becoming clear. I was not going to walk all 11.4 miles to Haulover Beach. BUT…I still wanted to get there and enjoy the catharsis of swimming after a hard hike: this time, butt naked.

So I decided to use one of the great, unsung lifelines of urban hiking—I hopped on a Miami-Dade Transit bus and leapfrogged all the way from 43rd Street to 90th Street. This still left about 3 miles of ground to cover on foot, including the towering bridge over Haulover Inlet—essentially the grand scenic finale before you arrive at the south entrance to the beach. But when I emerged from the bus outside a sushi restaurant, I could immediately feel a change in the atmosphere. The sun’s rays, while not totally snuffed out, were becoming more diluted. The thunderheads that looked distant an hour ago were rapidly congregating overhead. The wind was picking up and making the palm trees sway and rustle. This is what I’ve come to call a Dusty Moment—a knowing prelude to a storm that would have prompted Philip Seymour Hoffman’s irresitible storm chaser Dusty, from the film Twister, to shout, “IT’S THE WONDER OF NATURE, BABY!” before jamming a Van Halen tape into the stereo and flooring it.

I don’t know how many of you have been caught in a Miami thunderstorm before. It’s happened to me each time I’ve visited—which isn’t very often—and it’s the strangest juxtaposition of ecological power and business as usual that I’ve ever seen. Sheets of warm rain hammer the cityscape, sometimes almost blinding in their force or density, and life goes on. Traffic slows down a bit, some people will pivot into the nearest CVS or liquor store, but there’s no collective wave of awe or panic. And in a weird way, this also reminds me of destinations that more of us might associate with hiking. The last time I found myself squelching through a thunderstorm in the forest was up in the Green Mountains, on the way down from the dramaderie-shaped peak called Camel’s Hump. Whooping or wailing as the storm began would have caused the other hikers to stare at me. Because getting heavily rained on is just a part of how things are there.

My main concern about getting caught in this particular Miami Beach cloudburst was finding myself on the elevated stretch of the Haulover Inlet Bridge when the lightning began. I was also mindful of keeping my feet out of any flash-floodwaters that briefly took over the streets. (Fellow flip-flop enjoyers: this is a great way to get a nasty skin infection!) But what I *should* have been thinking about was whether the storm might put a damper on the climatic stripdown and swim at Haulover Beach. If it was a single, passing storm, one could easily wait it out at the closest shelter and then return to the sand. But if the coming storm was just the start of a drenching procession, beach time would essentially be over. I wasn’t quite ready to grapple with that potential outcome.

From the height of the inlet bridge—where I watched a couple of Miami Vice-worthy cigarette boats heading out to sea—I realized just how much of Haulover Beach one must walk to get to the mythic nude section, toward its north end. Upon reaching the other side of the bridge, I picked up the pace, feeling the mileage in my calves and striding past countless people with their towels and umbrellas in hand, returning to the parking lot. I encountered what seemed like endless entrance paths to the sands of the beach, and it wasn’t until I saw a police car up ahead—directly across from one of these paths, keeping an eye out for anybody wandering outside of the sanctioned naturist zone without clothes—when I realized that I had arrived before the storm.

Well, sort of. From the moment when I did as the Haulover Nude Beach regulars do—laying out my beach blanket and shedding the woven shackles of polite society—the first droplets arrived. I stood my ground optimistically, and tried to savor the soggy ambience. There were still people in the water nearby, and after a few minutes of the rain hesitating between “gentle touch” and “full throttle,” I waded in and joined them. But as I dunked my head, the first crack of lightning flashed across the sky. And just like that, it was over; at least fifty of us re-emerging from the surf, awkwardly pulling on our damp, sandy shorts, and calling it a day. It was as though we had wheezed our way to the very top of Mount Moosilauke, just in time to touch the old summit cairn before a sudden winter blizzard forced a frenzied mass retreat down to the treeline.

Except this retreat wasn’t frenzied. It was calmer—humbled by a sense of inevitablity, and a certainty that many of us would be back, in better conditions. Because, after all, cities are where the vast majority of us live and work. For Miami Beach residents and visitors alike, a return journey to a wondrous place like Haulover Beach is a lot more likely and feasible than a sophomore attempt at climbing a mountain that you barely got to enjoy the first time. But still, I wondered: How many of us would hike there...?

The South Beach to Haulover Beach Traverse
Hike distance: 11.4 miles point-to-point (with optional public transit detours)
Elevation gain: 56 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

While we’re on the subject of urban hiking, here is some really cool and belated news. The folks who brought us the San Francisco Crosstown Trail and Double Cross Trail are at it again! Now you can *perambulate* SF on the Roundabout Trail; a 37 miles-long juggernaut that features well-known landmarks like The Presidio, Fort Funston, and the Embarcadero, along with hidden bangers such as the Vistacion Valley Greenway and India Basin Waterfront Park. Due to my work schedule and travel budget limits, I don’t know when I’ll be able to get out west and explore this beautiful monster a trail. So if you manage to check it out anytime soon, I’d love to hear about your experience.

And finally, to close us out this week, here’s Lifelike—one of my favorite electric music producers—with his sonic tribute to Miami. Listen to it with the top down, if you can.

A few months ago, I sent out a survey to all Mind The Moss readers to try and get a better sense of where all of you are reading the newsletter from. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of you who responded identified as residents of the northeast United States. (For its first 3-ish years, Mind The Moss was described as a newsletter about “unusual hiking in New England.”) So, I’m going to wager that most of you know at least one person who has left the northeast for less expensive territory beneath the Mason Dixon line; in the broad, solar-poached region that’s known as the Sun Belt.

These days, most Americans reside in metro regions due to the availability of jobs and recreational amenities. And America’s housing affordability crisis is particularly bad in and around cities like New York and Boston which have pretty much been spared from economic shock events and the manufacturing declines that have sent other U.S. cities into long periods of stagnation. These once depressed cities are now attracting those of us who are being priced out of the northeast (and also the west coast cities).

Now, I could take us deep into the weeds of how we got here—our anemic housing construction record, the financialization of housing, and other forces. But I’m going to leave that to the hundreds of other writers who are already untangling those threads.

What I want to tell you about this week is the physical reality of moving and living in a major Sun Belt city during the summer. And two different versions of that city’s future.

Less than two years ago, my friend and former co-worker from the White Mountains, George Heinrichs, relocated from Seattle to Dallas for a new job. He went in with an open mind, aware that things would be very different in Texas, but intrigued by the promise of great food, interesting cultures, and the ground reality of living in the Lone Star State. I decided to go and visit George in Dallas at the height of summer, after he told me about nights when the outdoor temperature was 90 degrees after sundown. I guess you could chalk this up as solidarity between old friends, but I wanted to suffer a few days of a Texas summer with George. I needed to know what 90 at 9pm felt like.

The short and most honest answer is that it’s hellish. You step out into the night from whatever air-conditioned venue you’ve been sheltering inside (which is basically any indoor venue in Dallas) and the fetid, moist air seems to coat every exposed inch of skin and the insides of your breathing orifices. The streetlights are on, the lawns are shining from their latest sprinkling and stirring with tree roaches, and the clicking of woodland cicadas in the branches overhead plays like an overture. That’s the scene if you’re in most residential neighborhoods of Dallas, which can feel more suburban in layout. The city center swaps grass and trees for pavement, and it’s common to see lavishly-dressed people rolling into restaurants and nightclubs long after dark. Why? Because Dallas has been slowly roasting all day, under the big, merciless Texas sky. And it will take all night for that latent heat to start dissipating. People come out at night and they stay out late, before another day of cycling from one indoor, freon accented place to another, almost always by car. Dallas has been built for cars, and during the most blazing months of the year, the city sidewalks often appear empty.

BUT there are exceptions. Consider the Katy Trail, a 3.5-mile greenbelt path that was once part of the Union Pacific railroad line. It runs through the neighborhoods of Oak Lawn and Uptown, northwest of downtown, and it’s flanked with arbors, grassy plants, and shrubs. George learned about the Katy Trail in the weeks before his move from the Pacific Northwest to Dallas, and when I walked it with him for the first time this past year, I was struck by three things. The Katy Trail is the only trail of its kind in the heart of Dallas. People were using the hell out of it. And on the trail, sex was in the air.

One of the peculiar things about Dallas is how it combines the objectification of high fashion hubs like Miami with the conservative values and gender roles that we often associate with the Deep South. A lot of people in Dallas go to great lengths and costs to look their hottest, so that they can establish a family in which Dad brings home the bacon, Mom coordinates the housekeeping, and the debutante ball is just around the corner. Joining the river of humanity on the Katy Trail felt like wandering into a meat parade; a procession of skintight spandex, chemically-enlarged biceps, and surgically-enhanced chests. It’s the only trail I’ve hiked where the scenery made me wonder what my ass might look like if I tried using anabolic steroids, as a lot of folks are now doing.

@amandatwellAll hope isn’t lost in finding love on the Katy!! (Just not with me🤪) break out those tennis skirts ladies!! But it you’re going to shoot your shot just make sure it’s in daylight and you don’t sneak up on her 😅 #katytrail #dallas #dallastx #texas #dating

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Now let’s remember, Dallas during daylight hours—in the summer—is excuciating. The abundant pavement turns the city into one big heat island. In some places, you would need a death wish to willingly walk 3.5 miles outdoors in the mid-afternoon. Still, the Katy Trail is reliably active throughout the day. While the peak crowds congregate in the morning and evening, there’s always a range of jacked and tanned denizens on the trail during the toasty interim. Some of them are aiming for the Katy Trail Ice House; a charming beer garden alongside the trail, with plenty of misting fans. Others might be making their way from the gym back to their apartment or house. In other words, the Katy Trail is one of those great urban trails that offers recreation and convenience in one package. And it really makes you wonder. What if Dallas had more walking trails?

Well, as it turns out, they do. And the other thing that inspired me to visit George in Dallas last weekend was the Northaven Trail. A major escalation of the Dallas Parks Department’s plan to increase multi-modal infrastructure in the city, the Northaven Trail stretches a whopping 9.3 miles through residential burbs on the north edge of town. The trail follows a power line corridor for much of the way before crossing the city’s main highway on a new pedestrian bridge and connecting with the White Rock Creek Trail; a paved walking and biking path that leads to White Rock Lake. (A vast reservoir with waterside paths that are popular for runners, cyclists, and fisherfolk.)
As George and I planned my visit, we grasped the possibilities. From the start of the Northaven Trail, not far from George’s townhouse, we could use the two trails to go all the way to White Rock Lake; a walk of 17.4 miles. In Dallas. In the middle of summer.

If you’re wondering, “Why on earth would you do that to yourselves?” believe me, we asked ourselves the same question aloud the night before, as we filled our daypacks with sunblock, salty snacks, water bottles, and every piece of sun protection gear we owned. And what we kept coming back to was the improbability of something like the Northaven Trail in Dallas. Here was a long distance trail where you could walk, built in an environment where walking for more an hour could kill you. What this signals, on one level, is the cultural impact of walkability in American cities. Even here, in one of the hottest cities in the U.S., policymakers were explorig ways to get Dallas residents out of their cars. The odds were grim, and yet, the Northaven Trail was built. It seemed unlikely that many people would be walking it on a Saturday in August. So George and I decided to be bodies on the trail. Kind of like the three people who went to see Kevin Costner’s Horizon: Chapter 1 in a theater; to show that this was for somebody. Maybe.

We agreed on a 5:30am departure from George’s place, to maximize our time on the Northaven Trail before the Texas sun rose high enough that the homes and the trees along the trail would no longer be able to hold back its glowing wrath. We dressed in shorts, moisture-wicking shade hoodies, and broad brimmed hats. For this hike, I had brought a special sun hat which included a rear neck brim so large that it looked more like a cape. And yet, for the first hour of our trek to White Rock Lake, George and I got incredibly lucky. The projected high for the day was “only” 95 degrees, and the early morning clouds merged with nascent sunlight to create a wondrous backdrop for the walk. The landscape was spare and open, with only the occasional shade tree, and it looked even more epic with the occasional lone jogger or walker passing us, heading out to the vanishing point. For a moment, we felt the magic of urban hiking in Texas.

But the reverie was short-lived. Because by the time we reached a local YMCA and availed ourselves of coffee there, the sun was ascendant and the sweat was already beading on my backside. And this was when George and I noticed something about the Northaven Trail that could be a real challenge for the growth of the trail. Unlike the Katy Trail, which offers plenty of connections to adjacent businesses and residential areas, the Northaven Trail primarily runs through the latter territory. If you live around here and you’re walking your dog—or commuting from your place to a friend’s—that’s fine. But if you’re searching for a trail in Dallas for stretching your legs, finding some new haunts, and maybe grabbing some afternoon delight, the Northaven Trail would probably be a tough sell. It’s long, it’s brutally exposed to the sun, and once you’re on the Northaven Trail, you’re really on it. And you could be on it for a pretty long time.

This became more visceral when George and I approached the Central Expressway, where the new and admittedly impressive pedestrian bridge offered safe passage above 12 lanes of traffic. The trail took us up a winding ramp to the bridge, with no shade whatsoever. The bridge itself was long and meandering, to strike a balance between looking cool and getting across all of those lanes of angry cars. And on the other side, the descent toward the intersection with the White Rock Creek Trail was also shade-free. It was just south of 90 degrees when we crossed the bridge, in full sun. If it had been 10 degrees warmer—which is not uncommon in Dallas—crossing the bridge could have pushed the hike from Type 2 Fun to Heat Exhaustion Medical Emergency. Because you are traversing that bridge for a solid 20 minutes, at least.

As the White Rock Creek Trail took us into a slightly leafier stretch of path along the titular creek, which had that green sheen of Texas waterways that’s uncomfortably ambiguous in origin, I had to ask a question. Is walking sustainable in Dallas? There’s certainly a version of the future in which more of Dallas does exit their cars; in which you can put on your most revealing outfit and go to a singles event on a trail, like the one that a local influencer hosted on the Katy Trail back in June. But this version of Dallas is at least partially dependent on the summers not becoming too much hotter. And by most estimates, summers throughout the United States are moving in a very bad direction. As the journalist Yasmin Tayag wrote about for The Atlantic recently, summers are getting so infernal that a growing number of people are experiencing seasonal depression symptoms that are often associated with the winter months, when longer nights and shivery weather send millions of us indoors. If the average daily high temperature in Dallas keeps climbing, that will start to have an impact on the number of people you see on city trails. The sidewalks might be even emptier. Life in summer could retreat even deeper indoors. On our Northaven Trail walk, George and I saw a tiny fraction of the folks that we had glimpsed walking just a mile on the Katy Trail, during my earlier visit. Most Northaven Trail users were on bikes, to avoid being under the sun for too long. Walking the trail was an adventure, and a penance.

But even out there, we occasionally encountered other walkers. A man with a white handlebar moustache taking his Basset Hound for a stroll. A younger woman who seemed to be doing a workout inspired by Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. It was a reminder that Sun Belt cities like Dallas, for all their elemental challenges and the specter of climate change looming over all of them, are still crackling with life. A move to the Sun Belt, in this period of climate change, can seem insane. Affordable housing in less sweltering urban areas like Buffalo or Pittsburgh does exist! But the Sun Belt continues to stir something in the imagination, and the City of Dallas’s late breaking effort to bring multi-modal trails to the cityscape feels similarly fueled by an optimistic, irrepressible dream. If we build this, people will come. And they will walk.

It was enough to lure George and I onto the Northaven Trail and the White Rock Creek Trail, which led us to the shores of the manmade lake around noon. And of course, the prophecy was fulfillfed by the Katy Trail’s raging success. Will these trails and others like them lead Dallas into a future that’s less automotive and isolated? A future where you can hop onto a trail to buy some avocados, show off your huge lat muscles and tiny waistline (some call this a Dorito,) and stumble across a new mosaic tile mural?

Maybe we’ve reached the point in our climatological roadmap where that outcome is a fool’s hope. But even if we’re cooked, reality has rarely stopped Americans from doing what they want. If trails are on the menu in Dallas, build them. Some of us will come.

Northaven Trail and White Rock Creek Trail to White Rock Lake
Distance: 17.4 miles point-to-point
Elevation gain: 341 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

You know what’s great when you’re on a long, scenic walk someplace where the birds are screeching and the grasses are rolling like an ocean? Not walking, but still moving. Take the Stockholm Archipelago Trail, which runs 167 miles across 21 islands. When it’s time to hop from one island to the next, you step aboard a ferry or climb into a row boat, make your way across the water, and resume your hike. Closer to home, there’s something special hidden in the northeast edge of the White Mountains; a cable car strung across Austin Brook, which you have to cross when hiking to Dryad Fall. You need to use a rope to pull the car over the brook, which offers a nice change of pace from negotiating the rocks, roots, and puddles that New England trails are made of.

But what if you could create something like this on an even mightier scale? A Planes, Trains, and Automobiles style trail that combines different modalities into one route? We tend to think of trails as venues for singular activities—usually walking or biking. And yet, when we’re walking around the places where we live (cities especially) we’re often mixing and matching modes of transportation. You walk to a subway station, ride the train across town, walk another couple of blocks to your date’s place, and then the two of you pick up rental bikes and pedal to your favorite park to picnic and make out. Maybe you catch a ride home, or perhaps it’s such a beautiful night that you walk.

Again, what if this could be a trail?

The next time you find yourself near Portland, Oregon, you don’t have to wonder about this. Because in the late 2000s, a local father and son duo created the 4T Trail, a loop around the west side of the city that features four methods of movement that begin with the letter T. The lion’s share of the route is a series of Trails through the wooded hills and ravines near Homestead and Portland Heights. Then, you ride an aerial Tram down to the edge of the Willamette River. From there, the MAX Trolley takes you into the heart of Downtown Portland, where you close the loop by catching the Train to the Oregon Zoo (from which you started the woodland Trails portion.) I’ve spent a lot of time poking around urban trails in the U.S. and aboard, and I’ve never seen anything quite like the 4T Trail elsewhere. Even more remarkable is the fact that the founders, Don and Eric Baack, were able to persuade the City of Portland to fund infrastructure for the 4T Trail, such as metal signs that you’ll find posted along the route. While it didn’t happen overnight, this is a striking breakthrough, as city governments can be aggressively wary of urban trail concepts that they didn’t come up with themselves.

I’ve got family in Portland and before learning about the 4T Trail, I had already spent some time on each featured modality. The idea that you could combine them into a hiking route fascinated me; not just because I’m one of those Millennial transit nerds who goes weak in the knees for a train connection in a forested area, but because the multi-modal trail—if embraced and realized in more places—could change the way we think about hiking and trails in general. Treating a more passive means of movement like riding a trolley as part of a trail experience expands the scope of who can enjoy a trail. In most cases, stepping from a literal built trail onto a train would signal the end of a hike; or in some cases, bailing on a hike. But when that train is just as much part of the adventure as the sauntering and scrambling, climbing aboard no longer comes with a sigh of relief or defeat. The train suddenly gleams with intrigue and possibility.

I know this because last summer, I paid a 36-hour visit to Portland on my way to see friends in Seattle, with the intention of checking out the 4T Trail for myself. I prepared accordingly by eating a McIsley breakfast sandwich (fried chicken, pickles, mustard, and honey) from Pine State Biscuits, before catching a city bus from the east side of the river to downtown. There I would kick off my 4T traverse with the Trolley segment.

While you could start the 4T Trail from any point, I was fixated on two things. I wanted to feel the satisfaction of climbing high into the hills, without doing any cardiovascular work, and this meant that I would have to take the Tram up to the Trails. I also fancied the idea of finishing the 4T Trail within walking distance of nourishing lunch options, like the pork and sugarcane shrimp vermicelli bowls at Luc Lac Vietnamese Kitchen. Jumping onto the Train after finishing the forest Trail chapter would allow me to end up back in the heart of the city, where the restaurants and bars are most concentrated.

Now in the interest of properly setting expectations, I should say that the magic of the 4T Trail didn’t take hold immediately. From the MAX station at the intersection of SW Morrison Street and SW 11th Avenue, the trolley headed south toward the water and it felt just like that; a trolley ride through an increasingly pavement-heavy stretch of the waterfront. As far as I could tell, I was the only rider aboard the trolley wearing hiking boots and carrying a backpack and a trekking pole. But it wasn’t until I disembarked and approached the ticket window for the Portland Aerial Tram when I started to feel the crackling excitement that manifests when you’re going someplace unfamiliar. The towering height of the tramway surprised me and as I watched one of the gondolas descend toward the station, a thought crossed my mind—a thought which has never crossed my mind in the middle of a hike. In three minutes, I am going to be airborne.

