Traversing the Seven Sisters...with Two Sisters

A long, strange Western Mass. trip

Every state deserves a traverse—that is to say, a long-distance hiking route that’s roly-poly and scenic enough to be considered an alluring ordeal. New Hampshire has the Presidential Range. Maine has Mount Bigelow (which is basically its own mountain range.) And of course, Vermont has the Long Trail, which runs a whopping 273 miles along the spine of the Green Mountains. But for reasons that I didn’t grasp until last summer, the definitive Massachusetts traverse is overlooked and not often cited in the same conversations as these other juggernauts. It’s hidden in the Pioneer Valley, where the Connecticut River runs south past Springfield and Northampton, and it’s routinely overshadowed by the nearby Berkshires hiking destinations. At 5.5 miles, it might not sound like much of a traverse, but here’s the kicker: within those 5.5 miles, hikers attempting the traverse summit 10 interconnected peaks in one grueling day!

Moss people: I’d like you to meet The Seven Sisters.

The setting of this skin-your-shins challenge is the Holyoke Range, which includes the literal Mount Holyoke for which the college is named. And from the pinnacle of Mount Holyoke, where you can gaze into the valley from the porch of an old summit house, a long basalt ridgeline runs east toward Bare Mountain. Between these two peaks are a series of knobby high-points; wooded but still offering views of the Connecticut River, the surrounding farmlands, and the not-so-distant Berkshires. Here you have the seven sisters themselves. Though, to be frank, the moniker is a bit of a puzzler. Why is this ridge traverse known as “The Seven Sisters” when there are well over seven peaks to scramble over? Is it a nod to the proximity of Mount Holyoke and Smith, which belong to the Seven Sisters liberal arts college league? Did the supervisor overseeing the trail development grow up with seven beloved sisters? I couldn’t tell you, and not for lack of digging. But I suspect it has something to do with the academic scene. Because each May, psychotic athletes from Pioneer Valley colleges and neighboring regions come here to run a yo-yo style race across the Seven Sisters; meaning, they attempt two traverses in one day, at speeds that seem inadvisable on steep and rocky terrain.

I had no interest in running with the bulls like this, but given the modest mileage and zealous elevation gain of the Seven Sisters traverse, it had occupied a top slot on my ramble list for several years before my hiking comrade and former Boston flatmate Katie Metzger relocated to the city of Holyoke. With a good friend and her basecamp just 12 minutes away from the Holyoke Range (which, strangely enough, is located in Amherst), the time was ripe for taking on the Sisters. So on a fetid, sweltering evening in August of last year, Katie and I sat in her living room studying maps, shoveling Pad Thai into our gullets, and planning our quest. We would set off in the early morning from the east end of the range, ascending Bare Mountain first and making our way to Mount Holyoke, so that we could passive-aggressively wait to flop into rocking chairs on the summit house porch that would almost certainly be occupied by people who had driven there on the mountain auto road. (No disrespect to these visitors, by the way: the masochistic glory of traversing a mountain range on foot is a choice.) But the moment when our plans went from promising to hallowed was when Katie’s sister, Dawn, texted her to let us know that she would be accepting our invitation to join the climb. Seven Sisters plus Two Sisters plus one Symbolic Sister. We had a perfect 10.

We set off on our traverse at 8am and started with the ceremonial staging of vehicles at each end of the journey. We left mine at Mount Holyoke and then piled into Katie’s Prius and puttered over to the trailhead parking lot for Bare Mountain. The hike began innocuously, with a steady climb up the traprock-laden east side of the mountain. As we gained elevation, savoring the temperate morning air with the understanding that things would really get cooking after 10am, my feet kept skidding out from under me as I stepped on loose rock shardsthat covered the trail. I pitched forward twice and on the second time, I broke the fall with my iPhone, which I was stupidly carrying in my left hand in order to take photos of our hike. Miraculously, the screen was uncracked and the hardware seemed to be fine. Our good fortune continued as we reached the top of Bare Mountain, where a little exposed summit pops out from the trees. The sun was resplendent, the valley view was worthy a tourism board slideshow, and the only other hiker up there had a Westie named “Balthazar” who kept throwing himself into a puddle of muddy rainwater that had accumuluted on the summit. What a lovely day.

What none of us realized was that this promising first stretch of the traverse was not a sign of things to come, but our last gulp of being outdoors and loving it. Because this is what happens when you continue west from the summit of Bare Mountain. The dense verdant forest of the Seven Sisters ridgeline envelops you, to the point where the trail suddenly becomes a twisting tunnel of deciduous foliage thick enough to block the sun and the upper altitude breeze from fully breaking through. Meanwhile, the earth beneath your feet gets progressively unstable and unkempt. For the next couple of miles, we hauled ourselves up sequences of ledges that felt like the result of a giant cheese grater being scraped across the mountains. And then, we gingerly desended steeper trail segments that were strewn with the same traprock fragments that threw me off-balance earlier. And again, with the exception of an occasional hole in the trees that offered a glimpse of the Connecticut River Valley below—in the same way that a bakery window in a Dickensian story offers a torturous glimpse of fresh bread to its destitute protagonists—we saw little but leaves, branches, and bugs.

