The moss that was minded

What most of you read in 2024

Season’s greetings! I hope that you’re digesting the final morsels of a leftovers meal, giving someone special an extra squeeze, or saying farewell to 2024 by going for a nice, pensive ramble outdoors, wherever it is that you call home. This past year was the third full year of Mind The Moss, which is a hell of a lot longer than I had initially expected this newsletter to last when I impulsively launched it during the sophmore pandemic summer of 2021. The only reason why the party has gone on for this long and grown each year is you, my dear readers. And since 2024 is the last year in which Mind The Moss will be a newsletter about “unusual hiking in New England” before it evolves into a newsletter about the modern Renaissaance of walking (in the U.S. and beyond), I’d like to pour one out for 2024 by revealing your favorite stories of the year.

No December is complete without a parade of Top 10 lists. These were the 10 most popular and thoroughly-read stories from Mind The Moss. Several of them surprised me, given the specificity of their topics, while others (especially the top story) left me cautiously hopeful that some of our most unique outdoor activities and destinations are becoming less esoteric these days. In any event, here is what most of you read:

#10: Towers and tingles

I guess there’s something universally skin-crawling yet alluring about old rusted fire watch towers in the middle of the wild; like the tower on top of Elmore Mountain in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, which I visited back in early fall. Almost as scary as climbing these towers is imagining what it’s like to temporarily live on one of them during fire seasons. This is still a seasonal job that people undertake in the crispier parts of the U.S., and there are some seriously freaky stories about what they’ve seen.

bwats2 CC BY 2.0

#9: Smashing pumpkins revival

I wanted to write a story about the 2014 Keene Pumpkin Festival riots for well over a year, so it was deeply gratifying that so many of you read this one. I enjoyed taking a long, contemplative walk around Keene’s parks, streets, and protected forests in early October, wondering how such a random explosion of destruction bubbled out of this seemingly idyllic, suburbanized New Hampshire city. And then I remembered the late J.G. Ballard’s observation that many suburbs “dream of violence” and the prospect of being sprung into “a more passionate world.” That feels kind of familiar right now, eh?

#8: I ♥ Portland Trails

Given that I wondered aloud whether Portland, Maine is “New England’s most hikeable city” in the tagline of this story, I’m not surprised that tons of you gravitated toward it. I published this story back in January, but I actually got to spend some serious time in Portland during a long weekend in October, with the specific intent of exploring most of Portland’s extraordinary network of urban trails and greenways. While you’ll have to wait until 2026 to read about that adventure, this story should help you plan your own.

#7: The Mohawk Trail that’s still a trail

Now this was a nice surprise. I gather that a lot of you have driven Route 2 through the northern Berkshires—also called “The Mohawk Trail”—and thought to yourselves, “This is cool, I guess, but I’d much rather walk on an actual trail with Indigenous heritage.” It took me several visits to the Boston Public Library before I found an old guidebook that shed light on such a trail that might have been part of a trading footpath used by the Mohawk people and others during the pre-colonial era. Seek it out next summer!

#6: The Town That Trees Built

When I saw that this love letter to Berlin, NH made the Top 10, I let out an involuntary “fuck yeah” right in the coffee shop where I was writing this, slipped in my earbuds, and instinctually cued up a Ben Böhmer song. Like its namesake city in Germany, the northernmost city in the Granite State is a garden of eclectic delights. Whether it’s a riverside path through a corridor of birches, a hidden waterfall along an ATV path, the lookout ledge atop a mountain where Indigenous peoples once harvested stone for arrowheads, burritos of unusual size at a local cafe, or the excellent smoke shop and sex store that’s been operating on Main Street for decades, Berlin is truly a legend.

#5: Waterworld, NH

New Hampshire keeps racking up the wins! Roughly 15 minutes down the road from Berlin, on the wooded haunches of Mount Adams and Mount Madison, there’s a grand buffet of waterfalls splishing and sploshing through the forest. Fed by Snyder Brook, which flows from the upper saddle between the two peaks, these waterfalls add a lot of enchantment to what’s otherwise an ass-ripper of a climb, and if you visit them in the summer, their vapors can transform the muggy forest into a veritable Cool Zone.

#4: Personal Best…and worst!

This was encouraging. In the last weeks, I’ve made several callbacks to this recent story about hiking the Robert Frost Trail in Western Massachusetts, coming to terms with the fact that one of our greatest poets could be kind of a prick sometimes, and accepting that this applies to many of the people we love and respect. I wrote this a few weeks after the 2024 election, which pretty much gives the subtext away, and it was nice to see the story get such a strong response. It’s a glimmer of what’s ahead.

#3: NOPE

Again, when you frame a travel story superlatively, a lot of people tend to read it. Still, I wasn’t sure how many of you would “enjoy” my account of walking through a forest that’s considered to be the most haunted forest in America—especially since I had to preface this story with a content warning, given the grisly history of what’s happened in the Freetown-Fall River State Forest on the south shore of Massachusetts. It’s one of the very few outdoor spaces to which I have no desire or intention to return. Ever.

#2: Lost highway

I spent a couple minutes theorizing what exactly drew so many people into this story about a little-known way to walk from an MBTA commuter rail stop to the top of Great Blue Hill in the Blue Hills Reservation. Was it the allure of a transit-to-trails adventure? The revelation that this route involves walking along a stretch of abandoned highway that’s now overgrown with greenery? Or could it be a sign that many of us are growing curious about the intersections between “city” and “country” these days? Whatever the case may be, all of these would be green flags as to how people are thinking about the way in which we utilize land, and what it means for the outdoor to be “accessble.”

And finally…the big fish.

#1: Have yourself a Walking Holiday

When I first learned about the concept of a “Walking Holiday”—a multi-night getaway that involves walking across the countryside via easy paths or quiet roads, eating and sleeping in villages along the way—I was smitten and heartsick all at once. In other parts of the world, this is something that lots of people do. In America, there aren’t many places where one can easily take a Walking Holiday, because of how our life is built around driving. But the harder I squinted at the landscape, the more I began to find select opportunities for Walking Holidays in the U.S. or nearby. Whether it’s the Prince Edward Island Walk trail on PEI, a town-to-town rail trail like the new Lamoille Valley Rail Trail through Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, or the intentional Walking Holiday route in the Berkshires known as The High Road, the concept is starting to take root domestically! And the fact that my story about Walking Holidays was the most popular Mind The Moss story of 2024 is a wonderful omen for what’s ahead.

Thank you all so much for reading. I really couldn’t do any of this without you.

See you in 2025.