An aerial tram is a special offering that does not appear on the average city menu of mass transit options. If you’re in Portland, a ride up or down the scenic tram is worth every penny, given the views of the city, the river, and Mount Hood. I took all of this in with about 20 other passengers crammed into the bubble-like gondola, and even the kid in front of me who had been glued to some superhero game on his iPhone was eventually taken aback (quite vocally!) by how high we were now soaring above the cityscape. I’m not sure if Don and Eric Baack always envisioned the tram as being a part of the 4T route, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the entire concept grew from here; from wanting to create a trail that included a ride on the aerial tram. If you’re going to create a multi-modal trail, you should incorporate the coolest options for mobility. In San Francisco, that would mean cable cars. In New York, you could throw a horse drawn carriage ride in the mix. And in Lisbon, a funicular lift would be a no-brainer.

Still, if we’re talking sheer mileage and time spent moving from one place to another, the Trail portion of the 4T Trail is the heftiest chapter by far. From the very top of the tramway, I wandered into a complex of medical buildings that were part of Oregon Health & Science University (OSHU) Hospital. Here I felt even more out of place as a gear-clad day hiker, and sure enough, the trailhead for the Connor Trail—the first of several interconnected paths that the Trail portion follows—was practically hidden at the far end of a parking lot. But a colorful 4T Trail sign posted near here confirmed that I was on the right track. Minutes later, after skidding down a series of eroding switchbacks, I was in a chirping forest so rich with ferns and Douglar fir trees that it felt like a worthy backdrop for one of the Jurassic Park sequels. Occasional wooden bridges offered passage over streams descending toward the city center. Pieces of woods-adjacent houses peeked through the trees. And when I finally hauled my way out of the understory to the exposed, grassy high point of Council Crest Park, I was rewarded with a far-off view of Mount Hood’s snowy cone, and a foreground view of a septic tank truck rumbling away, its hose attached to one of the park porta potties.

Go for a hike in a city or any residential area, and you will run into a juxtaposition like the state’s grandest mountain and the transference of raw sewage at some point. In this case, the binary forced me to say goodbye to Mount Hood quicker than I would have preferred and retreat into a nearby grove of flowers with my shirt over my nose and mouth. But underneath the shirt, I was smiling. The unlikeliness of natural and built elements colliding can be its own form of amusement or joy. And an hour later, when I approached the parking area for Oregon Zoo, I experienced the latter. A little elevator took me beneath the zoo, into an underground train station where gigantic silhouettes of giraffes and elephants were painted on the walls. It was a reflection of the wildness—the life—that existed on the surface. Not just the resident animals, but also the trees, the leafy plants, and the waterways that thrive around the Oregon Zoo.

How many hikers would find their way down here after an hour or two of sweating on the trails nestled in Portland’s hills, if Don and Eric Baack hadn’t cooked up the 4T? I’d imagine the figure would be vanishingly small, given our siloed way of thinking about trails, movement, and what qualifies as a hike. But as I mentioned earlier, millions of us are already undertaking journeys like the 4T Trail every day. Conceiving of them as trails would be like flicking a switch buried in the mossiest recesses of our brains. It’s hard to know what prompted the Baacks to make that quantum leap. But they did, and Portland is richer and more readily explorable for it. The 4T Trail signs were installed in 2009, which is really bugging me out. I mean, just think about that for a sec. 2009! Obama was our new president back then. Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger had just saved an entire planeful of passengers by landing in the Hudson River after some geese got sucked into the jet engine. KFC was peddling the infamous Double Down sandwich.

I mention all of this to illustrate how much time has elapsed since the 4T Trail came to being, and how under-realized the idea still is. Any city and a great deal of towns could host a multi-modal trail like the 4T. And maybe the next trailblazer could be you! Hell, it wouldn’t be half as tough and time-consuming as mapping out a cross-town trail that’s built around hiking or biking exclusively. Scouting the route would mean logging some miles in the field, on foot. But it would also take a lot of riding and gliding too. Maybe you’re already doing some of that riding or gliding, as part of your daily commute. So the next time you’re getting groceries or going to the doctor, ask yourself a question.

Could this be a trail?

You might be surprised.

Portland’s 4T Trail
Walking distance: 7.3 miles point-to-point
Elevation gain: Roughly 800-1,000 feet
CLICK HERE for trail maps and directions

Now here’s something you probably won’t have to worry about on a multi-modal trail in a residential area. As reported by Michael Hill for the Associated Press, a bull moose is currently occupying a popular trail in the Adirondacks. (It’s the Goodman Mountain Trail.) Granted, “occupying” might be the wrong word here, since the moose is pretty much on its home turf. But a state scientist is quoted describing this bull moose’s behavior as “very unusual.” The 900-pound chunker has been sitting beside the trail and foraging around the trail. All of this reminded me of a *huge* moose that took up residence near Madison Spring Hut in the White Mountains, back when I was working there in the summer of 2011. We called her Lola. One afternoon, I emerged from the crew shower (located outdoors) and was greeted by Lola, towering above me. To this day, when getting out of the shower, I occasionally sniff the vicinity for moose musk.

While we’re on the subject of potentially dangerous situations in the outdoors, take a minute to consider why RFK Jr. is making the rounds on social media platforms this week. Not because he’s hacking away at our confidence in vaccines, and not because somebody dug up an old photo of him partying with Jeffrey Epstein, but because he apparently wears jeans while hiking. Now look; I’m hardly a purist when it comes to orthodoxies about what you should or shouldn’t wear in the backcountry. When I’m hiking through tick-infested areas, I prefer shorts to long pants because I can easily spot and remove the little fuckers that try to hitch a ride on my exposed legs. But in my decades of experience, wearing jeans on a hike—especially an extremely hot hike like the one that RFK Jr. recently took on Arizona’s Camelback Mountain—is a great way to develop a heat rash on your lower extremities. Judging from the uproar over this, I think that Tim Walz was onto something (before he was basically forced into a straitjacket by the Harris/Walz campaign management) when he recognized that the MAGA crew is not just cruel and vindictive and narcissistic. They’re really weird too.

The next time you’re splayed out on a picnic blanket at your favorite park, or huffing some essence of azaleas at a community garden, take a moment to consider how much we’ve recovered from the Industrial Revolution. Back in the late 19th Century, when textile mills and steel plants speckled the shores of our lakes and rivers, cities were literal shitholes. Most of the manufacturing plants were powered by coal-burning steam engines whose emissions billowed from smokestacks, shrouding the cities in smog. Oil, debris, and other industrial wastes were dumped in waterways. And as if the factories weren’t wreaking enough havoc, lots of city residents had to take sewage disposal into their own hands, due to the lack of indoor plumbing at the time. The Ned Flanders types would take pails of odorous refuse to a designated dumping site, and everyone else would just fling their turds out the windows, pedestrians be damned.

Leafy and flowering parks where you could escape the cacophony and squalor—as envisioned by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux—were the cure for this mass scale poisoning. And while New York may have gotten the party started with Central Park and Prospect Park, few American cities leaned into public parks like Chicago did. By the time Al Capone and Eliott Ness were in a shooting war with each other during the Prohibition era in the 1920s, Chicago had constructed so many parks and gardens that the city motto was Urbs in Horto, which is Latin for “City In a Garden.” And yet, the City of Chicago is more like the nucleus of an extremely large and colorful atom. The city is surrounded by an expanse of green and blue space, with Lake Michigan to the east and a labyrinth of woods, wetlands, and creeks wrapping around the other sides.

A couple of years ago, I learned that you can thru-hike around this landscape. You set off from Buckingham Fountain in the city center. You follow 210 miles of paths and streets. And when you finally make it back to the lakeshore and gaze across the water at the high-rises of downtown Chicago again, you have become a different person; toughened by the chigger bites, the sunburns, and the thorns embedded in your pants. How is this possible? Because back in 2017, local explorers created the Outerbelt Trail, which forms this sprawling circle around the City in a Garden and Cook County.

And last week, I spent 48 hours thru-hiking part of this trail with one of the architects.
As in, hiking the trail, sleeping in a tent along the trail, and hiking onward the next day.

This is, to put it mildly, something that you cannot do in most American metro areas.

Just like the San Francisco Crosstown Trail and Boston’s Walking City Trail, Chicago’s Outerbelt Trail is a patchwork of walkable paths through forest preserves, meadows, and other green spaces flanking the city. One of the people who spent innumerable hours investigating these trails and finding the places where they run into each other is Jay Readey; a lawyer, social entrepreneur, and president of the Outerbelt Alliance, which steers the Outerbelt project. As Jay explained to me during our first collegial phone call a few months ago, the Outerbelt route was sculpted by the notion that you could follow waterways to Lake Michigan and the city. And some of these waterways and smaller water bodies along the Outerbelt are legal camping areas. I use the term “legal” because lately, a number of cities have been enacting tent-camping bans; as a response to more people becoming homeless and living in tent encampments. It’s an unfortunate type of posturing that doesn’t actually address the roots of the issue (the cost of housing and health care) while at the same time taking something away from everyone. Learning that you can actually sleep in a tent in the Chicago metro area, as part of an overnight backpacking trip, was all that it took for me to call Jay again and ask if he and any of his friends felt like a midsummer expedition on the Outerbelt Trail.

”Let me ask you something,” Jay said, a few days before I boarded a plane to Midway. “How backcountry do you want this to be?”

”What do you mean?” I asked.

”Well, when it comes to meals, we could coordinate and pack our own food,” Jay said. “Or…since you’re visiting…we could truck some local delicacies into the campground.”

”Oh.”

”The nature preserve where we’ll be camping is only five minutes up the road from Aurelio’s, which is the pope’s favorite place for thin-crust pizza. Or so they’ve said.”

There was a pause as I imagined tucking into a pepperoni pie steps away from my tent, as a fuschia sunset flared through the trees and the mosquitoes stirred to life.

”Backcountry is overrated,” I finally said to Jay.

The Outerbelt was designed with connections to the city center in mind, and after spending my first night in The Loop, I rose at sunrise, I put on my bulkiest backpack (which was stuffed to the hilt with camping gear), and I walked over to Union Station to catch a Metra train to Calumet; on the south side of the city. For our thru-hike, Jay and his comrades had selected a long and winding piece of the Outerbelt that runs through some of the bushier and lonelier woods around the city—woods where the trails are maintained somewhat passively and are prone to plant overgrowth during summer. Jay met me at the train station, pulling up in a well-weathered pickup truck plastered with bumper stickers that serves as the official Outerbelt Alliance service vehicle and goes by the name Trucky Truck Truck. Our hiking companions for the day were newly-minted graduates from Wheaton College who were spending the summer working with Harvey Conservation Corps—an AmeriCorps-funded program focused on revitalizing parks, community gardens, and preserved green space in the Chicago area.

Since this was city thru-hiking—as opposed to the Spartan purity of backcountry thru-hiking—we decided to make things easier for ourselves by loading some of our heftier camping gear into one car and leaving it at the Homewood Izaak Walton Preserve; our destination for the day’s end. Less encumbered (a wise idea, given that temperatures were climbing into the low 90s), we piled into Trucky Truck Truck and motored over to the northeast tip of Lansing Woods; a snarly parcel of forest where we picked up the Outerbelt. The hike began on a deceptively cushy note, as we followed a paved biking and walking path into a sun-splashed field. Then, Jay indicated that it was time for us to veer left onto a less-traveled path. At a glance, the entrance to this path appeared invisible. I was staring at a wall of dense vegetation that would almost certainly leave a rash if you weren’t wearing protective clothing. But then, through the leaves, I saw a little pink flag planted in the ground. These flags have been continually installed along shaggier sections of the Outerbelt as low-impact and low-cost trail markers. And sure enough, after we pushed through the barrier of leaves, we stepped onto a legible path.

Now, I’ve logged a considerable amount of mileage on urban trails, and most of them occupy a solid middle ground between the extremes of built environments and natural environments. On some trails, you might occasionally wander through a more extreme built space, like the outer edge of a cat food factory or a pavement-heavy area that’s short on shade trees. But the Outerbelt Trail is the first urban trail I’ve hiked that offers you a taste of the natural world at its most extreme. The ribbon-like paths that we took through Lansing Woods were a testament to the regenerative power of local plants. It wasn't long before we were wading through tall grasses and leafy plants that looked a lot like stinging nettle. Occasionally the flora towered over our heads. While some of the pink flags planted in Lansing Woods had been removed, enough remained to help us avoid losing the trail. Another affirmation that we were on the right track was a lone elderly gentleman who we crossed paths with on the periphery of a reedy meadow. He was out for a daily ramble, sporting an enviable bucket hat and undaunted enough to be out there in shorts. (The rest of us had worn protective trail pants, at Jay’s urging.)

The woods provided essential shelter from the full heat of the day, and as we crossed a busy road from Lansing Woods into North Creek Meadow Forest, two things were becoming clearer. The first was North Creek itself; one of the Outerbelt’s numerous trailside waterways, bound for Lake Michigan. But the other thing was the amount of grueling work that went into not just scouting the Outerbelt loop, but revisiting many of its pieces and keeping the brushiest bits visible. Adam and Erik, two of the Harvey Corps. workers along for the hike, had actually spent the last few days re-visiting the segments on which we were walking; to gauge any obstacles like trees blown down during a storm or poison ivy overgrowth. In some places, this must have felt like bush whacking, which...well…if you’ve ever bush whacked, you’ll know how tough it can be.

The forests through which we were hiking are managed by the Forest Preserves of Cook Country, but “managed” might be a generous way of describing how the trails through the forests are maintained. For his part, as one of the Outerbelt’s principal creators and advocates, Jay understands the constraints that the FPCC faces, which seem to stem from liability concerns. (In 2014, Chicago Fire actor Molly Glynn was killed in a freak accident when a tree fell onto her during a bike ride in suburban woods north of the city.) “But here’s the thing,” Jay explained to me. “The FPCC also makes it clear that hikers can go anywhere in any preserve, with the caveats that they’ll be traveling at their own risk and should practice a ‘tread lightly’ ethos. So there’s a lot of latitude for people to reclaim prior trails or to go where the deer blaze trails.” The permanence or sustainability of those trails, as Jay sees it, just depends on awareness and traffic. The awareness part is harder without the ability to place signs on the trails with FPCC permission. But in the current era of GPS maps and apps, physical trail signs aren’t as essential as they once were. The visibility of the Outerbelt Trail really depends on more hikers using the shorter paths that it’s made of. Regular use makes the paths more accessible and inviting, and the Outerbelt Alliance seeks to get more people using them; while at the same time supporting the mission of the FPCC by promoting minimally invasive land use ethics. “We want to support the trail without overwhelming the sanctity of the FPCC, which hosts the trail,” Jay said.

The timing of our conversation about ethical land use was curious, as we were only a stone’s throw from Thornton Quarry; one of the world’s largest aggregate quarries, at 1.5 miles long and 450 feet deep. An eye-popping place of extraction, which you can see from Interstate 294, the quarry will remain an active harvesting site for another 200-ish years. (After which it could be rewilded.) But the quarry is also home to the Thornton Reservoir; a floodwater storage space connected to an extensive network of underground tunnels that run beneath the adjacent suburbs. The idea here is that if you can concentrate abundant rainwater and all of the shit that it picks up, then it’s less likely to end up in Lake Michigan, recreational green spaces, or your basement. The reservoir project is a more utilitarian demonstration of how industrialized space can be leveraged to do something more ecologically responsible; just as the parks and preserved woodlands that we now hold dear turned cities into livable places.

The Homewood Izaak Walton Preserve—which we staggered into at 4pm, soaked with sweat and covered in forest detritus—is flanked by railroad infrastructure. You would never know this, given the immensity of the trees, the prominence of the natural sand dunes that you can glimpse here, and the serenity of the onsite ponds where visitors come to fish long after sundown. But the preserve is one of innumerable examples of what’s possible, when it comes to reclaiming and re-greening land in urban areas. We had to detour slightly away from the Outerbelt Trail to reach the preserve, and being able to camp there for the night was something that Jay had negotiated. But if you’re thru-hiking the Outerbelt, you’ll find more reliable camping options at trail-adjacent spots like Camp Bullfrog Lake in Willow Springs, or Camp Shabbona Woods in South Holland. Some of these campgrounds even have cabins, and while getting there may require a quick rideshare lift from the trail, the Outerbelt Alliance is working on making these trailside tenting zones more visible for subsequent waves of urban thru-hikers.

Where does it all lead? What’s the lasting outcome of this collective labor, beyond the Outerbelt Trail itself? It’s too soon to know, but what’s thrilling about the Outerbelt Trail is how much Jay and his comrades are going for it and grasping for the full extent of what urban hiking can look like. As I occupied one of the bathrooms, stripping down and giving myself a sponge bath with wet wipes before changing into fresh clothes, I realized I had never done anything like this before. And the next morning, we would do it all over again, with a new team of Harvey Conservation Corps, on even less traveled paths in these south side woods. It was tough to conceive of this as I emerged from the bathroom, just in time to catch Jay heading toward one of the picnic tables with a giant box from Aurelio’s Pizza in hand. I was exhausted, in the best way. We made fast work of the pizza, seizing upon it like a pack of Velociraptors as the sun went down. I had to trust that a night of tossing and turning in my sarcophogus-like tent would be enough to have me recharged and ready for Round 2 the next morning. But just to be safe, at Jay’s recommendation, we decided to end our night with one last indulgence.

We squeezed into Trucky Truck Truck and crunched out of the parking lot, as two cars driven by night fishermen arrived. We drove past rows of single family homes, with the windows down so that we could feel the muggy breeze on our bare skin. Five minutes later, we were standing in line at the local Dairy Queen; a lone source of luminance in an otherwise darkened part of the cityscape. Other people were gathered there too. A few of us took our frappes and floats over to a gigantic tree on the edge of the parking lot, and we sat on a wooden fence beneath the branches, which felt like the arms of an old god hovering over us. We were in the garden. And yet, we were still in the city.

To learn more about the Chicago Outerbelt Trail, including hiking advice, CLICK HERE.

I also recommend this story by Diane Penningroth, a writer and copy editor at Midwest Living who decided to circumnavigate the entire 210 mile trail. To read it, CLICK HERE.

Since we’ve officially entered summer blockbuster season, I want to take the opening moment of this week’s newsletter to recognize a decades-old cinematic franchise that serves delectable Grade A cheese like no other. The Rocky movies. Sylvester Stallone could have called it a day after Rocky nabbed the Best Picture Oscar in 1977. Instead, he wrote, directed, and starred in Rocky II, taking the franchise into unabashedly hokey territory. And this led to one of my all time favorite movie montages; a ridiculous yet inspired scene that makes me laugh and smile.

Rocky is just a few days out from his big rematch with Apollo Creed, which can only mean one thing. It’s time for another training run, set to Bill Conti’s brassy Rocky theme! But this time, Rocky doesn’t go it alone. As he jogs through Philly’s railroad corridors and the Italian market, onlookers greet Rocky and cheer for him. And some of the onlookers start running with Rocky. By the time Rocky reaches the Ben Franklin Parkway, thousands of Philly residents are jogging behind him, as he makes the final push to the art museum stairs. I mean, really, people. Are you not entertained?!?

The Rocky II training montage is one of the sweeter demonstrations of how a local underdog can get people into streets. Sometimes, the underdog might even get them moving across town together, fueled by belief in something unlikely. So a few weeks ago, when I heard that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was going to spend a summer night walking the entire length of Manhattan Island, I paid attention.

Mamdani—or Zohran, as many of his supporters refer to him—is a three-term New York state assemblyman representing Astoria, Astoria Heights, and Ditmars-Steinway in Queens. Last fall, he kicked off his bid for the Democratic Party nomination for New York mayor as a longshot candidate. As unapologetic democratic socialist, running for the highest office in the national capital of finance, Mamdani earned himself an enthusiastic base of supporters by proposing a more affordable city for eternally-squeezed New Yorkers; with interventions such as rent stabilization, city-run grocery stores with lower food prices, and fare-free bus routes. One of these supporters was Brad Lander, the city comptroller and a fellow primary candidate, who reciprocally endorsed Mamdani near the end of the race. It was a natural alliance, as both men shared a more egalitarian vision for New York and they had also demonstrated fighting spirit when confronting ICE officials over the deportations of New Yorkers.