All of which begs the question: Why do this? A traverse, by definition, is challenging. But there’s usually a buffet of scenic courses to sample along the way, like exposed mountaintops and waterfalls. Ours was becoming a much leaner journey, to the point where the occasional spurt of ecological diversity would inspire fits of ecstasy. Near the halfway point of our traverse, we bumped into a family of hikers who had made their way up the ridge via a short spur path. They had a Corgi with them, whose name I’m forgetting, and Katie spent the next five minutes tousseling the little rambler, who clearly relished the prolonged attention. I half expected her to ask the family if we could borrow their dog for the remainder of our traverse, or if they wanted to come with us to Mount Holyoke. A half hour after parting ways, we climbed a set of steep wooden stairs installed near one of the knobby summits, and then we descended them again, just to appreciate the reprieve from rock shards and ledges. Near the top of the stairs, another sight proved strangely stimulating: an old electrical box with a pipe running from it, down the mountainside. Did this pipe contain a cable of some kind? If we sawed the pipe in half, would we cut off all the power for Amherst? These were questions that we actually asked ourselves for the next 10-15 minutes of hiking.

If you’ve ever tried psychdedelics, then you probably recognize what’s happening here. Just like a pinch of dried psilocybin mushrooms can alter your senses, a traverse on roller-coastering terrain in seemingly endless woodlands alters the way you perceive and experience the things around you. For us, the effect was similar to ripping into a bag of Cheetos when you’re two hours into a trip, popping a few of the nuclear orange puffs into your mouth and going, “Oh my fucking GOD.” Or watching a re-run of Friends and finding yourself shedding actual tears when Ross and his old monkey, Marcel, are briefly reunited. Altogether, it took us around three hours to reach the saddle between Mount Holyoke and the unnamed “sister” that precedes it. But if our journey had taken another few hours, things probably would have escalated into a hallucinatory place. At the height of our exhaustion and delirium, trudging upward once again, we broke into song and started singing “Africa” Not the Toto original, but the Weezer cover, which includes a lot of overaggressive, overdriven guitar work during the chorus. We were hitting Rivers Cuomo’s high notes, air-shredding and windmilling as we hiked. And in this moment, I started to understand why people run the Seven Sisters each spring.

A traverse that messes with your mind, like the Seven Sisters ridgeline does, can feel like a sort of purification through degradation. By the time we finally emerged onto the manicured lawn beneath the Mount Holyoke summit house, we had been distilled into the most base versions of ourselves. We practically sprinted toward the porch like vikings with a sudden burst of late-game energy, drinking in the valley views with audible OOH-ing. When I plunked myself into a rocking chair, glistening in sweat and covered with bits of forest detritus, I did so with enough abandon that there was an audible cracking sound from the chair. And when a pair of elderly visitors asked us if we had hiked to the mountaintop, I launched into a recollection of our journey that was much more episodic and vivid than these poor travelers had probably expected. They were making friendly chit-chat. We were processing what we had been through.

We made our way down Mount Holyoke to my waiting car, and then we kept coming down at Barstow’s Dairy Store and Bakery, just a few minutes south of the trailhead. Nursing maple ice cream cones at our little table, we had calmed down and were starting to reconcile our return to the real world. Dawn and I had to drive to Boston that evening, amidst the familiar traffic of I-90. Katie had to spend the evening at her apartment preparing the materials for a gardening project with her students the next day. Would the lingering psychedelic fumes of our traverse lend a pinch of demented energy to these mundane tasks? Or would the tasks feel agreeable after spending all that time up in the ridgetop woods? Again, why did we do this? It’s a logical question to ask about any traverse, or any hike really. But hiking is not logical. It’s an impulsive thing; more amorphous in rationale. Ours was simple. There were Seven Sisters, two actual sisters, a symbolic sister, and one long strange trip. And for us, it was enough.

The Seven Sisters Traverse (east to west)
Hike distance: 5.5 miles Point A to Point B
Elevation gain: 1,352 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

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Because several people in my life have gotten to see Taylor Swift performing live on the Eras tour, it’s been brought to my attention that at each of these shows, there’s a piano covered with real moss! Naturally, I had to look into this, and it sent me down a rabbit hole almost as hypnotic as hiking the Seven Sisters. For Architectural Digest, Katherine McLaughlin breaks down the world building that happens each night when Taylor Swift and her crew assemble the elaborate setpieces on stage. Each setpiece is an allusion to one of her albums, and the mossy piano is part of a callback to the Folklore and Evermore years. Or rather, the Folkmore and Evermore ERAS. This is how you spend a Swiftian tour budget. Now, if anyone can show me, with proof, where the piano moss was harvested from, I’ll send you a free Walking City Trail sticker by mail.

In grimmer news, those of you who are bound for the Grand Canyon this year might want to avoid Havasupai Falls. A lot of people who’ve visited the falls recently have been getting violently ill. Several have even been airlifted to Arizona hospitals. My hunch is that the root of this mysterious outbreak will be pretty straightforward; kind of like that recent investigation into the recurrence of norovirus among thru-hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail. (Spoiler/stomach alert: the contagion was the prodigious fecal bacteria found on surfaces of shelters and cabins along the trail.) But nonetheless, it’s a bit spooky to imagine over 100 people in a specific location being overwhelmed by the same sickness. It’s the stuff that X-Files episodes are made of. Or were made of :(