Wilderness, right in the urban
A Worcester hiker goes deep and lives to tell the tale
This week’s Mind The Moss is a special dispatch from Bill Shaner, author of Worcester Sucks and I Love It. An expert on the politics and environmental oddities of the Central Mass citadel, Bill asked me if I was interested in a guest story about a “super gritty” hike that “winds through a dense part of the city.” Suffice it to say, I said yes instantly and watched my inbox with a falconer’s anticipation and now, having read Bill’s story thrice, I’m bookmarking next week’s train schedules for the Boston-Worcester line.
Sitting down to write up my hike yesterday, I’m reminded of coyotes in New York City. Through thin bands of wilderness and other such out-of-the-way corridors and alleys, coyotes were able to make their way from western prairies to Central Park. Now, they are rarely noticed but always there, somewhere in the shadows, traversing by some route unknown to us. A wilderness right there in the urban.
“People often see the wilderness and the cities as two completely different things,” observed one researcher with the Gotham Coyote Project. “It’s crossovers like these that remind us that these landscapes are actually two neighboring parts of the same ecosystem.”
Hiking the East Side Trail in Worcester, Mass. feels very much like taking the route of a coyote. You are never more than a football field away from a road or an apartment building or a business, but over its entire ~3.5 mile stretch, you’re left with the feeling that you’ve traversed a wilderness—one a city resident could pass by for a lifetime and never really see.
Appropriate to the name, the hike is through the “East Side” of Worcester, a mid-sized, working class city with the usual problems of such a place. The East Side, especially where this trail bisects it, is among the more economically depressed areas of an economically depressed city. As such, it’s worth a disclaimer that this hike is not for the clutcher of pearls. You will very likely pass people living in tents or the evidence of it. There’s broken glass and there’s trash. There’s graffiti. There is no grand payoff vista a la a mountain peak but there is a lot of beauty to take in if you’re open to the taking.
About 2:30 p.m. Sunday I parked my car on Shrewsbury Street and walked through the arch of twin stone lions that serves as a gateway to Christoforo Columbo Park (I know...) and marks the start of the East Side Trail.
It was cold and rainy and this particular trail was one of the few in Worcester I’d never done. Something about it always stopped me. There’s no loop to it. It involves crossing heavy traffic. Some of the trail is just a sidewalk. And it honestly seemed a little daunting. Colin Novick of the Greater Worcester Land Trust described it to me as “the most challenging three-mile trail in Worcester.”
“I think it is a great trail for conditioning, but mostly I am amazed at how close to remote you can be in the heart of the City on the built up East Side,” said Novick. “Pieces of that trail let you lose yourself in the woods.”
The conditioning element was immediately apparent. After a quick walk from the lions past a spray park and amphitheater to the woods on the park’s border, a blue trail marker spray-painted on a little jersey barrier takes you immediately up a several-hundred foot elevation climb. It is brutal, frankly. There are no switchbacks. At times it features the sort of thick leaf cover that makes it even more difficult and suggests it doesn’t get hiked a lot. You go straight up the side of Bell Hill to an old access road, where you then have to hop another barrier the style of which has not been seen for decades, similarly marked with spray paint, and continue the steep ascent. The barrier is all tagged up as are a lot of features on this hike. On the back of the barrier, I noticed a little message. I stopped, panting and sweating, to type it out.
“*fact* these woods and trails contain spirits that throw rocks and disguise there voices of the same voice of your loved ones. By any means you are never alone at any time of any day. You have been warned. This is not a joke.”
And below it a rejoinder: “Ha ha a hoe / slut I think not”
Welp, good thing I’m doing this alone, I thought.
From there to the top of Bell Hill it wasn’t so much spirits in the woods as it was real people, or the evidence of real people having been there prior. A fire pit and a pillow torn and spilling its fluffy guts, and an abandoned tent site and then two active ones. In the second I heard someone inside, talking on the phone as I passed quietly.
At the summit there was a clearing with an old stone foundation all tagged up and beyond it a soccer field: a couple empty cases of beer the only suggestion of a human presence. No nets on the goals, just a tattered sweatshirt ominously tied to one of the goal posts. This is a forgotten place, I thought, but not some ancient ruin. Like it was forgotten in the past 10 years.