All of these things put Mamdani at odds with not just the right, but Democratic Party leaders who have spent the last three decades operating on the premise that cool ideas and confrontational energy must be watered down to appease the conservative movement—which has taken advantage of this placation to grab even more power. So it was clear from the beginning that running the standard electoral campaign with buttoned-up TV ads wasn’t going to cut it for Team Zohran. The illuminating, funny, and moving social media videos created by the campaign team were set in New York staples like bodegas, Halal carts, and parks. In retrospect, these videos feel like an incremental buildup to the cross-Manhattan walk that Mamdani and his team took on Friday June 20th; a documented 16 mile journey from Inwood Hill Park to Battery Park.

“We’re outside because New Yorkers deserve a mayor that they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at,” Mamdani says with a grin toward the beginning of the walk video. And what follows is a Rocky-eque montage of Mamdani and his supporters doing something that a lot of politicians talk about but few actually practice—meeting people where they’re at. Anyone who’s spent time in New York during the summer knows that New Yorkers utilize every available space for hanging outdoors in the afternoon and evening. And as the video progresses, we see these folks talking with Mamdani or saying hello from their camp chairs, storefronts, and stoops. Some of them join the long walk. Others offer vocal confirmations that they voted early. The ensemble cast of the video—the New Yorkers—are multiracial, multigenerational, and they seem pretty stoked.

Now obviously, when it comes to public events, any campaign video highlights exactly that; the highlights. I’d imagine that Mamdani and his fellow walkers also encountered jeers, indifference, and plenty of odd looks on their way to Battery Park. But when the video of the cross-Manhattan walk went live on YouTube and all the social platforms, media outlets took note. And several of them seemed to ask, “Really? They actually walked from one end of the city to the other? Huh.” But it was a perfectly fitting finale for an uncommonly energetic and intrepid primary campaign.

A few weeks ago, I attended a community hike on Vermont’s Lamoille Valley Rail Trail led by Bernie Sanders (which you can read about here.) But where the Bernie hike was more of a walking town hall—and a lovely one at that—Zohran Mamdani’s walk has the aura of something more self-deterministic. Something that feels essential right now.

Every time I walk around New York, I’m struck by the dichotomy of what I can see around me, and what goes unseen far above me. These higher powers, veiled from sight in high rises in the Financial District and Midtown, exert a level of influence that shapes the visible environments where millions of us have fallen in love with New York. The poverty that’s grown more noticeable in recent years across New York and pretty much all American cities is the cruel, logical result of decisions made hundreds of feet above the street level. Jordan Neely, the 30 year-old homeless Street performer who was strangled to death by Daniel Penny after experiencing a mental health crisis on an MTA train two years ago, is one of thousands who might have experienced a different life in a cityscape less lacerated by inequality, austerity, and police violence.

A kinder New York.

And yet, New York is a kind city. In my opinion, no other place better illustrates the difference between “nice” and “kind.” In passing, New Yorkers—and us Bostonians—are not the nicest people you will meet. We can be rude and surly. But when you’re in need, a softer side of us tends to come out. If you’re boarding a bus and struggling to keep balanced, someone will usually vacate their seat for you, and they’ll often do so with a smile. Or suppose you just found out about a loved one being rushed to the hospital, your cell phone is about to die, and you have to finish the call; when you ask people on the street if you can borrow their phone to finish the call, someone will say yes. Even the needs that city residents learn to tune out, like people who are unhoused asking strangers for spare change, are usually met by somebody. This is kindness.

But circumstantial kindness from one person to another is not enough—especially at a moment when many of the actors that helped put Donald Trump back in the White House are trafficking in narratives of cities as lawless hellholes. These stories are crafted with one intention; to make people scared of the systemic poverty that’s grown much more noticeable in cities like New York and San Francisco, as wealth inequality worsens and safety nets are broken. The killing of Jordan Neely is the sort of atrocity that happens when people decide that the appropriate response to these glimmers of profound suffering is to become hard-hearted. To decide that some people are beyond help.

There is another way forward, however. It involves channeling the kindness that lots of us have offered or received as individuals into something bigger that’s capable of sweeping across the city. And toward the end of his cross-Manhattan walk video, Zohran Mamdani touches on this.

“To everyone who pulls me aside to whisper, with the best intentions, “You have already won,” I am sorry, but the days of moral victories are over,” Mamdani says, his voice rising. “Because this is a campaign that is going to win on June 24.”

Mamdani’s walk across Manhattan wrapped up around 2:30am at Battery Park. The walkers and onlookers who hadn’t retired by then headed home and went to bed.

On Tuesday, they voted.

And they won.

Rustling dune grasses. Chattering gulls. The foamy, softly roaring maw of the Atlantic Ocean. The coast of Massachusetts might be the state’s most iconic feature—a place of wonder, where you might encounter anything from a violet dusk worthy of Winslow Homer, to a whale carcass breaking down under the sun. But I want you to take a stab at guessing the percentage of the Massachusetts coastline that’s open to the public.

An optimistic 80%?

A more cynical 30%?

Something in the middle?

If you wagered any guess within that spectrum, I hate to tell you that it’s time to grind that number down….by a lot. The most recent state survey of Mass. coastal access was done about 30 years ago, and it found that only 12% of Massachusetts’ coast is publicly accessible. The other 88% of our shoreline is either privately owned outright, or only accessible by people who happen to own private property along the coast.

Let me explain how this works. In most states, it’s legal to own coastal property down to the high tide watermark. The intertidal zone between the high tide line and the low tide line is usually considered No Man’s Land. But Massachusetts is one of a small handful of states where you can own the beach all the way to the low tide watermark. If you own a beach house on the North Shore that’s near a crowded public beach, and a couple of beachgoers wander beyond the confines of that beach onto your beach, by rambling through the intertidal zone—which, again, is legal in most of the U.S.—then you have the right to tell them to buzz off, and to call the cops if they refuse to leave.

What this means, in practice, is that a lot of Massachusetts residents and visitors will never set foot on the sands during the height of summer. The small handful of public beaches that don’t come with subtler restrictions like Resident Only parking rules are reliably packed. And some of them, such as Crane Beach, carry hefty admission fees for vehicles. But my intention here is not shitting on The Trustees, which manages the Crane Beach grounds and imposes fees. The level of activity concentrated upon Crane Beach and others like it requires a ton of management resources, and all of this is the logical conclusion of Massachusetts’ beach ownership policy. The majority of us are forced to share a pithy slice of the shoreline, while a lucky few get to bask in the rest of it. So you might wonder; What would happen if I knowingly crashed a private beach?

The short answer to that question is, a lot could happen. Your beach trespassing foray might go swimmingly! Or a coastal home owner might spot you, confront you, and tell you to leave. They might ask politely, or they might scream at you until they’re purple in the face, which happens more than you’d think or hope. You might be able to settle the matter by walking away. Or you may find yourself having to feign ignorance, if the home owner calls the cops and they actually show up. “I didn’t know that the intertidal zone if off-limits too,” you can say. They might buy it. Or they might give you a citation.

Given these potential outcomes, why trespass on a privately owned beach in Mass.?

Last year, I teamed up with adventure photographer Dan Brown and I penned an 8,000-word story about beach trespassing for the 203rd issue of Mountain Gazette (which you can still get your mitts on by clicking here.) The thing that inspired Dan and I to go for a legally dodgy beach walk from Provincetown to Truro—following the footsteps of Thoreau—was the realization that even if the Massachusetts legislature chose to open up the intertidal zone to the public, enjoying our newfound right to walk in that zone is probably still going to feel like trespassing. For the early years, at least. When Rhode Island opened up more of its coast to the public, it didn’t take long for local media to circulate a rather wild story of a beachgoer who was assaulted by an adjacent home owner. The latter had spotted the former and ordered them to leave. And when the beachgoer stood their ground and correctly asserted their legal right to be on the beach, the homeowner snapped their beach umbrella and chucked it into the surf.

The cops were summoned and thankfully the beachgoer was not improperly cited or arrested. And that, of course, is the difference between what can happen if you walk the intertidal zone in Massachusetts at this time, and what might happen if that zone becomes public domain in the future. Nonetheless, there’s a potential social benefit that comes with a trespass walk; for the trespasser and even the landowner. And that is having a reasonable discourse about your presence on the beach. That’s something the state cannot facilitate. Learning how to co-exist with each other on the coast is a task that will be left up to us, even if the intertidal zone is given back to the public. The journey that Dan and I took down the inner Cape last summer was a useful exercise in having conversations with fellow beachgoers and home owners, in which neither of us assumed the worst of each other. That’s not to say that every exchange went down harmoniously (and sometimes one bad exchange is all it takes to end a trespassing walk) but we returned home from our walk mildly sunburnt, moderately dehydrated, and cautiously hopeful about whether Mass. residents can grow to share the sands.

We also saw a colorful range of beautiful and strange things along the beaches that connect Provincetown and Truro. Cumulonimbus clouds! Seaglass art! A mystifying amount of dead bees in the sand! Enough seaweed to choke a Mosasaurus! Walking through territory where walking is possible but not technically allowed is a classical genre of adventure. And if you’ve made it this far and still haven’t thought, “Nope, not for me,” I’m going to share some field tested advice—in the event that you want to hit Cape Cod and follow in the footsteps of not just Thoreau, but Dan and myself as well.

Recruit your accomplice(s) thoughtfully

As much as some of us enjoy a good solo walk in a wild place, traversing the beaches from P-Town to Truro is a riskier undertaking that’s best done with a small unit. And the task of recruiting your accomplice(s) requires consideration beyond, “Who’s up for getting extremely pruny feet from having to walk in the tidewaters for a few hours?”

If you have a hiking buddy who’s prone to getting testy when confronted by other folks, this is not the adventure to invite them on. The same goes for any friends who might feel the string of a trespassing citation extra hard—such as a friend who was arrested or fined for something else within the last year or two. Exposure to the teeth of the law is going to be different for each of us and unfortunately, that’s a really important thing to mull over when considering a foot journey along most of the Massachusetts coast.

So what should you look for, in an adventure buddy for this particular adventure? An appetite for sun, sand, and surf, of course. But also a knack for de-ecalating situations that might get tense. Courage. And openness to changing plans on rather short notice.

Know your entrance, exit, and at least one escape hatch

Dan and I began our beach walk at Provincetown’s Commercial Street beach—one of the town’s publicly accessible beaches. For our destination, we chose Corn Hill Beach; a more seluded beach in Truro, roughly 8 miles from Commercial Street beach by foot. We staged one of our cars at Corn Hill earlier in the day. (We had to buy a beach day pass for this.) Then we took the other car back to P-Town, left it there, completed our walk in about 6-7 hours, and drove the staged car back to Provincetown to pick up the other vehicle. This is one way you might approach planning a Cape Cod beach voyage.

Or you could pick alternative origins and destinations. Fancy a shorter walk? Consider ending your journey at Cold Storage Beach instead of Corn Hill. Again, you will need to buy a pass to leave a car there. But it will shave a few miles off the journey, which can be a blessing when your quads and calves are tiring of walking across shifting sands.

But there’s an equally important thing to know, before setting off on a beach walk in Cape Cod. What’s your escape hatch? Let’s say you run afoul of an angry home owner and have to get out of dodge. Or you’re feeling parched and woozy from the sun. You will want to identify at least one place along the route where you could bail early. You’ll pass a lot of paths and staircases connecting the beach to the mainland, but most of these will be privately owned. So the escape hatch should be a public beach or way. If Corn Hill Beach is your destination, Cold Storage Beach is a solid escape hatch. It may mean having to summon an Uber or walk along the shoulder of a road to make it your closest staged vehicle. But such is the nature of walking where walkers aren’t wanted.

Consider leaning into the loopholes

While there’s not that much daylight between the letter of Massachusetts’ beach laws and the art of walking the forbidden coast, there IS one loophole that you might find useful. You see, being able to own the intertidal zone is a law with colonial-era origins. And when our regional ancestors crafted this law, they were at least resonable enough to include a couple of carve-outs—for common activities that can happen in a private intertidal zone. The exceptional activities are fishing, waterfowl hunting, and boating.

The inclusion of boating (toward high tide) and the exclusion of walking is especially frustrating, as this basically criminalizes your feet making contact with the sand in any way. But still, let’s think about those other two activities. Fishing, and hunting for water birds. Carrying shotguns on your beach walk is surefire way to make flashing squad car lights appear in the distance. But carrying fishing rods is another matter.

If you want a little extra padding, legally speaking, you might bring a fishing rod with you on your walk. You don’t actually have to use it. The rod is just a prop that you can point to, in the event that somebody takes issue with your presence in the intertidal zone. And just to make it convincing, you should probably bring a small tackle box as well. Having the rod won’t guarantee being left in peace, but who knows? It may help!

Mind the tides

Maybe this goes without saying, but before embarking upon your beach adventure, it’s really important to know the tidal sequence for that day, by taking a look at a forecast. To leave plenty of time for your walk and lower your odds of having to wade through knee-deep surf—or having to take your chances on a private stairway to higher ground—you will want to set off midway between high tide and low tide, for a 9-hour window.

Be cool

Tempting or intuitive as it might feel to begin your beach trespassing adventure with a righteous chip on your shoulder, you’re going to want to resist the urge to antagonize the local homeowners. Go in hoping for the best and be ready to be conversant and humble. If someone asks you what you’re doing, try saying, “Oh, I’m just out for walk,” and try to avoid adding a scowly, Clint Eastwood-esque “You got a problem with that?”

At the same time, be prepared to bail or pivot if you do run into truly nasty characters. If that happens, try your best to keep your cool; focus on de-escalating by getting out of the area and nothing else. If your beach walk does end this way, let yourself feel all of the feelings that accompany exclusion and unreasonable aggression. The beach laws in Massachusetts are fucked up. The fact that the state still hasn’t updated them for the 21st Century, with our summers getting hotter and muggier, is outrageous. If nothing else, remind yourself that acts of protest—which a beach trespass is—have a way of accruing when there’s a lot of distance between civilians and elected leaders.

You’re not the only person to try walking through the intertidal zone, and you won’t be the last. But hearing about your walk (or witnessing it!) might cause someone else to care about beach access. And in this time of chaos, that’s localized a victory in itself.

If you dug this week’s Mind The Moss story, I *highly* recommend checking out the work of Chris Burrell, the GBH journalist who has been The Guy covering the beach laws in Massachusetts. I learned so much from his stories; they opened my eyes to the absurdity of this land ownership policy and the growing tide of public opposition.

”State law and town rules keep most of the Mass. shoreline off-limits.” Chris Burrell, GBH
”Historic racism still raises barriers to beach access.” Chris Burrell, GBH
”Mass. residents are clamoring for more beaches. The state says it’s listening.” Chris Burrell, GBH

You also might enjoy this feature that I wrote The Boston Globe’s Ideas section a few years ago. While this week’s story was focused on the privatization of the intertidal zone, the sneaky rules that towns employ to block access to beaches that are legally public (such as Residents Only parking rules) are a problem too. And one innovation that could solve this problem would be having transit authorities run seasonal buses to the beaches where the public is allowed to splash and tan. I’d ride one! Would you?

Finally, the “Locals Rule, Tourists Drool” exclusionary energy that lingers over beaches is not just a Massachusetts problem. Surfers run into this too. That amazing scene in Point Break when Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze get into a fist fight with a gang of psycho surfers that includes Anthony Kiedis? It’s instigated by Keanu having the nerve to surf at one of these fiercely-guarded beaches. That’s just one iconic scene, but the recent Nicolas Cage film The Surfer builds an entire thriller out of this scenario; not a waterside fist fight, but the shock and humiliation of being kicked off of the beach by local asshole surfers. I saw it a couple of weeks ago and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

You know That One Day in spring, when you wake up and find yourself feeling more turned on than you’ve been since October? When I say “turned on,” I’m talking about the totality of mind and body energy. You’re able to appreciate the delicate flavors of your morning coffee or tea. You can feel the warmth of those sunbeams refracting through your bedroom window, bouncing off the walls. And when you eventually step outdoors and get an immediate noseful of allergens, you couldn’t care less about the sneezing fit that follows. To paraphrase the early 2000s Christian metal band P.O.D., you feel so alive. It might as well be the very first time. And there’s no denying spring.

The rebirth of the landscape each spring actually precedes another epic flourishing of new life. Summer and early fall are the peak seasons for baby deliveries. Odds are you know somebody who’s getting close to their due date. That’s just how the conception calendar has historically worked out. (I mean, let’s be real: Would you rather conceive during the fetid humidity of midsummer, or during sweater season?) But some of us get started earlier, and this week, I would like to introduce you and the whole Mind The Moss community to my new baby. A very big baby, born just a couple of days ago. . .

Originally conceived during the summer of 2024—which gives us a gestation time of about nine months!—the City On The Hills Trail is the newest addition to Boston’s trail labyrinth. It’s a juggernaut of an urban hike; starting on the banks of the Charles River at Millennium Park, on the edge of the city in West Roxbury, and running 31.1 miles to Castle Island, where you can gaze at Boston Harbor and watch some seagulls fight over spilled french fries from Sullivan’s seafood shack. The City On The Hills Trail is an east-to-west sibling to Boston’s Walking City Trail, which meanders just over 27 miles from the Neponset River in Mattapan to Bunker Hill Monument. The two trails briefly intersect atop Mission Hill, forming an octopus-like shape across the City of Boston.

Continuing the Walking City Trail’s narrative—celebrating Boston’s green spaces and the many shapes and sizes in which you find them—the City On The Hills Trail is split into five segments of 6-7 miles each. You can hop aboard an MBTA bus or train at the start, midpoint, and ending of each trail section. Local outlets for grub, libations, and mid-hike shopping become more frequent as you walk eastward from the river to the harbor. And the range of green spaces that you encounter along this journey is really something. From vast, chirping forests and wetlands in Chestnut Hill and Brookline, to little-known hilltops and community gardens nestled in Roxbury and Dorchester, you’re hiking through over 40 verdant oases spread across nine city neighborhoods. If that’s not an invitation to take the train, ferry, or freeway into Boston right now, as the trees return to full color and the once-dormant flowers bloom like hell, I don’t know what is.

Those of you who read Mind The Moss regularly most likely know that I’m the guy who started the Walking City Trail, despite lacking any background in land management or construction. Both the Walking City Trail and the City On The Hills Trail are examples of a new, grassroots approach to trail building—a model known as the Instant Urban Trail. It’s basically an act of walking space curation. You find a cool path through an urban green space that offers some sweet scenic features. Then you find a similarly interesting street (or a series of streets) that connect to another green space. Rinse, repeat. Then, you come up with a catchy name. You make some maps and directions for your route. You throw them on a website, and BOOM! You’ve got a new urban trail.

Instant Urban Trails have been mushrooming up from the sticks and streets in a lot of cities lately. Worcester, Mass. cranked out the East-West Trail, which goes from Lake Quinsigamond to The Cascades. San Francisco has gotten some major press for the Crosstown Trail and the Double Cross Trail—which showcase some of the city’s best forests, canyons, and high points. And one of the volunteer trail builders who helped bring the City On The Hills Trail to life is Mike Tormey, a Boston-based transportation planner who created the 177-mile Denver Orbital Trail while he was living in Colorado not long ago. The DOT, as some call it, is a gigantic circle around the Denver area that features not only mountains and meadows, but weirder places like a cat food factory where the emissions made Tormey’s eyes water as he sauntered along the fence. “It’s weird and interesting and gritty,” Tormey told me last year for an Outside story. “It’s one strange moment of a big, long urban trail, and part of the broader urban environment.”

This idea of telling the complete story of the cityscape and what it’s made of—from the naturalistic to the gritty—had an influence on the layout for the City On The Hills Trail. Working with a theoretical map of the route that I put together last summer, after poking around the parks and streets between West Roxbury and South Boston, a crew of us ventured out into the elements this winter to walk, test, and finesse each section of the proposed trail. And the thing that we found ourselves debating most often was the connections between the featured green spaces—connections that involved built environments that are often busy and cacophonous.

For example: the Allston section of the trail decends the open hillside of Ringer Park and then uses Commonwealth Avenue to reach the quieter, greener streets of north Brookline. Initially, I had thought of using a much quieter street that runs parallel to Commonwealth to make the connection to Brookline—knowing that a lot of hikers might prefer to avoid the congestion of Comm Ave. But during our scouting walk, volunteers made a persuasive counter-argument. If the trail was rerouted to Commonwealth Avenue, to get from Ringer Park to Brookline, it would offer people the chance to walk right past the old apartment building where Aerosmith lived and held band practices in the early 1970s. We gave it a try, digging the historic easter egg, and in the process, we found a bonus ecosystemic oddity; a USPS mailbox that Allston’s pigeons appear to have chosen as their neighborhood toilet.

We rerouted the trail.

The “we” here is important, because more so than the Walking City Trail—which began as a solo project and evolved into a collective endeavor, as people attended the public trail walks that I organized—the City On The Hills Trail was a group project from the beginning. Those of us who created the final, cemented version of Boston’s Walking City Trail started talking about the possibility of more trails connecting more Boston neighborhoods as far back as February of 2023. The concept for the City On The Hills Trail was the logical sequel to the Walking City Trail; a companion route that would cover neighborhoods not featured along the latter, with the same foundational theme. And while the rough draft trajectory of the City On The Hills Trail is something that I cooked up on my own, the trail as it now exists reflects a collective imagining. Some of the best turns and gems along the trail—such as a hidden lookout point up on Savin Hill where you can gaze toward Downtown Boston—were suggested by the volunteer urban hikers who came on the scouting walks. The trail is better thanks to their ideas.

I hope a few of you have already grasped what I’m building toward here: You could do this too, in your city or town. You don’t need official permission to create an Instant Urban Trail (as long as it’s made of spaces where the public can walk freely.) You don’t have to do a feasibility study or hold a series of community meetings to discuss the idea. In fact, it’s probably best that you don’t hold any town hall-style meetings about a project like this. Because those kinds of meetings tend to become reactionary. When you ask the public to help you form a consensus about whether a community project should or shouldn’t happen—whether it’s a new affordable housing complex or a new trail—fear of change can suck the oxygen out of the room. Most Instant Urban Trails are created by small groups of people, who invite the wider public into the trail project through events like organized walks along the trail. What this approach says is, “This thing is happening, and we’d love for you to be a part of it. Come take a walk with us.”

So when you embark on your introductory ramble along Boston’s City On The Hills Trail this spring or summer, take a moment to sit with any flashes of inspiration that come. Start asking yourself questions like, “What story would I want to tell with a trail across my hometown?” or “Who would my accomplices be, if I actually decided to build one?” Think about whether your trail would be a local resource, sculpted by input from the walking public, or a secret passageway that you and your co-creators could return to. And if you decide to take the former approach, consider the season(s) when you’d be most excited about spending a lot of time pushing aside branches, tiptoeing around puddles, and scribbling down field notes about the benefits of one path across a park versus another pathway. If you’ve ever created a website—even an extremely simple one—get ready to dust off those Squarespace or Wix skills. And if you haven’t, see if any of your friends have ever dabbled in this space, and think about recruiting them.

There’s so much more I could say about this, and I’ll save it for the guide to building an Instant Urban Trail that I’m working on right now. It should be coming out by June. But for now, enjoy these sultry mornings and afternoons—before the inferno of summer—with a walk across Boston’s greens and grays. Hike the City On The Hills Trail, in as many or as few pieces as you like. And when you’ve finished the trail, do let me know by sending me an email. You will be rewarded for finishing, sometime later this year.

Boston’s City On The Hills Trail
31.1 miles point-to-point
1,834 feet of elevation gain
CLICK HERE for maps and directions

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out a brief survey to Mind The Moss readers with paid subscriptions—with the intent of finding out where exactly MTM readers are reading from, and where they’re likely to walk. This week, I’m sharing that same survey with the entire Moss community. I’d love to get a sharper sense of the geographic reach of the newsletter, so that I can ensure that I’m publishing place-centric writing stories that are useful to most of you. Of course, not every Mind The Moss story is centered around walking destination ideas. But I know this is one of the top reasons why many of you subscribe to the newsletter; to find cool places for walking. Already, thanks to those of you who filled out the survey, I have a better understanding of the locational scope of the Moss community. So if you haven’t completed the reader survey yet and have a minute or two for doing so, I would appreciate it so much. CLICK HERE for the survey. And thank you to all of you for subscribing and keeping the Moss flourishing!

RECOMMENDED READING

- ”You can walk across San Francisco in a day. Here’s how.” (Chaney Kwak, National Geographic.)
- “S.F.’s newest urban hike is 15 miles of pain and bliss.” (Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle.)
- “Visit dozens of Seattle’s best parks on this Olmsted walking route.” (Terry Wood, The Seattle Times.)
- “A 27-mile community-made trail brings urban hiking to Boston.” (Alysa Guffey, The Boston Globe.)
- “Instant Urban Hikes Are Popping Up in U.S. Cities.” (Moi, Outside.)

One of the perks of running your own publication is being able to make new editorial decisions without getting the approval of a board or a billionaire owner. I could redraw the Mind The Moss logo with lightning bolts extruding from the first “M” and the final “S,” in the vein of the Metallica logo. But this weekend, I’m announcing a meatier new offering; a recurring newsletter series called WALK STARS in which we meet a prolific walker who’s doing something really cool that involves exploring the world on foot.

The first time I spoke with Laura Zurowski was in 2023, during a visit to Pittsburgh centered around one very unique feature of the Steel City—over 700 staircases nestled in the mountainous wooded hills that surround the city. Zurowski, a writer, photographer, and walking tour guide, has spent the last several years documenting the roly-poly beauty of Pittsburgh’s hidden stairways, or “city steps” as most Pittsburghers call them. The steps were created during the industrial era to make it slightly less arduous for workers to commute to the steel mills from their homes on the slopes. Today, they’re a beloved recreational resource and a portal to the city’s history. The South Side Slopes Neighborhood Association, which helps look after many of the steps, leads an annual fundraiser called StepTrek that features a communal circuit hike on the stairs. Taking part in that urban hike was what brought me to Pittsburgh, and into Zurowski’s orbit.

Because the steps are so numerous and different in their composition and size, they can surprise you. It wasn’t long after Zurowski moved to Pittsburgh from Rhode Island in 2013 when she had one of these encounters. “I learned that there was this huge flight of stairs down from the street that I was living on, which would allow me to descend to the neighborhood of Polish Hill, where I have some friends,” Zurowski remembers. “So I thought, “I can take stairs down to Leslie's house, and then we can walk over to our favorite bar, I can have a few beers, and then I can work them off; on the return journey back up the hill.” But it was early summer and as she began using the steps with greater frequency, Zurowski was startled by how quickly the stairway was overwhelmed by fresh bushels of Japanese knotweed. The plant growth was so thick and relentless that Zurowski soon found the staircase impassable. “Since I was the newest person in the neighborhood and using these steps on a pretty regular basis, I went back to my house, I got my clippers, and I just went to work,” Zurowski recalls.

Zurowski’s self-appointed role as a step steward points to a much older and bigger challenge for Pittsburgh residents who enjoy using the stairs recreationally—and those who need the steps to access bus stops or neighborhood businesses. In the 1980s, as Pittsburgh lost a great deal of its population (and tax base) amidst the decline of the steel industry, the city stopped maintaining the steps. Some of them crumbled and others were ensnared with plants. The city also lost many records of the steps. In fact, it wasn’t until 2015 when a University of Pittsburgh geographic systems professor named Bob Regan released a full accounting of the steps with his book, Pittsburgh Steps: The Story of the City’s Public Stairways. Regan had spent years biking and walking around Pittsburgh, to confirm the existence and accessibility of the forgotten steps. And when Zurowski discovered his book, an idea began stirring to life.

“Bob had graciously given his data to the city, at their request, so that they could make digital maps and databases that would help more people access the steps,” Zurowski told me. “But when I picked up Bob’s book, one thing that really jumped out at me was the 34-page appendix at the back; which basically explains where all 739 of the steps that he had found on his journey are located. And I wondered how long it might take to go out and visit all of them.” Poring over online maps, Zurowski estimated that she could recreate Regan’s 20-year journey in a quarter of that time. But heading out and finding the steps was only half the allure; Zurowski wanted to chronicle them in her own way.

”What I was starting to realize as a new resident is that Pittsburgh’s steps are a super important feature in the collective memory of the city,” Zuroswki says. “The steps hold a fond place in a lot of people’s hearts. They can be a window back to one’s childhood and to very unique stories from those years.” This is one of the reasons why Zuorwski decided to document each stairway that she located with a Polaroid Spectra camera and a short written creative non-fiction story inspired by her time walking on the steps. Zurowski published her photographs and stories on a website and Instagram account called Mis.Steps, which soon garnered a very large following from within and outside the city. And as the project progressed, Zurowski started to meet more Pittsburghers on her walks and through the Internetu—Pittsburghers who were eager to share their own step stories with Zurowski, before she set off to revisit their favorite stairways.

”There’s one woman who lives on the south side of the city who told me how well she remembers sitting on the steps near her house as a little girl, all excited and waiting for her dad to appear on his climb back up from work,” Zurowski told me. “And then there are the recurring stories that I’ve heard from lots of different folks; stories about how the steps were places where you could escape your parents if you wanted to smoke a cigarette, drink a beer, or spend some time with your girlfriend who your mom hated. You know, if you're living in a small house and you’ve got brothers and sisters, you’re living in an environment where you don’t have much personal space. And city steps can end up becoming third places, where you can freely gather or engage with others.”

Ongoing waves of development in Pittsburgh, coupled with the population loss from which the city hasn’t fully recovered, can make these shared memories of steps feel borderline endangered. “Pittsburgh is a very different city today compared with 40 or 50 years ago, and now there are lots and lots of people who don’t realize that there used to be steel mills here; let alone that there are all these stairs,” Zurowski says. It took around five years for Zurowski to reach the 739th staircase that Bob Regan had documented in his book. And during that time, the City of Pittsburgh had made huge strides towards digitizing old city maps and records that had been temporarily lost or squirreled away in a storage facility when Regan was mapping the steps. What this newly available information revealed for Zurowski and other step aficionados like her was that there were even more lost staircases around Pittsburgh, waiting to be found.

During the Mis.Steps years, Zurowski had become friends with Regan and two fellow step chasers; Matthew Jacob, who created the city’s database of public stairways and other public assets for public works, and Charles Succop, the city archivist. And as they considered the rate at which the city was transforming and the revelation that the Pittsburgh steps ecosystem was bigger than they had realized, Zurowski, Jacob, and Succop started mulling an idea—a vision for a new book about Pittsburgh’s labyrinth of steps. And one of the primary components of the book, in addition to unearthed history, would be blueprints for step walking tours.

Regan gave the trio his blessing when they told him about their idea; enthused to see three fellow Pittsburghers taking up the mantle of step chronicling. “Pulling the book together took about 15 months and each of us had a distinct role,” Zurowski says. “Charles was responsible for the research, both the newly located and digitized material in the city archives and other sources. Matt was our photographer and map maker, and I wrote the narratives. The three of us collaborated on the walking tours because for each walk, we wanted to present interesting history and beautiful photos that would inspire and motivate people to get outside.” But the mud, sweat, and tears paid off. City Steps of Pittsburgh: A History & Guide was picked up by The History Press and released in July of 2024. The book went into its second printing in December, and an audiobook produced by Tantor Media will be released later this year.

Take it from both Zurowski and me. If you have never been to Pittsburgh—or if you’ve never been to the city with the intention of taking an epic urban hike—2025 is the year to change that. The elation of finding a staircase that disappears into a tunnel of trees is a special kind of heaven; as is the feeling of reaching the top of a long procession of steps, as sweaty as you’d feel after scaling Mount Marcy, and being treated to the cool breeze on your moist backside and a killer view of the converging Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers near downtown Pittsburgh. So to close out this inaugural edition of Walk Stars, here are three planning tips for your first voyage to Pittsburgh’s steps.

Get started by following the mapmakers. Because there are so many steps in the city, the potential number of curated walking routes up and down select stairways is pretty much limitless. In addition to all of the step walks outlined in her book, Zurowski has helpfully compiled an online collection of guiding resources, such as maps from prior StepTrek hikes. (I can affirm that the 2015 “Gold Route” is a bonafide glute tenderizer.)

Use the new city resourcesu—and Zurowski’s booku—to go deeper. Once you’ve covered some of the more well tread steps in Pittsburgh, it’s time to start scrolling around the digital map of the steps that the City of Pittsburgh used Bob Regan’s data to create. Wherever you’re eating or shopping or sleeping in Pittsburgh, odds are there’s a staircase near you. But here’s an important caveat. If you happen upon a staircase that dead-ends in the woods or a partially ruined set of steps—and you’re on your own—come back with a buddy and tackle it together. In their book, Zurowski, Jacob, and Succop offer some very useful safety tips for adventuring up these forlorn stairs; such as saving those forays for winter or early spring, before the greenery has returned and obscured potential underfoot hazards.

“A lot of Pittsburgh hills used to have housing and infrastructure that’s gone now, and you can’t see what all the leaves and plants may be covering,” Zurowski says. “You don’t want to bushwhack your way into a sewer opening, or a mine shaft!”

Join or commission a walking tour from Zurowski. Since the Mis.Steps era, Zurowski has been organizing and hosting group foot tours of the stairs and streets that she’s come to know so well. Past walks have often ended at a city brewery or cider mill, and you can see if Zurowski is leading any upcoming walks by checking out the City Steps Walking Tours section of her website. And if there’s nothing on the calendar during the time of your Pittsburgh visit, you can commission a private group tour from Zurowski.

”The big idea behind these walks is, you can come and do this again,” Zurowski says. “Maybe you’ll bring your dog to a particular set of stairs. Maybe you’ll bring the city map of all the steps. Either way, those steps are still here, and they’re for everyone.”

You can keep up with Zurowski’s current foot journeys, writing, and photography by subscribing to her newsletter, Pittsburgh’s Green and Gray—a showcase of the city’s parks, playgrounds, and trails. (Zurowski, Jacob, and Succop are already at work on a new book about this, with an anticipated October 2026 release date!) You can also follow her on Instagram and on BlueSky. And while you’re at it, check out Matt Jacob’s Instragram account, which is pretty much a showcase of Pittsburgh steps grandeur.

This is the second installment of my two part account of surviving Montreal’s Nuit Blanche; a dusk-till-dawn party in eight city neighborhoods, hosted in the middle of winter each year. CLICK HERE to read the first installment of the story.

1:10am: When I first committed to attending Nuit Blanche and realized that the events are spread across eight Montreal neighborhoods, I had aspired to visit all of them. But upon reviewing the schedule, I realized this would be impossible. The majority of the festival events end by 2am, which means that if you’re looking to stay up for the entire night, your late night wanderings are going to be limited to the nightlife hubs that are cranking on most Saturday nights of the year. And most of these hubs are in the city’s downtown area. Still, there are outliers, and the one in Villeray that I’m heading for is a collaborative perfume-making workshop, hosted at a loft next to the Autoroute 40 highway. I’m going to the city’s edge. I wonder how many are taking the same route.

1:11am: A lot, as it turns out. My first train ride on the green line, from Place des Arts station to Berri UQAM station, is typically crowded. But when I transfer to the orange line at Berri UQAM, I find myself standing on a platform with hundreds of festivalgoers awaiting the northbound train toward Jean Talon station (my final transfer stop.) And when that train pulls into the station and opens its doors, I am literally carried into the car by the throngs of festgoers. There are so many of us crammed into the train that grabbing onto the support bars isn’t even necessary. We’re literally holding each other up. This would be a nightmare for commuters, but on a festival night, it’s kind of sweet!

1:40am: From the Jean Talon station, where the crowds dissipated, the blue line train takes me just a couple of stops north to the end of the line at Saint-Michel Station. Is there a more satisfyingly eerie feeling than heading for “the end of the line” on a long train journey? That vibe is definitely cranked up for Nuit Blanche, because as soon as I emerge from the station entrance with a sparse handful of travelers, I’m surprised to find myself standing on a long drag of a street flanked by gas stations and apartment complexes, with no apparent signs of festivity. The loft where the perfume workshop is being held is 10 minutes away by foot, and the only hint that something curious is happening in the vicinity is a trio of 20-somethings walking that away and huddling together for warmth. Nothing about this area screams, “Walk here at night!” and yet, being out here feels good. Because on most nights of the year, this is where art and creativity takes shape in most major cities. In lofts and studios on the edge of town; not in the downtown high-rises that most visitors know. We have entered the mine.

1:52am: Thanks to Montreal’s pedestrian infrastructure, crossing beneath the highway is no problem. A crosswalk with a traffic signal is our bridge to a looming building that contains many loft apartments. From the outside it looks like a storage facility but the number on the front door confirms that this is where the perfume workshop is going down. But as I step inside, relieved to be toasty again and hoping that the workshop will include plenty of boreal essential oils, I see the three 20-somethings backtracking toward the door with glum expressions. The doors to the loft space are closed and a man sitting at a table nearby lets me down gently; the workshop has reached its full capacity. No perfume for you. While Montreal is very much a bilingual city, my French isn’t good enough for persuasion in a snafu like this, and I don’t want to be the whiny American cajoling the guy to make an exception for me. So I head back into the night.

2:00am: But I’m not heading back to the downtown nightclub hub just yet. Earlier, as I pored over the Nuit Blanche events, I was intrigued to see Plaza St. Hubert advertised as a place to wander throughout the night. Plaza St. Hubert is a unique shopping mall in Montreal’s Little Italy that runs the length of St. Hubert Street. The street itself is an open-air thoroughfare, but the sidewalks are covered with extensive shade canopies and the mall businesses are eclectic, from bookstores and bars, to lingerie shops and wedding gown designers (often side by side!) The festival app seemed to suggest that Plaza St. Hubert would be decorated for Nuit Blanche. Curious, I hop back on the blue line and I return to Jean Talon station, which is just a few steps away from the mall.

2:25am: My expectations may have gotten ahead of themselves, when I pictured the mall festooned with neon lights and ice sculptures for Nuit Blanche. But what I find when I step onto St. Hubert Street is arresting and strangely beautiful in its own way. The mall businessses, closed or open, are largely illuminated. The long shade canopy has a distinctly alien look to it. Occasionally I come across a piece of artwork that’s been attached to the support beams—say, a painting of a pink comb with the head of an elephant—but these temporary installations are almost beside the point. The mall itself is a work of art, in its shape and design, and getting to experience it with just a few wanderers on a winter night feels special. This is a genuine Nuit Blanche surprise.

3:00am: As I approach Beaubien station, near the opposite end of the mall from where I began, I’m suddenly hit by two colliding waves. The first is shivers—the logical result of spending over half an hour walking outside in 0-degree weather. And the other wave is fatigue. On the train back to the downtown area (much less crowded than my earlier ride) my head is beginning to droop and my mind is drifting. It’s time to crank the nitro for the final 2-3 hours of Nuit Blanche and conveniently, this creeping exhaustion has coincided with the most intense chapter of the night; good old Montreal clubbing!

3:25am: Usually, when I go to a club, I like to be a participant; dressed properly, head banging, hips thrusting, fist pumping, etc. In my 20s, I could have done this at 3:25am on Nuit Blanche. But now I am in my mid-30s. I don’t have the energy to be a Montreal club participant at this hour. And my fleece and wool layering system definitely won’t qualify as dressing the part for these clubs, where fishnets, leather, and glow-in-the-dark jewelry are staples. So I decide that tonight, I will be an observer instead. I pull out my “MEDIA” lanyard and badge, provided to me by the Nuit Blanche organizers, and after showing the credential to a bouncer, I open the door to Circus Afterhours.

3:26am: A small cascade of melted salty snow is trickling down the steps of the club. Steam fogs my glasses almost instantly. The walls are thumping and flashing with panels of neon lights as red lasers cut across the heads of the nightclubbers who are convened around the main stage and the bar. I realize, pretty quickly, that half of the people here are probably on ecstasy or ketamine, and all of them are younger than I am. The only person who appears to be close to my age is the inevitable single man with a mustache standing in the corner, holding a G&T and nodding along to the beat; the guy with big, “Hello, fellow kids,” energy. I’ve joined his company now. It’s humbling.

4:05am: This is where things get hazy. I remember walking through a series of wintery arches at a park near Circus Afterhours. I’m not sure if I boarded the metro again, to make it to my last stop of the night, but I do recall passing a Tim Horton’s and looking through the window to see at least 50 teens and 20-somethings inside. Many of them were decked out in goth makeup as they ripped into cruellers and Timbits (munchkins, for my fellow American readers.) It crosses my mind that I might actually be dying.