A short walk down from the summit takes you to Belmont Street, or Rt. 9, a busy street carrying traffic from the east into the downtown. Though there’s a crosswalk, caution is required and running is advised.
For a short while, the hike is just a sidewalk, until you notice boulder on the side of the walkway with a blue marker on it. I climbed up and just like that I was back in the woods.
The Rte. 9 traffic now whirring some 20 or so feet beneath me, I hiked deeper into the woods. This is where I first thought about the coyotes in Central Park. How a moment ago I was in a distinctly urban place and now I am safely back in some patch of woods I’d never before noticed.
After a short stretch, the trail takes you along the ridgeline of an old quarry, the rock faces of which are tagged with all sorts of colorful spray paint art and the base filled with the evidence of young kids partying and other people simply living. A metal folding chair next to a fire pit.
I’d advise keeping a trail map or app handy as there are dozens of options for where to go next. I opted for the “ghost trail” because duh. Ghosts. And I began following the white markers through Green Hill Park. The Ghost Trail goes through the woods for a short time before taking you through the park itself. Trail markers can be found on cement paths and light poles for a baseball field. As I searched out and followed these trail markers, like little easter eggs in a space not usually experienced as a trail, I noticed a deer across the street, heading in the direction I was. Wilderness, right in the urban.
In these woods, which border the grounds of the old Worcester State Hospital (of the One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest variety) the hike followed a rather ornate and large stone wall, leading eventually to some circular cement foundation in a field. On top of it now was not a building but rather a fire pit, stacked and ready to go, and a crude stone bench. The setting for some future ritual and/or party.
From here I hopped on the Worcester State Hospital Cart Trail, an old access road of a trail, spooky and pleasant at the same time. It took me past a cliff where I heard the caw of a falcon then looked up to see it floating up there on some updraft quite majestically. Mixed with police sirens and highway noise in the background, the crystal clear caw was striking. I took a minute there to soak in the sight.
Following the trail for a time led to a tall grass field adjacent the Green Hill Golf Course. As I walked into the field that same falcon soared over my head maybe 15 feet up. I fumbled for my phone like an idiot and didn’t get it in time. It disappeared into the dense woods bordering the field. Above the treeline a small plane was dragging a purple UNIBANK ad. A reminder of the human layer of the city while enmeshed in a deeper layer where the wild things happen unnoticed.
Unlike a hike in the proper wilderness, this hike is a series of little decisions. There are dozens of trails, both marked and otherwise, which cut through the parks and tracts of undeveloped land the overall “East Side Trail” follows. There are dozens of ways to complete the same route, and the AllTrails app proves especially handy. Without it I would have been very confused.
From the field by the golf course, the hike takes you through a swamp and follows the Coal Mine Brook, a small and delightfully babbling feature, straight to the point where it dumps out into Lake Quinsigamond. But not before it goes under a four-lane highway and you have to go over it. No crosswalk. While I might have jogged across Rte 9 earlier in this hike, I sprinted across this one. Not fun.
Once on the other side of the road, the trail takes you to the brook’s culvert, which has some delightful graffiti. And, as seems to be the case on many Worcester hikes, there’s an unexplainable totem! Gotta have the unexplainable totem. We love em, folks.
The trail ends at the shore of Lake Quinsigamond. A little patch of dirty beach with fire pits under “no fires” signs and trash and a wooden dining room table chair right on the bank of the lake. A perfect place to sit and reflect on the bizarre and winding and distinctly urban wilderness the East Side Trail presents.
THE EAST SIDE TRAIL (northbound to Lake Quinsigamond)
Hike distance: 3.6 miles
Elevation gain: 381 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map
THE EAST SIDE TRAIL (southbound to Christoforo Columbo Park)
Hike distance: 3.6 miles
Elevation gain: 430 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map
You can hike the East Side Trail as a ~7.2 mile out-and-back hike OR you can use Worcester Regional Transit Authority buses to return to your point of origin. But be aware that this may take nearly as long as simply hiking back. (We’ve both tried it.)
Great hike. I don't quite know how to express it, but something about the contrast of wilderness in urban areas, and the idea of these wild areas right next to busy, developed areas, but no one notices them are really interesting to me. The urban hikes described on here are often my favorites.