4:30am: When I step into the MTELUS concert hall on St. Laurent Street, I go straight to the bar and I order a whiskey shot. It’s the equivalent of the adrenaline shot to the heart in Pulp Fiction—a desperate dose of liquid energy to stave off collapse for the final hour of Nuit Blanche. On the stage, the dancers and DJs of Moonshine—an afro diasporic music collective whose parties have become a sensation in Montreal and abroad—are keeping the action going until 6am with thunderous sounds and moves. The place is packed with Nuit Blanche adventurers who all seem to be overcome by lethargy. There’s not as much movement among the crowd now; it’s a sea of bobbing heads. Up on the balcony level, there are scores of abandoned beer cans and plastic cups; the detritus of those who called it a night. Maybe it’s the smell of all those half empty drinks or the flashing of the strobe from the stage, but my brain is speaking.

It’s time for bed.

5:28am: In the end, I catch the earliest rays of light on the St. Lawrence River from the window of my hotel room, two seconds before flopping into bed and barely pulling the duvet over myself before falling into deepest, most lumbering sleep I’ve had in years.

THE AFTERMATH (EPILOGUE)

The morning after was less wretched than I expected—probably because I only had three drinks between dinner at O’Thym and going to bed. (Again, I am in my mid-30s.) Meeting for a post-Nuit Blanche brunch is a ritualistic coda to the event; a chance to reconvene and unpack gossip and exploits while shoveling nourishing food into your gullet. I rejoined my fellow journalists at Kamuy, chef Paul Toussaint’s mouthwatering pan-Carribbean restaurant near the festival plaza, where the brunch included savory root vegetable stew, beef brisket, and quite possibly the best jerk drumsticks I’ve ever eaten. Another proven recovery ritual for many Nuit Blanche veterans is slipping on a swimsuit and sweating out the toxins in the saunas, steam rooms, and thermal pools of Bota Bota; a spa on a boat that’s anchored on the waterfront. It was here, sitting in one of those pools and gazing at the frozen city, when my throat started feeling tickly.

I managed to drive back to Boston before my symptoms escalated into COVID-19; a much milder and quicker case than my first brush with the bug back in 2023, but still cause to self-isolate and live on chicken soup and Goldfish crackers (courtesy of my dear parents) for a sniffly 5-6 days. And I regret to admit that during those 5-6 days, I read and watched way too much national news. In particular, I followed the disturbing story of Trump’s unhinged fixation with using tariffs to wreck the Canadian economy, as a pretext to annexing the country; a fixation of a diseased mind. This is something that Canadians are treating with deadly seriousness, as they should, and Americans are just starting to realize that 1: Trump isn’t joking, and 2: We shouldn’t treat this like a joke. I couldn’t process it—experiencing a night of collective joy and curiosity hosted by our friends and neighbors to the north, and then heading back home and listening to our sadistic president subjecting our friends and neighbors to psychological abuse.

Like I said in Part 1 of this story, I needed Nuit Blanche in a more spiritual way than I had realized when I drove to Montreal for the festival. To spend a whole night walking around the city with tens of thousands of other revelers—in the middle of winter, or rather, in the middle of this winter—is to defiantly, desperately, and proudly Rage.

Rage.

Against the dying of the light.

Unless it’s a celestial event like last April’s total eclipse, or a historic event like Daft Punk and Rage Against The Machine co-headlining a music festival, I usually don’t plan travel more than a few months in advance. Even the best travel insurance isn’t going to cover all the disruptions of our dystopian age, and I don’t have a big budget for hitting the road. But there are exceptions, and two weeks ago, I drove to Montreal to take part in something that’s been on my calendar for practically a year. It’s unlike anything I’ve experienced before, it was probably the reason why I tested positive for COVID last week, and I have no regrets. In fact, I’m hoping to attend again in 2026, if we’ve managed to stop Trump from making deranged threats toward Canada by then.

Montreal is famous for having the kind of nightlife that inspires stories with sentences like, “As I followed instructions and removed my shirt, this girl with a glass eye handed me a Vodka Red Bull.” And as some of you may know, Montreal leans into its nightlife during late February and early March with the Montréal en Lumière festival—in which the city’s dedicated festival plaza is transformed into a winter wonderland with an ice skating trail, gourmet food tastings, a dizzying amount of neon lights, and a DJ stage that amasses an impressive crowd. But baked into the festival, there’s a hard core—a “white night” on which Montreal residents and visitors attempt to stay out and about from dusk till dawn. Over 100 cultural events (mostly free or low-cost) are offered at clubs, galleries, museums, and lofts across eight neighborhoods. The subway runs all night, with an illustrated “mystery car” roaming the tunnels along with all the regular metro trains. And if the idea of being on foot from sundown to sunrise in Montreal in the middle of the winter sounds like an act of survival, well….that’s kind of the point.

Montreal’s midwinter all-nighter, Nuit Blanche, was inspired by similar nocturnal fests that began in cities like Paris, Winnipeg, and Toronto during the early 2000s. The idea linking all of these white night events was inviting people to experience the beauty of night in the city—with the aid of artists commissioned to bring dreams to life on that special night, using the cityscape as their canvas. You might find yourself walking down an alley festooned with glow-in-the-dark jungle plants, squeezing into an old garage where someone is playing a thermain, or watching a print of Guy Maddin’s Heart Of The World projected onto the side of a building. But here’s the thing. Most white night festivals happen in the summer, which gives Montreal’s decision to hold Nuit Blanche during the coldest, darkest time of the year an extra twist of meaning. It’s not just about walking around the nighttime cityscape; it’s about exploring it together. It’s a reprieve from the lonesome nights millions spend at home during the winter—a reminder that to make it through the winter, in the fullest sense, we need each other.

Now bear in mind, I was smitten with the idea of Nuit Blanche last winter, when I first heard about the event. It sounded like good gonzo fun in a city I love, with a pinch of Shackelton seasoning. But when I pulled into Montreal on the weekend of March 1st and checked into the Hotel Zero near the festival plaza—my Nuit Blanche basecamp—I realized that I needed this event in a more spiritual way than I had anticipated. This winter has been really dark, for reasons most of you are way too familiar with by now, and I felt a powerful urge to be close to others celebrating the kinder, more colorful impulses of the human spirit, in a city that’s been positively shaped by these impulses in recent years; as evidenced by its parks and streets, its foods and elixirs, and its art.

What you’re about to read is my full account of surviving Nuit Blanche 2025. Enjoy the ride, and consider it a potential planning aide if you’d like to attend the fest next year…

5:45pm: The sun has just retired and I’m in my hotel room trying to decide how many layers is too many layers for Nuit Blanche. I’ll be alternating between 0-degree outdoor temperatures and heated venues where the presence of other humans will yield even more latent heat. I’m also not bringing a backpack because I don’t want to risk being turned away at any clubs that don’t allow such baggage. In the end, I settle for a knit sweater, a fleece vest with big pockets (for my portable phone charger—an essential for a long night in the cold), and the puffiest down jacket that I own. Oh, and a hat.

6:10pm: When you’re going to spend the entire night sauntering around a winter city, “pre-gaming” takes on a different form. You have to loosen up and fuel up for a long journey into the dark. And that means eating a hearty dinner (it won’t be your last of the night) and pairing it with the usual libations. To that end, I decided to join some fellow visiting journalists for a special event at O’Thym, a cozy BYOB bistro with a focus on Quebec ingredients like Arctic char and birch syrup. Montréal en Lumière features a gastronomie program which includes visiting chefs collaborating with Montreal chefs. Tonight, O’Thym’s Noé Lainesse has joined forces with Moonhyung Lee of Silo, which is located in London and holds the distinction of being the world’s first “zero waste” restaurant. Meaning, everything is either recycled or composted.

8:30pm: The bottle of Malbec that I brought to O’Thym is drained. We’ve just started tucking into venison paired with “winter carrots” (which are covered in snow and hay, to create a sweeter flavor) and it’s occurred to all of us that we’ve been sitting here eating, drinking, and talking for over two hours. On any other night, this might feel like letting the night pass you by. But for Nuit Blanche, it feels like a sound way of pacing ourselves. Still, I’m checking the time on my phone more frequently, because the first Nuit Blanche event that I’ve added to my schedule has begun, and it wraps at 11pm.

9:45pm: The Montréal en Lumière festival has its own app, which allows you to look at all of the events happening on Nuit Blanche and pencil them into an intinerary. Some of them end before midnight while others conclude in the small hours or at dawn. Per the advice of a local friend, I’ve avoided creating too tight and rigid a schedule. Part of Nuit Blanche is spontaneous discovery—wandering into places and happenings that weren’t on your radar before sundown. I’ve tried to split the difference by frontloading my “must see” events into the 9pm-1am window, while leaving the rest of the night more open-ended. Now we’re off to the first of those events, crowding into the metro at Beaudry station with a horde of fellow revelers that seems to swell by the minute.

10:30pm: When we approach the stairs of the Redpath Museum—McGill University’s on-campus natural history museum—the building is shrouded in shadows and looks closed. But then an LED twinkle from one of the windows gives the game away. For Nuit Blanche, the museum has turned off the lights and allowed people to come and explore the place with their own flashlights and headlamps. In the main exhibit hall, people are wandering past dinosaur skeletons and stuffed polar bears, murmuring as the beams of their lights collide with these creatures and create strange shadows on the walls of the museum; shadows that would be right at home in our dreams of what happens in a museum after dark, when the guests have gone home. If a local museum hosted something like this in Boston, where I live, I would probably become a member.

11:25pm: Some of Montreal’s best museums are helpfully clustered along Sherbrooke Street and from the Redpath, it’s only a five minute walk to the great McCord Stewart Museum of social history. And I don’t even have to venture beyond the lobby to see what the crowds have gathered for. Every Nuit Blanche has a theme and the 2025 theme is POP!—which is why the string quartert playing in the main hall are finishing up a cover of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” As they kick off their next pop song, “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith, I trade glances with a couple of strangers in the crowd and we exchange knowing grins. It’s as if we’re wordlessly saying, “Yeah, I also watched Armageddon in junior high. I remember when you couldn’t escape this song. Those were the fuckin’ days, dude.” We leave it at that and wait for the next chorus.

12:15am: Walking 12 minutes from the McCord to the epicenter of Nuit Blanche at the Quartier des Spectacles (what a great name for a festival plaza space!) is my first real endurance test of the night. The wind is howling and snow is flurrying, but none of this is stopping the masses from dancing to the techno that’s thumping from the DJ stage. Lasers and spotlights are cutting through the sky, lighting up the falling snow. The ice skating loop trail near the DJ stage is packed with people gliding along the track, and the food vendors are slinging treats like fresh maple taffy (the result of pouring maple syrup onto a bed of snow and harpooning it with a popsicle stick as it hardens) and melty raclette sandwiches. And of course, to borrow a phrase from Dumb and Dumber, the beer is flowing like wine. But what’s most exhilarating about the scene at the plaza are the looks of incredulousness on people’s faces. They can’t believe they’re out here doing this. And they’re loving it. There’s laughter, there’s hollering, and there are smiles.

12:30am: I could happily stay at Quartier des Spectacles for the next few hours, but I’m approaching a crucial turning point in my night—the moment when I’ll get on the train and venture beyond the familiar hub of downtown Montreal, into less familiar haunts in quieter parts of the city that are nonetheless busting out the festivities for Nuit Blanche. In other words, the true exploratory chapter of my Nuit Blanche is about to begin. I strategically head for the Village Gourmand food tent, where visiting chefs and mixologists offer free cooking demos and tastings for festgoers throughout the week, and I pony up for my second dinner; a modest but nourishing chicken chasseur, which will be essential for sustaining my energy levels between now and sunrise. Now that we’re past midnight, a lot of Nuit Blanche events have already wrapped up. What’s still out there is going to be more intense. For the first time, I wonder if I’m up for this.

12:50am: Only one way to find out. With bellyful of roast chicken and root vegetables, I make my way toward the Place des Arts subway station to begin my three-train ride to the northside neighborhood of Villeray, where I’ve never ventured before. But before I reach the station entrance, I’m distracted by bouncy music echoing from the Goethe-Institut for German language and culture. People are spilling into the doors and I go with them, finding myself in a Eurovision karaoke night hosted by the Verdun, France based drag queen Misty Waterfalls. Library stacks have been pushed aside to make room for the crowd, the place is awash in rainbow lights, and disco balls are throwing sparkles on everyone and everything. And all of it seems to scream, the night is ours.

Or maybe it’s the other way around?

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2

Usually, when weather turns deadly, our natural response is to flee the scene for safe havens. One of the more horrifically conceivable scenes that came out of LA this week involved hundreds of stranded motorists stuck in gridlocked traffic on the freeways, abandoning their cars, and continuing on foot as the ongoing wildfires crept closer. But in 1993, Malibu-based Pepperdine University took a very different approach to wildfire survival. You see, some of the university’s largest facilities were designed and built to be as fireproof as modern structures can be. And last December, when 20,000 Malibu residents were urged to evacuate as the Franklin Fire fanned across the hills, Pepperdine students stayed put and took shelter inside their fireproof library and campus center. And everybody made it out. The protocol worked! This time, at least.

Sheltering in place is almost always talked about in the context of episodes like the Pepperdine story—a temporary act of do-or-die necessity. By extension, the spaces that we think of as emergency shelters rarely facilitate more than sitting around and waiting for that heavenly moment, when it’s safe enough to open the door and emerge. But in cities that experience more regular and prolonged weather events that occupy the liminal space between “uncomfortable” and “it will literally kill you,” there’s a much longer definition of what qualifies as weatherproof shelter. Because at this point, you can’t just sit and wait. You have to keep on living and going about your daily errands and obligations, even as the punishing weather forces you to spend your days inside.

Enter the underground city—a network of subterranean passageways that connect the busiest buildings and subway stations in a city center. The idea itself isn’t particularly new. Many American cities have tiny examples of underground city passages, like the tunnels that connect Madison Square Garden to Penn Station and Moynihan Train Hall. But in the snowbound and frostbitten locales of North America, certain cities take the underground city concept to a more stratospheric level; with labyrinths of building-to-building passageways that you could spend an entire day or night wandering around.
Last winter, I flew to Edmonton for a travel industry event, and I arrived one day early due to the weather forecast. With extra time to explore, I made plans to go out, but I was immediately humbled by the reality of what Edmonton is like in early March. It was so fucking cold that when I walked two blocks from my hotel to a movie theater where Dune 2 was playing, I had to put on four layers, cover my face with a scarf, and use my eyeglasses for wind protection. I didn’t see a soul on the sidewalk. The next morning, when I made a 0.2-mile voyage from the hotel to an overlook from which I could see the Edmonton River Valley greenway (largest urban park in North America!), the city streets were comparably empty. The frozen city looked abandoned. And then, lured by the possibility of a Tim Horton’s kiosk, I pushed open the door to a building that was caked in ice. Quite suddenly, the people of Edmonton revealed themselves.

There seemed to be hundreds of them; traipsing past me in fur-lined parkas, lugging shopping bags, and enjoying their coffees on benches flanked by blooming greenery. The glass-ceilinged atrium we were sharing in the Edmonton Convention Centre is one of the more remote access points for Edmonton’s own underground city—the Pedway.

Upon reviewing a map of the tunnel network, I wondered how easily I could walk from the convention center to the ice hockey arena and casino at Rogers Place. It would be a solid northwesterly walk that would include some other curious buildings; Citadel Theatre, the Stanley A. Milner Library, and as convenience would have it, my hotel! The distance appeared to be less than a mile, but what I didn’t yet realize as I set off into the Pedway with unearned confidence was that determining which doorways and passages are part of an underground city route is half the fun of exploring the maze.

Most underground city routes are marked like a trail in the woods—with consistently branded signage that clearly indicates “Walk This Way.” However, these signs are not always posted by each turning point. And furthermore, the appearance of the tunnels themselves can vary quite a bit. Since the tunnels begin and end in different buildings, with different management and architectural styles, no connective tunnel is ever quite the same as the next one. Some are soft-lit and decorated with artwork, while others have a more austere and foreboding look. And to make matters even trickier, not all underground city passages stay beneath the surface. Sometimes, you might have to climb a flight of stairs and pass between buildings in a protected pedestrian bridge, before taking another set of stairs back into the subterranean level on the other side.

I encountered these obstacles several times during my inaugural Edmonton Pedway walk. It took more than 15 minutes of poking around the indoor gardens at the Tucker Amphitheatre before I found the stairs that took me down to a longer tunnel leading to the Edmonton City Centre East shopping mall. And by the time I reached the mall, my backside was a little sweaty and I had probably logged well over a mile on my soles already. In a way, exploring an underground city is a slightly more adventurous spin on Mall Walking—the increasingly popular art of walking laps around a shopping mall, if the weather outside is too nasty for sauntering. The fact that Mall Walking is having a moment really illustrates the widening need for spaces that are safe and strollable. I love that people are reclaiming malls as spaces for recreation, and the underground city concept and the mall are cousins; climate-controlled spaces that were made for commerce but function quite beautifully as explorable, low-barrier Adventure Zones.

The difference is that you have lower odds of getting truly lost in a mall, compared to an underground city. And that’s why this past week, while visiting Montreal with my friend and fellow foot traveler Katie Metzger, we saved our traverse of Montreal’s own underground city—the RÉSO—for the last night of the trip. After two prior evenings that involved eating noodles and sampling dark beers at various nooks, we wanted to do something that pushed us beyond what’s familiar, when it comes to a night on the town. So, as Katie herself put it, we decided to have ourselves a night under the town.

We were staying two blocks aware from the Square Victoria Metro Station, where you can pick up the RÉSO labyrinth. And to ensure that we would stay in the underground city, we only wore enough cold weather layers to survive the 5-minute walk from the hotel doorstep to the subway entrance. Once we were in, we were IN. We would find our way to the Centre Eaton mall for dinner, before retracing our steps to a junction and pressing ahead in another direction to reach the Place des Arts performing arts center, where we would find…who knows? Underground sculptures? A wall of video screens featuring people in the great outdoors making shadow puppets of animals with their hands? A guy who looked like Jeremy Irons’ twin emerging from a theater?

None of these are hypotheticals. Katie and I encountered all of these sights in the last stages of our two-hour RÉSO journey, which was fueled by mall fudge and avoidance of the punishing weather on the surface. Some of the spaces we explored, such as the mall and the Gare Central train station, were predictably flush with Montrealers. But on more than one occasion, we had a connective tunnel to ourselves—the kind of tunnel where most people wouldn’t want to linger, given the dim quality of the lighting and the desolate appearance of the space. And I’ll be honest; roaming the RÉSO like a pair of mole people did start to mess with our heads. The back-of-mind awareness that all of this was a construct, powered by electricity and heating, made me crave the raw sensation of the wind in my face. So when we finally returned to Square Victoria to make the electrifying, above-ground dash to the hotel, there was a rush of catharsis.

Still, if we’re going to be dealing with increasingly dangerous and destructive weather for the rest of our lives—and if cities are best equipped to become bulwarks against gnarlier weather—I’d much rather live in a city where the weatherproof shelters are vast enough to accommodate movement and exploration; two of the most essential pillars of our lives, which many of us don’t miss or think about until they’re suddenly yanked away by circumstance. And while underground cities such as the Montreal RÉSO or Edmonton’s Pedway may sound like pipe dreams for U.S. cities, consider again that some of the infrastructure is already in place. In Houston, one of the muggiest places I’ve ever set foot in my life, there are six miles of air-conditioned underground tunnels that connect various buildings downtown. I know this because when I went there back in 2021 to report a story for the Rotary International magazine, I really, really wanted to go into the Houston tunnels to avoid the drenching mid-August heat. But my schedule was too busy to allow a solid afternoon of exploring the passages. So I settled for the air conditioning in my rental car and vowed to go into those city tunnels another day; hopefully just for fun, and not for survival. But in all likelihood, it will be a bit of both.

Given the weather events of late in LA, I’d like to use the end of this week’s Mind The Moss to direct your attention to this rolling roundup of GoFundMe campaigns which have been verified by GoFundMe as fundraisers for individuals and families who’ve been directly impacted by the wildfires. In addition, the Los Angeles Times has a very helpful list of organizations that are doing important ground work in LA as we speak.

If you’re based in LA or if you know anyone who’s based in LA, one crucial resource is 211 LA, a nonprofit organization that specializes in connecting people in need with temporary housing options. And since demand for temporary housing over the next several weeks will be huge and historic, Airbnb and a number of hotel brands have offered free or heavily discounted rooms to LA residents and travelers who’ve been stranded by the fire. Maya Kachroo-Levine just wrote about this for Travel + Leisure.

Still, I would refrain from heaping too much praise on Airbnb here; given the role that the company has played in worsening a residential housing shortage in cities around the world, and considering how severe that shortage is about to become in LA when the fires are out. Temporary housing for those impacted by a disaster is just that, and pretty soon, we are going to need to build a hell of a lot more housing in general, in SoCal and elsewhere. So, let’s get used to helping each other and sharing resources.

Once in awhile, you read a book or see a movie with a central idea that’s so delicious that you don’t really care how smartly or poorly that idea is executed. For me, one of the classics of this sub-genre is John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. The year is 1997 and crime in America has risen by 400%. To contain it, the government has built walls around New York, placed land mines on the bridges, and turned the city into the world’s largest maximum security prison. This is all going just fine until Air Force One crash-lands in Manhattan. The gangs that run the island capture the president. To get him back, the feds tap Snake Plissken—a soldier turned federal reserve robber played by Kurt Russell—to infilitrate New York and break the president back out. If he pulls this off within 24 hours, then Snake gets a full pardon for his crimes. But if he fails, a small tracking device which has been implanted in his neck explodes. I know writers who would trade a decade of their lives for coming up with such an incredible setup.

In its vision of a dystopian police state, Escape From New York—made and released in 1981—was a metaphor for the disinvestment that ravaged American cities in the wake of suburbanization. Carpenter imagined a nightmare future in which poverty and crime are sequestered in one guarded hellhole, with the entire urban population treated like criminals. But what we often see in our current age of inequality, with the perception of rising crime (even when it’s actually declining) is the opposite of the Escape From New York scenario. Today the powerful are walling themselves off: often within cities!

In 2017, Evan Osnos wrote a wild story for The New Yorker on Silicon Valley tycoons gearing up for the apocalypse. Their preparations included converting former missile silos into luxury bunkers, hiring merceneries to guard their mahogany catacombs, and my personal favorite, taking more archery lessons. But there’s a much subtler form of self imposed seclusion that you can find in most parts of America; the creation of wealthy villages in large metro areas. Sometimes these fiefdoms are municipalities, but just as often, they are unincorporated areas made from pieces of neighboring cities and towns, which have been Frankenstein-ed together. A gated community like this might contain an actual gatehouse and a wall. But the prices of real estate and local goods are usually so exorbitant that no wall is needed to keep out the riff-raff.

Or at least, that’s what a lot of the gilded villagers think.

In Boston, where I live, there’s a place on the west edge of town that’s called “Chestnut Hill,” and a lot of people don’t seem to realize what it actually is. “Chestnut Hill” often brings to mind the Chestnut Hill Mall—a collection of shops on both sides of Route 9. Others may assume that there’s a hill in this region of Boston, speckled with chestnut trees and worthy of name recognition. But in fact, Chestnut Hill is an unincorporated area with one of the highest concentrations of wealth in Massachusetts. It’s a hodge podge of land owned by Boston, Brookline, and Newton. Residents include New England Pariots owner Bob Kraft and super-investor Seth Klarman. And according to Redfin, homes in Chestnut Hill sold for a median price of $2.1 million in November last year. And yet, there is a structural vulnerability to Chestnut Hill’s castle walls; a breach which you’ll see in other moneyed villages. You can still walk around them.

I don’t mean “walk around” as in “walk from some hedge fund manager’s house to the local apothecary skincare store.” I mean a perambulation, in which you identify the village border on a map and you walk it, tracing a full circle around the kingdom. In this newsletter, I’ve written about the surprising beauty and vivid strangeness of doing a perambulation of a city over several days. (In Philly, there’s an artist and community organizer named J.J. Tiziou who created a bi-annual perambulation event called the Walk Around Philadelphia.) But perambulating a wealthy village is a different animal. It’s more manageable than a citywide circuit, given the small acreage of villages, but it also poses its own hazards. When you’re walking through an old industrial yard on the edge of town, you might worry about finding yourself in the kind of trouble that may require calling the cops. But when you’re ambling around a village like Chestnut Hill, you have to consider the possibility that somebody there might call the cops on you.

So, given this reality, why should you put on your trainers and perambulate the rich?

- Walking around a wealthy village can demystify the place and change the way you and others perceive it. Once you see the arbitrary nature of where the borders have been drawn, the village can start to look less powerful and more absurd.

- Going for a walk that feels sort of like trespassing can be really fun; especially when you take the walk with a few friends who are also game for flying close to the sun. Strength in numbers is a real thing when it comes to walking in gilded territory.

- It’s important to take advantage of public sidewalks and paths wherever they exist. Because if these essential resources are being used regularly, by a diverse range of people, trying to taking them away becomes more cumbersome and conspicuous.

With all of this in mind, I decided to kick off 2025 by perambulating Chestnut Hill; a walk of roughly 6.5 miles that took me through a surreal spectrum of residential and rustic environments—not to mention, commercial nooks and a special historic place.

I rode the MBTA’s Green Line trolley to the north edge of the village and set off on my circuitous walk near two of the most well-known destinations within the Chestnut Hill radius: the campus of Boston College and the rippling Chestnut Hill Reservoir. Every day, hundreds of perambulators walk or jog around the reservoir, and I’d imagine that only a small handful are aware that it only exists because landowners were persuaded to sell pieces of their marshland and meadows to the City of Boston in the late 19th Century. Boston, which was growing at the time, needed to expand its water storage capacity, and without the cooperation of Amos Adams Lawrence—a textiles kingpin who delivered the lion’s share of land for the reservoir—it’s unlikely that the project would have been possible. As I walked along the western shore, breaking slightly away from the Chestnut Hill line for a glimpse of Downtown Boston across the water, I wondered how much it would cost the City of Boston to buy land from Chestnut Hill landowners today.

As I left the reservoir behind and crossed into more palatial residential territory, that hypothetical figure seemed to grow bigger and bigger. Not only were the mansions I wandered past surrounded by hedges and walls, but the some of the roads back here were weirdly chewed up. At one corner, I saw a pothole deep enough to take out a tire on an Escalade. And then it occurred to me that some of these raggedy roads were private ways, which are owned and maintained by adjacent property owners instead of the city. You would think that in a gilded village, everyone would chip in to ensure that their roads were of the highest quality, but collectivism and wealth are pretty awkward bedfellows. In Sun Valley, Idaho—a winter sports playground for the 1%—the lack of affordable housing in the town has forced fire fighters and other first responders to move farther and farther out of the area. And yet, this does not seem to have inspired thoughts such as, “Maybe we should allow one of those apartment complexes to go up, in case my boiler explodes.” I guess when money is no object, it’s easy to presume that no matter what happens, you’ll be okay. Hell, maybe it’s the accurate calculus.

For most of my manse wanderings, I was the only walker on the streets of Chestnut Hill. But that changed suddenly and jarringly when I reached the bustle of Route 9 via Hammond Street and swung a right into the parking lot of the Chestnut Hill Mall. The businesses that loomed ahead of me ranged from pedestrian-level offerings like Star Market and Shake Shack to more imperial brands such as Arc’teryx, Blue Bottle Coffee, and the Showcase “SuperLux” movie theater—where I could have plopped into a reclining leather chair and watched the Nosferatu remake with heated lumbar support. But I had already seen and enjoyed the movie a few days earlier, so I pressed onward to the Hammond Pond Reservation woodlands. You’d never know it from zooming past the mall on Route 9, but the Chestnut Hill Mall backs right up to the heavenly waters of Hammond Pond—which earns the “Great Pond” title that Massachusetts bestows upon any water body that’s over 10 acres in size. The forest on the west shore of the pond contains rickety bog bridges, climbing rocks, and a regular current of human visitors. The reservation trails begin from the edge of the mall parking lot, mere steps from the SuperLux cinema. And I found this heartening.

The thing about malls in uber-wealthy areas is that they still force people who might otherwise be sequestered away in opulence to spend time with each other. Even if it’s just harrumphing as the person ahead of you in the line at Winston Flowers takes forever, there’s still value to logging face time in society. I’m no stranger to swapping small talk with a cashier or server who seems chatty, but back in 2019, when I spent almost a month living in my bedroom after contracting mono from another person who had managed to dodge it during college, I had to learn how to talk with people in public again. My first attempts were a mess. My timing, sentence structuring, and sense of humor had atrophied, and it took me another month to recover in this way. I don’t know if most denizens of the Chestnut Hill Mall are out-of-town visitors or real Chestnut Hill residents, but having a mall and a mall-adjacent woodland in the village seems like a benefit for everyone. If nothing else, it creates and maintains precedent for people moving around on foot, crossing paths, and ideally, talking to each other.

The trails of the Hammond Pond Reservation took me uphill from the mall, across the Hammond Pond Parkway (easily the most hair-raising part of my perambulation) and eventually, into another spruced-up residential zone. But what I didn’t realize was that all of this uphill walking would deliver me to a hallowed place within the confines of Chestnut Hill—a shrine for the ultimate precedent of human movement in Boston. As I arrived at Commonwealth Avenue, I stepped right onto the Boston Marathon course and made my way up Heartbreak Hill; one of the most grueling high points along the race, infamous for breaking spirits and snapping tendons. The first Boston Marathon went down in 1897. And it was right around this time when Chestnut Hill transformed from farmland into a posh residential enclave, under the direction of Frederick Law Olmsted; the rock star landscape architect who designed Central Park. (He took on private commissions as well as municipal gigs.) What this means is that for roughly as long as Chestnut Hill has existed—an island of gilded exclusitivity within a city—there have been hordes of unwashed people running through the village each year.

Suddenly, my perambulation of Chestnut Hill felt like less like a hoot and more like the invocation of a tradition. I might have been one sweaty, fragrant person, but I was still availing myself of the right to move around this shiny space. I have no interest in running a marathon (more power and deep respect to those who do!) but I could see taking up perambulation as a distance sport in the most silver-spooned locales of the U.S. And winter might be the best time to undertake such walks, with many residents of these locales away in the tropics or the mountains. As I closed the loop, I arrived at the Newton Commonwealth Golf Course. The golf carts were hibernating. The sky was free of projectiles. And the grounds were an empty, inviting expanse of matted grass and goose shit. I squelched forward, and I felt an unexpected warmth of belonging.

If you’d like to follow my footsteps and try perambulating Chestnut Hill, you’ll find an AllTrails map of my walk by clicking here. But if you’re attempting to perambulate a different village, here are my three tips for planning a perambulation walking route.

1. First, find the borders of your village by searching for it on Google Maps.

2. Next, fire up another online mapping tool. Using the Google Map as your reference point, identify the streets and paths that you’ll walk, to more or less trace the border of the village you’re perambulating. I highly recommend using a mapping tool that shows you the most walkable spaces within a map. Google Maps is fine for streets, but for paths in parks and natural spaces, AllTrails and OpenStreetMap are superior.

3. Since you won’t be able to literally walk the village line in most places, err on the side of choosing interesting scenery for your walk, even if it takes you slightly away from the border for a little while. Any perambulation walk is a rough approximation.

With that, here’s John Carpenter playing the theme for Escape From New York (which he also wrote) to close us out. Have fun out there, and happy new year to each of you!

When it comes to creativity, imitation isn’t just a form of flattery. It’s also this thrilling confirmation that your project is escalating and growing into something much bigger and in all likelihood, beyond your control. In the long run, this can be a good thing or a bad one. Consider the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem. When they got cranking in the early 1990s, slathering their faces with “corpse paint” and melting other faces with ghoulishly nihilistic songs such as “Funeral Fog” and “Freezing Moon,” the scene for black metal was young and full of possibility. But as the scene grew, it attracted guys who practiced what they preached, like burning down churches. In fact, one of these men, Varg Vikernes, eventually murdered the lead guitarist of Mayhem. It was a manifestation of what David Bowie sang in Ziggy Stardust—“When the kids had killed the man, I had to break up the band.” (Except that Mayhem never actually broke up.)

But many episodes of artistic imitation and escalation don’t end in a courtroom. One of the happy outcomes was the evolution of Starship’s irresistibly hammy and synthy single, “We Built This City.” The original lyrics were written by Martin Page and Bernie Taupin, and handed off to Starship and their producer, Peter Wolf, who re-fashioned what was originally a moodier, downbeat song about the gentrification of L.A.’s club scene into a power anthem. And in the process, the setting of the song changed too. It became a song about “the city by the bay,” which could only mean San Francisco.

I bring all of this up not just because it’s fun to shoehorn obscure music history into a hiking newsletter, but because the way in which “We Built This City” transformed into an S.F. barn burner mirrors a more contemporary act of creative imitation that’s taking place in the city now—a story that could only happen in our current age of urban trails.

As I reported back in 2022, San Francisco is where America’s growing Instant Urban Trails movement got started, with the creation of the 17-mile Crosstown Trail that runs across the city from the piers of Candlestick Point to the towering cliffs at Lands End. Created and launched by grassroots volunteers, with a nod of approval from the city and a budget of only $600, the Crosstown Trail inspired new trails in other U.S. cities, including the Boston Walking City Trail that I launched just a few months after hiking the Crosstown Trail and loving it. But as Boston has demonstrated, with its historic walking routes like the Emerald Necklace linear parks and the Freedom Trail, a city can host a big network of trails sculpted by different creators. And in 2019, a pair of Crosstown Trail superfans decided that their favorite urban trail could use a sibling.

The Crosstown Trail runs northwest across the S.F. landscape, and in 2019, after a few glasses of wine at a holiday party, Arnie Thompson and Chris Rupright—who live in the community of West Portal—started tossing around a lofty idea. What if there was another trail traversing San Francisco as a northeasterly vector, running perpendicular to the Crosstown route? There were still many parks and neighborhoods waiting to be connected by one trail, and the idea of having two trails forming a giant X across the city was irresistible for Thompson and Rupright. They shared the idea with a friend and avid runner, John Trevithick, and things began germinating. “Since we enjoyed the Crosstown Trail so much, we came up with the idea of doing various hikes around the city starting from our West Portal neighborhood,” Thompson and Rupright wrote in a 2023 blog post. “This worked out really well and we discovered many more hidden staircases, stellar views and interesting architecture. . . Months of poring over maps, pounding the pavement and note-taking ensued. We wanted to incorporate nature, architectural gems, lofty views, lunch options, transit access and of course restrooms.” As their idea grew into a tangible thing, they knew that it needed a name.

So they “cheekily” dubbed their 14-mile baby The Double Cross Trail and then, they mustered the courage to reach out to the Crosstown Trail founders. Those of you who’ve ever tossed back a whiskey shot and emailed an original poem or a short story to an author who inspired the work will know exactly how this feels; to share something that’s both a form of homage and a declaration of intent. And for the Crosstown Trail crew, learning about a new and gestating trail across San Francisco (which they had indirectly catalyzed) added a new dimension to their own project. What started as a singular trail now seemed to hold the possibility of becoming a constellation of city trails. And so, like Janelle Monae and Prince, Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, and other creative power couples brought together by a mutual passion, the Crosstown Trail founders and the Double Cross founders joined forces.

Today, when you visit the Crosstown Trail website—where you’ll find the maps and directions you need to navigate either trail—you’re greeted with a pluralized offering. Even the Crosstown logo has been updated to say “Crosstown Trails” and each trail has its own dedicated page with resources and photos. It speaks to the humility of everyone involve and their shared vision that this evolution could happen so quickly and seamlessly. And if you’re thinking, “Okay, that’s pretty cool, but isn’t this a New England hiking newsletter?” here’s the throughline. We’re approaching a time of the year when many northeastern denizens make plans for escaping the unremitting bleakness of our increasingly soggy winters. Those of you planning to abscond to relatively warmer climates will have to pay top dollar if your goal is assuming the starfish formation on a beach, because . . . millions of other people have the same idea. But if you’re game for soaking up the sun in an urban environment that most people overlook as a potential winter destination—and if you’re open to bringing some hiking boots—the Double Cross Trail is calling, and you really should go.

Take it from me: My life-changing ramble on the Crosstown Trail happened back in late February of 2022. I was only out there for 72-ish hours, and I still flew back to Boston rejuvenated and inspired enough to start a similar trail here in The Big Windy Bean. Whether you’re looking to be dazzled, soothed, or nourished, the Double Cross Trail can deliver. Hell, you could hike both of the trails over the course of your visit. And just to offer you a taste of what could be a winter getaway to remember, I’d like to share some memories of my introduction to the Double Cross Trail from last winter.

It was late November, which meant that being outdoors in San Francisco was getting milder and rainier, but nowhere near the extent that we suffer here in New England. I had made plans to meet up with Arnie, John, and also Bob Siegel and Pat Koren from the Crosstown Trail squad. Our goal was to hike the entire Double Cross Trail over the course of the day. We would set off from the southwestern trailhead at Fort Funston, where hang gliders push off from rolling bluffs and soar over the beaches below. The first segment of our walk would be a long, incremental climb to Twin Peaks; one of San Francisco’s highest points. From there, we would descend into the urbanized core of the city, finishing the hike at a maritime-flavored bar located on the Embarcadero.

I had memories of going to Fort Funston as a kid, when my family would come out to the Bay Area to visit relatives. I recalled standing on the observation platform where the Double Cross Trail begins, gazing out at the hang gliders, and feeling awestruck by their daredevilry. I had gotten used to thinking of Fort Funston as a special destination for mythic people who practiced a form of recreation that I would always be looking in on, from the outside. And it gave me a little thrill to realize that by setting off on a double-digit journey from Fort Funston, I had now joined the ranks of those who come here to do something that only a handful of people understand (so far, at least.) As we followed a sandy path through pockets of forest, eventually descending a hill toward the blue rippling expanse of Lake Merced, I felt that unique electric buzz of belonging.

But there was so much left to learn and witness. And just a few hours later—slathered with my third coat of sunblock, feeling my nipples chafe on the sweat-soaked cotton of my t-shirt—I cautiously approached the precipice of a craggy height-of-land, below the summit of Twin Peaks. We had entered a hidden park known as Tank Hill, which boasted an astounding view of not only downtown San Francisco, but also Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the broader East Bay. The name “Tank Hill” is an allusion to the park’s former identity as a water tank site. But in 1957, the tank was removed and the city had the foresight to purchase the rocky hill on which it once loomed over Ashbury Heights. Today, it’s one of the more beloved open secrets of San Francisco.

And yet, even after my first hike on the Crosstown Trail back in 2022, I would not have known a thing about Tank Hill’s tranquility and its panoramic vista had it not been for Arnie Thompson and John Trevithick making the bold decision to create a sibling for the urban trail that put San Francisco on the map as an urban hiking destination. And if the Crosstown Trail crew had felt threatened by what Arnie, Chris, and John were doing, I’m not sure what would have happened with the Double Cross Trail. Maybe they would have launched their own website for the trail. But the project could have easily lost momentum and disintegrated. Instead, all parties involved decided that they—and S.F. residents and visitors—would be better off if they pooled their shared knowledge and adoration from the city; if they distilled it into something you could explore and savor by foot, with minimal resources. As we descended twisting stairs down Telegraph Hill toward the end of our Double Cross traverse, soles aching and faces painted by the orange sunset, I thought about what kind of dark beers would be on tap at Pier 42 (the watering hole that served as our finish line.) But I also thought about the undiscovered trails that might stir to life soon, in the wake of the Double Cross Trail’s birth and growth. I wondered where those new trails may take us one day.
The San Francisco Double Cross Trail
Hike distance: 14.9 miles Point A to Point B
Elevation gain: 1,873 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

So I’m not sure how it took me this long to find out about it, but there’s a new-ish book on the market about a father and son who are hiking up in the White Mountains when some kind of civil conflict breaks out in the U.S. Mindful of the danger awaiting them in the valley and beyond, the two take shelter in a shuttered mountain hut—which is almost certainly supposed to be one of the AMC huts!—and they “settle” into new and austere survivalist existence that’s built on borrowed time. The book is called Above The Fire, it’s the debut novel from Michael O’Donnell, and upon learning about it, I was immediately struck by its coincidental resemblance to another recent book about a pair of guys emerging from the woods of Northern Maine to find that the nation has regressed into a civil war. That book is Burn, the latest novel from Peter Heller, and I practically inhaled it back in September. Now I’ve just borrowed Above The Fire from my local library and I’m looking forward to digging into over the weekend. Again, the narrative and thematic parallels between these two books are seriously uncanny, and I’m not implying foul play. They were written and released at similar times, and I think this affirms that the New England backcountry has become a canvas for authors as they imagine the apocalypse and how it could play out in the very near future. Yay?

Keeping with that theme for a few more beats, I was also very excited to learn that the first official trailer for 28 Years Later dropped this week. It’s the long-awaited sequel to 28 Days Later, which remains the scariest and most effective zombie movie of the last two decades (in my humble opinion.) The original film, which was one of the first hard R-rated films I saw with my dad in a movie theater back in 2002, involves a small band of survivors undertaking a terrifying and sometimes strangely ethereal journey across the U.K. after it’s been decimated by a virus called “rage” that turns people into feral red-eyed killing machines. The sense of place in the first film is tremendous. The photography of the landscapes and the atmosphere are essential to the film’s impact, and one of the reasons why I’m probably letting myself get too excited for the sequel is because it’s not just the director Danny Boyle and the screenwriter Alex Garland who are coming back for more. The original movie’s cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who also did Antichrist and 127 Hours) is returning for this too. Take my money now!

A few weeks ago, I wrote a feature for Outside about the rise of Instant Urban Trails; beautiful urban hiking routes created by curating walkable spaces, such as park paths and interesting streets, with free trail maps and directions available on a dedicated website. One of the earliest examples of an Instant Urban Trail is Worcester’s 14-mile East West Trail, which runs across the city’s bounteous parks ecosystem from Lake Quinsigamond to The Cascades. But the San Francisco Crosstown Trail—a 17-mile trail from Candlestick Point to Lands End—was the trail that really put Instant Urban Trails on the map for most of us who know about them. Reading a story about the Crosstown Trail in National Geographic in 2022 was all it took for me to get myself out to the Bay Area to hike the trail. And hiking the Crosstown Trail over the course of a weekend was all it took for me to found the 27-mile Walking City Trail in Boston.

About a month after the launch of the “WCT” (as we’ve come to call it), I was up in the White Mountains camping near Crawford Notch when I received a phone call from an unrecognized number with a San Francisco area code. It was Bob Siegel, one of the architects of the Crosstown Trail, and he was calling to express his delight that I had basically copied their templates for the Walking City Trail trail website, directions, and maps. “There’s a guy up in Seattle, who might be launching something like this too,” Bob said at one point, referring to Peter Hendrickson—who would later co-found the Olmsted 50 and 70 Trails. “So I’m gonna go up there and have coffee with him,” Bob continued. “To see what he’s been thinking. I’m going to try and convince him to do it.”

I understood, in that moment, that Bob sensed the crackling of a potential movement. He was identifying the early instigators and their projects. By 2024, with more Instant Urban Trails having popped up in Denver, Sacramento, and San Francisco, a group of us began having Zoom conversations, comparing notes on our respective urban trails and mulling the possibility of building some kind of an Instant Urban Trails alliance in a more formal way. (If anyone reading this feels like cutting a big check to support this idea, freel free to shoot me an email.) One of the best outcomes of these Zoom calls was getting into a habit of constantly looking for ways to amplify each other’s work. Persuading Outside to greenlight a feature about Instant Urban Trails felt like a major coup. And as I was editing the article, I got another exciting message from Bob; that as of September 2024, Providence had joined the Instant Urban Trails movement.

One of the coolest things about Instant Urban Trails is that they can be put together in just a few months, and when I got the rundown on the Providence Crosstown Trail, it reminded me of that scenario when you’re blindsided by a seriously interesting movie with a stacked cast suddenly appearing on the festival circuit. (The Brutalist recently snuck up on me like this.) Started by Providence hiker Justin Boyan, with help from a seasoned crew of ramblers, the Providence Crosstown Trail is a 13-mile west to east journey from the woods of Neutaconkanut Hill to the Field’s Point lookout deck on the city’s south waterfront. The trail visits a smorgasbord of urban green spaces scattered across 11 neighborhoods, including Downtown Providence, and the website includes maps for AllTrails, Strava, and Garmin Connect—in addition to turn-by-turn directions.

Ecstatic from the news, I was able to squeeze the Providence Crosstown Trail into the Outside story at the last minute. But what I was most amped for was actually taking the Boston commuter rail south, across the Little Rhody state line, and experiencing America’s latest Instant Urban Trail (that I know of.) Because, as some of you know, I’m extremely fond of Providence and Little Rhody in general. I love the local appetite for good food, weird art, and rustic beauty of the organic and built varieties. In fact, I took something of an improvised hike across Providence last year, covering the hike for the newsletter, and as I recuperated from the hike by sitting on a green at Brown University, lowering pizza slices into my mouth like a sword swallower, I thought to myself, “Man, a big trail across Providence could hit some really beautiful territory!”

Justin’s hard work and success in bringing the Providence Crosstown Trail to life felt like a prayer being answered—and an affirmation that as far as Instant Urban Trails are concerned, the genie has left the bottle. Last week, I studied the trail maps, noting the PVD green spaces that I was familiar with, like Neutaconkanut Hill and the Providence River Walk, and the parts of the map that were question marks. And on a Tuesday that was unusually unencumbered with busywork—one of those recent, freakish days that paired peak fall foliage with upper 70s temperatures—I skipped town with a daypack full of white cheddar popcorn, sunblock, and extra socks, to hike the trail in one day.

Neutaconkanut Hill, a wooded high point that was once used as an informal garbage dump before being successfully rehabbed, is a natural starting point for a trail across Providence. From the playgrounds at the bottom of the hill, I fired up the AllTrails map and made my way up stone stairs covered in orange leaves, heading for the lookout at the hilltop. The vista of Downtown Providence and the rivers that converge there was outstanding, thanks to the retreat of the hilltop canopy. But there were other things on Neutaconkanut Hill which had visibly improved since my last visit. The trail map sign at the hilltop was no longer a weathered old thing riddled with what looked like bullet holes. It was fresh, gleaming, and actually readable. When I returned to the foot of the hill via stairs that were created by the Works Progress Administration, the fields and playgrounds were alive with the sound of kids laughing. Multiple school groups were utilizing old Neauaconkanut Hill as a gathering space. It was a sweet sight to witness.

Three years had passed since my last visit to the hill, and as I made my way north to the Woonasquatucket River Greenway—by way of quiet residential streets aglow with crimson foliage—I reflected on how mainstream outdoor exploration has become in such a short time period. Not so much in the sense that more people are getting into hiking (that’s been accelerating since the early 2010s) but in the way that the city has become part of our conception of what qualifies as “the outdoors.” This is a far more recent development, and you see it in the expanding groups of park users, the upkeep and renovation of park infrastructure, and in grassroots projects like the Providence Crosstown Trail. You can also see this perceptive reset in public artwork such as the paintings on the walls that appear along the Woonasquatucket Greenway. I saw fish, foxes, and butterflies brought to life on these walls, as I followed the namesake river northwest, just a few clicks away from the parallel, automotive thrum of U.S. Route 6.

I mentioned that the Providence Crosstown Trail is basically a west to east adventure. But most Instant Urban Trails don’t come in straight line formations and here, before you go east, you have to go north first. This segment of the hike took me into a less familiar part of the city; a suburbanized neighborhood called Mount Pleasant, which does indeed rest atop a very large hill. I climbed a series of residential streets that offered a bumper crop of fall foliage, but not much in the way of parks, oddities, or views. Part of the fun of hiking an Instant Urban Trail for the first time is imagining what exactly the trail builders were thinking when they routed the trail through each part of the city. Often, the intention is obvious. But sometimes it reveals itself slowly.

The vibe of this particular corner of Mount Pleasant wasn’t the most welcoming. One house had a sign out front which featured an image of a handgun and the following inscription: “WE DON’T CALL 911. THIS PROPERTY IS PROTECTED BY THE SECOND AMENDMENT.” As I hiked past another house two blocks from here, I heard barking from behind a tall wooden fence, from a really big dog that sounded as hefty as a Shetland Pony. And then, just as I was beginning to wonder, “Why does the trail run through this part of town?” an answer materialized. I stepped into the Pleasant Valley Parkway, a linear green space sandwiched between two streets, with towering shade trees, a ragged footpath, and a central stream with ducks, which doubles as a storm drainage system. The Pleasant Valley Parkway is a stellar example of what you can do with a limited amount of space in a city. For the next 20 minutes, I followed the stream through Mount Pleasant, eventually arriving at its terminus by the ballfields of Davis Park. And looking southeast through the trees, I could see Downtown waiting.

Retracing familiar old steps through a grittier and more industrialized part of town, I walked along the Woonasquatucket River once again, ascending the stairs beneath the Providence Place Mall and arriving at the overlook by Waterplace Park, where the torchbearing boats of the city’s Waterfire Festival gather each summer. It was around 2:00 PM by now and having already made the physiological transition from summer to fall/winter mode, I was feeling tired from the sun and unusually high temperatures. And I still had some serious distance to cover, between Waterplace Park and Field’s Point: not just the River Walk, but also the expanse of Prairie Aveue and the paths of Roger Williams Park, on the south side of town. There was zero chance of making it to the watefront finish line before sunset, unless I power walked and skipped lunch.

Whenever you find yourself considering such a desperate change of plans on an urban hike, you know it’s time to call it a day and save the next leg for another time. So that’s what I did, vowing to return to Providence after the leaves had fallen—when the unique sadness of Stick Season is setting in—and finish the Providence Crosstown Trail then. With time to spare, I veered into the heart of the city, ponied up $12 for a voluminous chicken and falafel wrap from Livi’s Pockets, and I tried to imagine how delectable all of this would taste in a just few weeks, through the melancholic haze of a shoulder season that New England’s cities still haven’t figured out how to make the most of.

Perhaps Instant Urban Trails and all their wonders could be a part of the answer.

The Providence Crosstown Trail
Distance: 13.4 miles
Elevation gain: 568 feet
CLICK HERE for the trail website and maps

While we’re on the subject of new trails of generous size, those of you who’ve thought of moving to….I mean, visiting Sweden in the immediate future may want to bring your hiking boots. Because this fall, the Stockholm Archipelago Trail opens to the public. A 167-mile journey across the popular, gorgeously rustic islands of Sweden’s biggest metro region, the Stockholm Archipelago Trail mixes land and sea in dreamy fashion. You hike across your first island until reaching a dock, where you hop into a rowboat and paddle your way to the next island, where you pick up the trail again. I may have to expand the focus of Mind The Moss beyond New England. This thing is burning a hole in my wallet and in my editorial calendar. If you make it there, please get in touch!

But before we get ahead of ourselves, you might also consider the perspective of Ben Lerwill, who has a really nice piece in The Guardian about the joy of exploring the less superlative walking paths that spiderweb across the U.K. He recounts his ramble on the Baker Way, a 13-mile footpath that begins in the city of Chester and disappears into the surrounding countryside. There are no jaw-dropping landmarks or monuments along the route, but there’s a thriving universe of colors, sounds, smells, and stillness. Reading Lerwill’s essay reminded me of several trails we’ve visited in Mind The Moss.

Pumpkins are a peculiar breed of vegetable—big and brightly-colored orbs of winter squash that are hefty enough to fracture your toe, and chock full of squishy, stringy innards and seeds that can improve hair growth, sleep quality, sperm quantity, you name it. Cultivated as early as 7000 B.C. and native to continental North America, pumpkins made appearances in stews and pies long before the 19th Century, when a bunch of supertstitious Englishmen began hollowing them out, carving grotesque faces into the pumpkin rind, and placing a candle inside. These early Jack O’Lanterns were planted on doorsteps and windowsills on Halloween, to ward off evil spirits. As is the case with many traditions with roots in folk paranoia, the Jack O’Lantern, and by extension the pumpkin itself, became a beloved icon—a symbol of autumnal beauty.

At least, that’s what the pumpkin became for the little city of Keene, New Hampshire. Tucked away from the madness of the White Mountains and the Lakes Region, in the southwest corner of NH, Keene is best known for two institutions. There’s Keene State College, with a student body of around 3,000, and then you have the Keene Pumpkin Festival. It started as an October competition among Granite State towns—to amass the most Jack O’Lanterns in one place—and Keene clobbered the competition. Local businesses and residents carved tens of thousands of pumpkins and consolidated most of them in the city’s downtown shopping district. There were literal pyramids of these glowing pumpkins, which drew seasonal visitors to Keene and imbued the city with a sense of possibility. The event, originally called the New Hampshie Pumpkin Festival, became the Keene Pumpkin Festival. As this grand showcase morphed into a landmark happening, it added live music, street food, and a climatic fireworks show.

And then, one afternoon in 2014, an extremely strange thing happened.

Read more

In case you haven’t heard, Portland (our Portland) is a wonderful place for a hike. The coastal Maine citadel is to urban ramblers what Amsterdam is to cyclists; a maze of car-free paths connecting natural and built features of the cityscape, including the edible destinations for which Portland is renowned. A few years ago, when my dad and I spent a day hiking large swaths of the Portland Trails network—which boasts 70 miles of trails across the metro area—we kicked off our day with a small pile of potato batter doughnuts from the Holy Donut on the shores of Capisic Pond. Three hours later, after hiking through the buzzing marshes of the Fore River Sanctuary, we powered up for our ascent of Munjoy Hill with pulled pork sandwiches the size of bocce balls at Wilson County Barbecue. Our 13-mile trajectory was a constellation of Portland Trails, clicked together with city streets to yield a unique, delicious adventure.

But the Portland Trails network is so big that it extends well beyond the hotspots that most Portland visitors tend to seek out. As you’ll see on the map below, the trails run deep into the western suburbs of Portland. Most of the folks you’ll encounter on these trails are going to be Portland residents, using the trails as links from where they hang their hats to where they might work, shop, dine, and gallivant. But for visitors, taking a west-bound Portland Trail offers a different kind of transitional experience; an escape from Portland with a capital P. If you’ve found yourself in this city, wondering about the more snaggle-toothed underworld hidden behind the farm-to-table restaurants and tallships, the westernmost Portland Trails can be a gateway into that layer of the city ecosystem. It’s kind of like the opening montage of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet; a series of images of picturesque suburban houses. Lynch settles on one of those houses and the camera slowly burrows into the grass in the perfect front lawn, revealing a horrific extreme closeup of insects, engaged in what looks like an orgy and a feeding frenzy.

You won’t find that on the edge of Portland (unless you have a camera with a macro lens.) But what you can find is much grander and ruggedly dazzling in nature. When people talk about waterfalls in Portland, they usually focus on Jewell Falls; a modest but lovely cascade in Fore River Sanctuary. What many don’t realize is that another cascade—bigger and more thunderous—is rumbling away in relative solitude, not too far away. In fact, depending on how you look at this elusive cascade, it can be visually interpreted as a duet of watery drops. It’s called Presumpscot Falls and it looks like something which has been imported from the Maine Highlands, transplanted into a conifer-heavy suburban area. In other words, it’s a natural landmarks that’s far more representative of Maine’s wild, craggy heart than anything within downtown Portland.

Here’s how it works. The source for this crashing gusher is the Preusmpscot River; a hefty waterway that runs 25.8 miles from Sebago Lake to Casco Bay. On its journey, the river loses around 270 feet of elevation, and as the river rolls through the upper west side of Portland, it encounters a drop of around 5 feet. This yields some really impressive and cacophonous rapids, which constitute a short but explosive waterfall. But that’s just half the story. This segment of the Presumpscot River is flanked by a rockier and angular shoreline. And from the upper heights of the land, an elegant and taller horsetail waterfall spills into the torrent. It’s impossible to miss when viewed from the other side of the river, and thankfully, there’s a meandering Portland Trail which leads to the overlook from which the picture below was taken back in April.

I intentionally squirreled this story away in the “dank bank” for October, because most visitors seem to abandon the Pine Tree State as soon as peak foliage has passed. For hikers who appreciate the brooding qualities of autumnal hiking—not spooky, not melancholic, but steeped in a special, chilly mood—walking the Portland Trails in fall is a vital New England hiking experience. Especially if you’re taking the Presumpscot River Preserve Trail for an intimate view of the falls. This 3.8-mile trail is a classic riverside ramble, liberally squelchy after rainfall, but also most atmospheric at this time, when the trees themselves seem to be shaking off, after getting drenched. I chose a glowering afternoon for my visit to Presumpscot Falls, heartened by the promise that after getting muddy and perhaps a little shivery, I could peel off my damp clothes, throw them into a corner, and crack open a tallboy of black lager.

But don’t let this leave you with the idea that the Presumpscot River Preserve Trail is just a thankless and muddy slog to the main attraction. Following a river, on foot, and watching it evolve from a placid thing into a rip-roaring demon is one of the greatest ways to feel both humbled and electrified by intrigue. There’s a reason why so many stories involve journeys along the bends of waterways, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Peter Heller’s aptly-named The River. It can almost feel like a dare to follow a river, knowing that somewhere along the way, the river might surprise you with something that poses elemental danger; like an eroding bank, a flash flood, or a perilous bridge crossing (which is not really the river’s fault, but still, you get the drift.) When I set off on the Presumpscot River Preserve Trail from the trailhead on Gray Road, I was confronted by the greenish mass of the river almost immediately. I was in the presence of this titanic being. The only things left to do were walk, observe, and see what it did next.

The trail hugs the wooded edge of the Presumpscot River for most of the way to the falls, occasionally dipping deeper into the shoreline woods, where you’ll often cross little wooden bridges over tributaries that spill downhill, into the king-sized river. After the first half hour of my hike, I decided to branch off of the main route and explore some of the spur paths that followed these tributaries uphill. Some of these paths lead to alternate trailheads—one of which, on Summit Street, is accessible via the Greater Portland Metro 9B bus! On one of them, after ascending some log stairs, I encountered a handmade sign from a Girl Scout Troop in nearby Falmouth (Troop #2331) imploring visitors with dogs to scoop their poop; to avoid contaminating local waters. The sign felt like something more than a PSA. It felt like one of those signs at the aquarium that asks visitors to not tap the glass on the whale tank. Not only because it’s the respectful thing to do, but because those whales are HUGE. If mistreated and agitated, a whale could shatter the glass. And if the Presumpscot River were to become contaminated, the environmental reprecussions would be felt far and wide, since the river is such a backbone to the Greater Portland metro region.

Thankfully, Portland residents and leaders are keenly aware of this. In general, Maine has a strong culture of land protection, and while that can sometimes be wielded in ways that are less-than-noble (say, to block affordable housing from being built on a vacant lot), the Portland Trails demonstrate how preserved land and developed land can be woven together almost seamlessly. For my entire jaunt on the Presumpscot River, I was surrounded by houses, on the other side of the evergreens and birches. I couldn’t see these dwellings thanks to the shape of the land and the density of the tree canopy. But they were always just a few steps away. And I found that charming.

Laying eyes on the falls themselves—the rapids and the horsetail—I felt as though I had cracked into a deeper recess of Portland. The “underworld” or understory of a city is often presumed to be a darker thing, where vice and violence thrive. But the natural foundation of a city can be an underworld of its own; overlooked, misunderstood, and in some cases, treated with apprehension. Portland has brought its own understory to the surface, with its ingenious trail network. The further west you’re willing to venture, the grittier and cooler that story becomes. Imagine yourself there this fall, or beyond.

Presumpscot Falls via the Presumpscot River Preserve Trail
Hike distance: 3.8 miles out-and-back
Elevation gain: 72 feet
CLICK HERE for an Alltrails trail map
CLICK HERE for the Portland Trails network map

As some of you have noticed, there’s often a synergy between the content and vibe of each Mind The Moss story and what I’ve been reading, watching, or listening to while writing the story—which I often allude to within each piece. So starting this week, I’m kicking off a new Moss ritual. Each subsequent newsletter will conclude with a book, movie, or song recommendation that’s spiritually connected to the featured story. As some of you may have guessed from the title of this week’s story, a certain number by The Boss was crackling in my ears as I mucked around the Portland Trails.

In broader hiking news, here’s a remarkable CNN story written by Dianne Gallagher and Michelle Watson about a man who traveled by foot through the mountains of western North Carolina to reach his parents, after the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene ripped through the area and destroyed the local roads. It’s a powerful example of a Hike Of Necessity, which might not be familiar to most Americans but is very much a form of hiking that happens throughout the world. (Traversing Panama’s treacherous Darién Gap, a requirement for thousands of migrants heading north, is one such example.)

If you’re in a position to contribute to the grassroots relief efforts that are happening in North Carolina right now, the Asheville Citizen Times has a helpful how-to primer.

Of all the forces and objects that have taken a destructive toll on cities, it’s tough to beat highways. In U.S. cities, highways will often cleave through entire neighborhoods, subjecting residents to relentless air and noise pollution. Worse yet, the decision to route these highways through residential neighborhoods was often rooted in racism. During the post-war Urban Renewal era, the homes of Black families were seized by the government through eminent domain and razed, in order to clear space for the interstates. In Boston, hundreds of families were displaced from Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and adjacent areas during the 1960s, as the federal government prepared to fund the construction of the Southwest Expressway—an extension of I-95 that would have run 8 miles from Canton to the South End. It would have dismembered Boston.

But it was never built. That’s because a large consortium of activists who would later become known as the People Before Highways movement successfully pressured Governor Francis W. Sargent to call the project off. It was a victory in the wake of a tremendous loss, as scores of homes and small businesses had already been razed to make room for the highway. And what the state ended up building instead of the interstate extension was the Southwest Corridor—a multi-use greenway path, flanked with shade trees, following the MBTA Orange Line tracks from Forest Hills station to Back Bay station. Today, the corridor is one of the great walkable gems of Boston. I’ve traversed the Southwest Corridor innumerable times, on dates, on training runs, on my way to the Reggie Lewis track center to get my first COVID-19 vaccine, you name it.

But the Southwest Corridor wasn’t the only green gift that took root in Boston after the highway upheaval. Remember, the I-95 extension was going to extend all the way from the heart of Boston to Canton, on the southern edge of the city. And hidden within the woods and wetlands near Boston’s southernmost limits today, a forgotten segment of the planned highway that actually made it to the paving stage is now overgrown with vines and shrubs, but still accessible by foot. It serves as an unlikely connection to one of the most ruggedly charming hiking destinations in Greater Boston—the Blue Hills Reservation trail network—and this weekend, I’m going to show you the way in.

For all its craggy majesty, immersive bliss, and fighting rattlesnakes (seriously, there’s a video of this), the one sore spot of the Blue Hills Reservation is its accessibility. It’s located next door to the residential hub of Masschusetts and yet, it’s still tough to get to the trailheads without a car. The roads that wind through the core of the reservation are too narrow and bustling for walking. You could bike on them, but only in the same way that you could try driving a compact car on a logging road that’s full of potholes and semi-trucks screaming past you at 70 mph. And since none of the Blue Hills trails are serviced by MBTA buses, you pretty much need your own car to go for a hike here.

This may finally change in the next few years. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council of Greater Boston has been mapping out a new, connective greenway that would run a few miles from Boston’s southernmost neighborhoods, Mattapan and Hyde Park, to some of the most popular trailheads within the reservation. Being able to comfortably stroll or bike from Boston into the heart of the old woodlands would be huge. But it’s going to be at least a couple of years before this access dream is fully realized. In the interim, walking from Boston into the Blue Hills is going to be more of an adventure. I had been thinking about embarking on this adventure back in the spring: identifying a public transit station that was somewhat close to the western end of the reservation, where Great Blue Hill itself is located, and finding a safe-ish way to get there by foot.

Poring over maps, I saw something promising, about 10 minutes from the Readville commuter rail station by foot. It was a long pathway identified as the “Burma Road Trail.” It began from a tiny parking lot on Neponset Valley Parkway and followed the Neponset River itself in a long, straight, southwesterly line through a large patch of green space that I had never visited before. And toward the end of the trail, a dense maze of connector paths and service roads appeared to offer a direct connection to the westernmost trails of the Blue Hills Reservation. I hemmed and hawed. The trail would be heavy on wetlands, and since I hadn’t heard of the Burma Road Trail, in all my years as a Boston resident, I suspected it would be replete with signs of overdue maintenance: decaying bog bridges, flooded trail segments, etc. Furthermore, it was late May, the beginning of black fly season in Massachusetts. But despite all of this, the thought of being able to amble from the city to a pine-scented hilltop tower from which I could gaze at the cityscape had sparked a fire in my loins. I had to try this.

So I tossed some tortilla chips and bug spray in a backpack, made my way to South Station, and boarded a Providence-bound train, on a glowering Sunday morning. A quick ride to Readville and a comparably efficient walk along the parkway (which, thankfully, offers plenty of sidewalk) brought me to the little Burma Road trailhead, where two cars were taking up most of the available space. I was heartened to know that I wouldn’t be completely alone out here, as I stepped into a grove of deciduous giants and squelched my way along the beginnings of the trail. What began as a twisty path through the trees soon widened into a bushier tunnel of greenery, with enough clearance overhead to steal the occasional glow of sunlight. I had reached the long straightaway segment of the trail, and it couldn’t have been three minutes before I glimpsed a fellow hiker up ahead, walking their dog. This posed a dilemma that’s common in hiking. Our paces were just enough out of sync that if I continued at my normal speed, I would be trailing the hiker by only 10 feet, which would probably seem rather creepy. But if I wanted to overlap the hiker and continue ahead of them, I would have to power walk and turn my exploratory ramble into a full-on HIIT workout.

Eventually, a spur path on the side of the trail made the decision for me. The hiker took a hard left onto this sidepath, clearing the Burma Road Trail for me. I followed the trail for a solid 20-30 minutes, trying to hear the sound of the nearby river which was completely obscured from sight by all the wetland vegetation. But the wetlands themselves started to open up as I continued southwest, allowing lovely flashes of their fragrant waters and half-submerged trees. I checked my map upon reaching a second cut-off path—the one I was looking for. This path featured a rickety wooden bridge that led me into a pocket of forest that more closely resembled the Blue Hills territory where I was heading. And as I arrived at a brushy clearing within this forest, everything changed and I suddenly understood what exactly I had been walking on.

The ground beneath my feet had transitioned from dirt to weathered pavement. It was a lost road that stretched ahead of me for several hundred meters. And at the far end of this ancient road, from which tall grasses and prickers had sprouted up through the cracks, l could see the traffic of I-95—the highway which had almost crippled Boston. This paved corridor was the beginning of the end that never came. If the project had been completed, the interstate extension would have continued along what’s now the Burma Road Trail, before plowing through residential Boston. The sight of the lost link overtaken by greenery reminded me of the Planet Of The Apes movies, in a few ways. In those films, the end of human civilization has yielded a resurgence of nature, with burnt-out skyscrapers and freeways festooned with leafy plants. It’s a thing of beauty, built on a nightmare foundation. And what the apes have done with that foundation is also kind of beautiful. They’ve created thriving and sustainable communities. It’s only when factions of the apes start to mimic the megalomaniacal impulses of mankind when things start to get ugly again. Standing on the forgotten I-95 extension today is like visiting a battlefield on which the scars are still visible, while nature itself heals.

What happened next cemented the Burma Road to Blue Hills hike in the hall of fame for one of my favorite hiking genres: the “Am I Actually Allowed To Be Here…?” Hike. From the end of the paved road, I veered left into the trees again on a trail that hugged the edge of the woods and a clogged on-ramp for I-95. I could actually see the people sitting behind the wheels of these cars. One of them, a youngish guy in a white Honda CR-V, actually made eye contact with me through the windshield as I entered a denser, mossier stretch of forest. By now, faint blue blazes had begun to appear on the trees; a confirmation that I had crossed into Blue Hills land! As the grade of the trail started trending toward ascension, I prepared my lungs and calves for the denouement. Little Blue Hill, the far west bunny slope of the reservation, was my warmup. I scrabbled up the rocky path to the summit, sat on the memorial bench for Augustus Hemenway, and picked my way downhill to a sprawling parking lot on Washington Street. Here, I waited for a traffic window, dashed across the busy road, and picked up the Skyline Trail—the grueling 7.5-mile roller coaster of a trail that runs across the Blue Hills from west to east. I would follow the Skyline Trail a short distance to the top of Great Blue Hill, enjoy the city lookout from Eliot Tower, and kick off my return journey from there.

The climb to Eliot Tower from Washington Street is a Yankee ass kicker; a sequence of steep stone stairs and slabs, reflective of the northeastern idea that hiking should be a series of punishments. But these are brief punishments, and by the time I arrived at the foot of the big stone tower, feeling a gentle hand of wind sweeping through the trees around me, it was only 11:30am. I had managed to ramble from a Boston train station to the highest point in the Blue Hills Reservation—a moderately challenging hike of roughly 4.6 miles—and I still had an entire spring afternoon in front of me!

Before I tell you what I did with the rest of my afternoon—I’m guessing it’s a choice that most of you will not end up making—I need to end this story with a caveat. The Burma Road to Blue Hills hike can involve some serious mileage if you treat it as an out-and-back hike. If you start at Readville station, like I did, huff it to Great Blue Hill, and retrace your steps, you’re looking at a round trip of 9.2 miles. While most of the elevation gain is limited to the end of the hike, this might be more than some of you are looking to bite off. But there are two ways to trim the distance of the adventure.

Option A: Start the hike from Readville Station, hike to Great Blue Hill, descend to the nearby Blue Hills Trailside Museum (which has a pair of resident otters!) and call an Uber or Lyft from here. This is probably the simplest way to shave off several miles.

Option B: If you have a car, recruit a friend with another car, leave one vehicle in the parking lot by the Trailside Museum, and then drive over to the Readville area in the second car, together. Leave that car on a residential street near the train station, set out on the hike, and head home via the staged vehicle in the Blue Hills lot. While you won’t get the satisfaction of actually using public transit to reach the beginning of the hike, you’ll still get to reach a well-known place via an eerily beautiful forgotten path.

I didn’t do either of these things. Because I wasn’t ready to leave the Blue Hills behind just yet, having trekked through strange, forlorn wetlands and woods and lost highway corridors to reach the superlative summit. So I kept hiking, following the Skyline Trail due east, over every goddamn high point in the Blue Hills Reservation, all the way to the end of the trail in Quincy, where a 20 minute “cool down” walk to the closest bus stop would mark the end of my protracted, self-inflicted suffering. I’m not sure why I did this. It was an impulsive decision that left me limping for the next few days, as my lower limbs regained their strength and elasticity. But I couldn’t help but feel a sense of smugness, as many of us do after adventures that unexpectedly escalate. The hidden Blue Hills connector—our own lost highway—made my ramble possible.

Who knows where it might take you.

Readville Station to Great Blue Hill via Burma Road (one-way)
Hike distance: 4.6 miles
Elevation gain: 728 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

CLICK HERE for a Mass DCR map of the entire Blue Hills Reservation

As far as I can tell, there are two proven ways to get a park named after you. If you’re rich, you can donate some land to a state, with the condition that the land be turned into a public green space. And if you’re like former Maine Governor Percival Baxter, the man who made Baxter State Park possible, you can throw in additional earmarks such as “no running water or paved roads in the park, because we’re not catering to cupcakes here!” Alternatively, if you don’t own land, you could run for public office. And if you win, you can make sure that parks get the resources they need to thrive.

Or not. Sometimes, politicians manage to endear themselves to the public to such a degree that after they die, a park is named in their honor. Because the fuzzy vibe that you get from a great park is not unlike how it felt to bump into the late politician and share a handshake, a coffee, a conversation about Medicaid reimbursements, you name it. The late John A. Notte Jr.—Rhode Island’s 65th Governor—was one of those affable legends. Perhaps best known for implementing the state’s income tax. This ultimately made him a one-term governor in 1963, but Notte still inspired a special kind of bipartisan respect from colleagues. He passed away from a terminal illness two decades after his electoral defeat, and at his funeral, Governor J. Joseph Garrahy hailed the late Notte as “a man of political courage; an honest man who worked to make Rhode Island a better and more compassionate state.” The implication was clear. “We may not have given you a second term. But we’re gonna give you a park.”

At least, that’s how I suspect Governor John Notte Memorial Park was catalyzed. A wraparound buffet of grassy picnic greens, swimming beaches, and conservation woodlands on Wenscott Reservoir in North Providence, the Governor’s Park feels designed for social cross-pollination. It’s a robust urban park with a shopping mall mindset—the promise that there’s something here for each person to enjoy or poke around, when they’re not busy catching up or grabbing a bite to eat by the fountain. And that’s not a metaphor. When you pull into the main parking lot for the Governor’s Park, you’re literally greeted by a fountain that would look right at home in the hulking Providence Place shopping center. The park fountain is located in a pool fed by a stream, and a gentle path follows the waterway uphill through a grove of shade trees. Moments later, you arrive at a gorgeous cascade, framed by an arched bridge that spans the width of the stream. Chance are, the banks of the cascade will be busy with parkgoers napping, tanning, munching, and performing jumping jacks to Bad Bunny. And you may hear the sound of ducks from nearby. Because the cascade spills from the watery heft of Wenscott Reservoir; the blue crown jewel of the Governor’s Park.

This is, note-for-note, exactly how my entrance to Governor John Notte Memorial Park played out. I found myself at the park earlier this summer, before New England turned into a rice cooker with an EXTRA STEAM setting. What lured me here? Well, if you must know, I was craving a beef kebab wrap from East Side Pockets; the delectable Mediterranean joint in Providence. And the New England Puritan in me needed another reason to justify driving to Little Rhody for the late afternoon. I soon realized that this could be an opportunity to explore a new Providence park, before grabbing an early dinner. I had found the rusting muscle cars in the forest of Neutaconkanut Hill. I had admired the Seekonk River from Blackstone Park. And I had followed the Hunt’s Mills Interpretive Trail to the onsite mill waterfall and fish ladder. But North Providence was less familiar territory for me. As soon as I saw the large splotch of green on Google Maps—the Governor’s Park—I sensed that this was the place. So I grabbed my trail runners and my broadest brimmed hat, and I headed south with rustling ambition.

And yet, as soon as I arrived at the reservoir, it became obvious that hiking in Governor John Notte Memorial Park is one of the more esoteric things you can do here. Most of my fellow parkgoers were clustered on the riverbanks. A handful were inching into the reservoir waters at Twin Rivers Beach. And just north of the beach, a banquet hall with its own pavilion was audibly thrumming with activity. I was more intrigued by the name of this banquet hall—The Overlook at Meehan. While the hall did “overlook” the reservoir to some degree, being perched on its wooded shore, I wondered if the name implied the presence of another high point in the vicinity; in the dense and snarled woodlands behind the banquet hall. So I left the more palatial side of the park behind and followed a thin, raggedy path with little blue signs that read “West River Trail.”

Sometimes there are obvious natural landmarks that inspire connective trails. But just as often, you’ll find trails that are clearly the product of someone desiring to have *a* trail in a certain location, with the destination of the trail being sort of an afterthought. “There’s a creek in the woods? Okay, fuck it. Let’s just have the trail go there.” The West River Trail is one of these trails—especially because the woodland stream to which it leads is not actually Providence’s West River. That distinction belongs to the waterway that flows from Wenscott Reservoir, toward that pool with the fountain, before flowing onward through the city. The West River Trail takes you away from its namesake river, toward a tributary that begins in the woods of Governor John Notte Memorial Park. I can appreciate the humble beginnings of any waterway and I was ready to savor the origins of this one. But before I got there, an uphill cut-off path to my left hinted at the possibility of an actual overlook with a nice reservoir vista. So I pivoted, expectingly.

What I found on the forested hilltop to which this trail led wasn’t particularly scenic, but there were glimmers of lost human activity up there. Namely, a pair of decaying archery targets suspended from trees. As I crunched through dried leaves and twigs, stepping over a few fallen trees and accepting that there would be no overlook views on this hike, I wondered if there had been another chapter in the short history of the Governor’s Park in which the woods were flush with hikers, campers, sharpshooters, you name it. Today, they feel like a forgotten sideshow, and when I doubled back to the main West River Trail route, I found myself pushing through branches that had partially obscured segments of the trail. The tributary itself was a modest trickle, and the wooden bridge over the stream was falling apart. But the presence of the bridge suggested unknown glory days; a time when more people came out here to ramble.

My exit from the Governor’s Park woodlands appeared as a set of stairs that delivered me back to the sunny parking lot from which I had set off. There were still plenty of parkgoers galivanting on the greens by the fountain and the beginnings of the West River. I felt like I was rejoining friends in the South Shore Plaza atrium, after visiting a BDSM store while they had been shopping at American Eagle. There was a sense of coming back together after exploring the mall in our own ways. As much as the trails here can feel like an undercooked side dish, they still offer something for those of us who crave the sting of thorns in our calves and the visceral satisfaction of emerging from the forest with muddy ankles. Sometimes, a nice side dish is all you’re craving.

But who knows what the Governor’s Park might taste like in the future? As I learned after my inaugural visit, the bacteria counts in Wenscott Reservoir have been getting high enough that the state of Rhode Island is recommending the closure of the Twin Rivers Beach. If that happens, what will the beachgoers do? Will they fan out and disappear into the Greater Providence parks ecosystem, like tears in rain? Will they sit on the picnic greens near the reservoir, drowning their sorrows in Fritos and Pepsi? Or could a handful of them find their way into the nearby woods? To the West River Trail?

The loss of any public swimming hole is a gut punch. But the people of Little Rhody will figure this out. Who knows what could fill the recreational void left by a beach closure? There could be more woodland trails, or a floating pool with self-filtering technology, like the one that’s being deployed to New York’s East River soon. Hell, someone might build a zipline through the forest! All I know is that when I went to Governor John Notte Memorial Park, I saw many denominations of being outdoors and loving it. I saw parkgoers of different persuasions coexisting, in harmony. And I’m sure this will endure. I’d imagine it’s what the Governor himself would have wanted.

Governor John Notte Memorial Park ramble
Hike distance: 2 miles loop
Elevation gain: 161 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

This is the free September newsletter for Mind The Moss. Support from readers makes it possible for me to write these New England hiking stories. For the complete Moss Experience, upgrade to a paid subscription today and enjoy weekly stories, full access to the Moss archive, and customized hiking ideas for your next New England road trip!

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When it comes to hiking news, we can’t seem to get enough scatological stories. It makes sense. Being out in the sticks, distanced from the comforts of home, forces you to think about bodily functions in a more intentional way; including those of any four-legged hiking companions. For Slate, conservation specialist Jeff Dingler wrote about the absolute worst thing that you can do with dog poop when you’re out on a hike. I’m not going to reveal the answer here, but I will say that I’ve witnessed a lot of people doing this on trails lately, in the city and in the backcountry. And it’s not cool.

Also, speaking of stories involving fecal bacteria (apologies), I wrote a piece for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section on the obstacles that people will often run into when trying to find a clean, barrier-free swimming hole in Massachusetts. With summers getting hotter and heavier storms contaminating some of our swimming venues with chemical and pathogen rich runoff, it’s clear that we’re going to need more places to swim. And as I reveal in the Globe story, New York is showing us how to create them.

Finally, Aislinn Sarnacki, who writes for the Bangor Daily News while also producing a fanastic series of Maine-based “1-minute hike” videos, has a new story about one of the scariest and most iconic hikes in the Pine Tree State: the infamous Knife Edge ridgeline ascent on Mount Katahdin. (I’m actually less scared of the rugged, narrow ridge path and more freaked out by the chimney-like gap that you have to climb into and out of, during the traverse.) Sarnacki’s story is also a helpful reminder that we’re about one month away from Katahdin’s trails closing for the winter. Learn more here.

Back in late July, I was heading back to Boston from Midcoast Maine after visiting family there and rather than contend with the usual crush of weekend traffic along Coastal Route 1 and I-95, I decide to cut across back roads and local highways; a scenic bypass that would take me through the state capital! Augusta, Maine is an intriguing place that never seems to get the press coverage of Maine’s other cities. Portland is tough to compete with, of course, but these days, places like Lewiston, Bangor, and Bath are finding their way into more magazines and guidebooks on the strength of their food, museums, and parks. This makes the Augusta blind spot feel even stranger. So I was determined to make an afternoon of my brief stopover there.

The city was built on the banks of the mighty Kennebec River, and today it boasts a population of just over 19,000 people (which is barely 1% of the size of Providence, Rhode Island!) Like a lot of Maine’s interior towns, the architecture here dates back to the manufacturing mill era in the 19th Century. Back then, the locally-produced goods included textiles, headstones, shoes, furniture, and my favorite of all, broom handles. Now a lot of those mill buildings contain small businesses, including several of the savory variety, and my first idea was posting up at Cushnoc Brewing Company for a “Gigantic Dad Pants” India Pale Ale and a pizza. But the weather was so resplendent and golden that finding a place to enjoy the more rustly side of Augusta was tempting too. I considered walking the Kennebec River Rail Trail, chasing the waterfalls within Vaughan Woods, or wandering the garden paths at Viles Arboretum. But in the end, I was drawn to another venue, by a more narcissistic root of intrigue—a speckling of elevated woodlands behind the Maine State House which is known as “Howard Hill.”

I went there expecting a nice view of the Maine State House’s great copper dome. But I ended up getting something more; a living, shimmering reminder of Maine’s unique culture of access to beautiful spaces, and the unstable foundation that it’s built upon.

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