Wilbraham Hiking Club: Alton's Way and White Cedar Swamp Trails

The Wilbraham Hiking Club is a new group geared toward enjoying one of the things that is so great about this town: its proximity to great hiking spots. Of course I was thrilled about hiking not only the Alton's Way trail in the McDonald Nature Preserve, but also the White Cedar Swamp trails. This area is Wilbraham's best kept secret, and it's great to see that others are enjoying these beautiful woods, fields, and wetlands.

Something new: someone built a little "boardwalk/bridge" to span the brook in the back of the Memorial School.

Ahead is the pine grove where the Cedar Ridge housing development will eventually stop its march toward the marsh. It is believed that the developer can't build beyond beyond this stand of pines in order to stay 600 feet away from the wetlands of the White Cedar Swamp, but who knows? In any case, this outstanding vista, with the pine grove in the middle (below) will be lost forever when the buildings are built in the foreground.

Faculty Street Clearcut

This is the view into the swamp woodlands from Faculty Street. The Wilbraham and Monson Academy soccer field used to be hidden in the middle of the woods with a dirt path from the road leading to it. Now the field is in plain view as the school builds a football field, a parking area, and an asphalt road leading to the whole shebang.

I realize that it's the Academy's right to build on its land, and the availability of athletics facilities and parking make all the difference in the world when a student is choosing a prep school.

Still, it's another instance of development hacking away at the forested edges of the White Cedar Swamp. Oh, the swamp still has plenty of trees, but not so much on the Faculty Street side any more.

The Hunt for Hessel's Hairstreak

A Wilbraham Butterfly Mystery

The Conservation Commission will hold a "Hunt for Hessel's" on May 22 at 2:00 p.m., beginning at the north trailhead of the McDonald Nature Preserve. The state documented this rare butterfly species in the White Cedar Swamp in 1960, but it hasn't been spotted here since then.

The butterfly enthusiast world was all aflutter in 1982 when Roger Pease discovered several Hessel's Hairstreaks in Wilbraham's largest swamp. His account of how he found them can be read in the Massachusetts Butterfly Club's journal Massachusetts Butterflies.

According to Pease, he took the specimens to the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, CT, but a search of the museum's online catalog fails to reveal any butterflies from Wilbraham: the only ones from Massachusetts were taken from Dover.

So I presume there is no official confirmation of Pease's find. Wouldn't it be something if one were found in this year's Hunt for Hessel's?

The first recorded capture of the Hessel's was in Milton, MA, in 1941, but this female wasn't attributed to the species until 1950, when the Hessel's Hairstreak was officially named after Sidney Hessel, who discovered subtle distinctions between the Hessel's and its sibling species Juniper Hairstreak.

The Hessel's is intimately associated with the Atlantic White Cedar tree, this butterfly's only larval food plant. But this tree is threatened by land clearing for development, according to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. Increased housing means not only felled White Cedars, but also more storm and fertilizer runoff and siltation, which contributes to nutrient enrichment in the soil. This is good for hardwoods, but deadly to the remaining White Cedars.

Happy Holidays from the Swamp

Hey folks, I just thought I would bestow upon you a Christmas tree as a present for reading this blog. I carefully selected the tree on an excursion with my five-year-old boy.

No, I'm not talking about the tree in this 1969 Forbes & Wallace Christmas ad. Which tree am I referring to? You'll see: we found it in the woods.

My son and I typically go snowshoeing in the White Cedar Swamp in Wilbraham when it freezes over. After a couple of cold weeks, there was no snow, but the swamp was solid enough to walk on December 19.

You never know what you'll find on a hike. Look what we picked up when we trudged through the swamp's uplands in the fall of 2009 (above).

So there we were last Sunday, scaling the familiar old stone wall—the kind of structure that is ubiquitous in the woodlands of New England, and yet gives you that feeling that you're looking at something...special...ancient...like Stonehenge, man.

Giving me the paparazzi brush-off (oh yeah, paparazzo is the singular), he let me know that he hates having his picture taken, which kind of worked out, because I would never include his face on the blog. (No offense, but there are weirdos out there.)

Our route always takes us under the bridge at a condo development. This complex, The Woods at Wilbraham, was controversial when first proposed. It was delayed from 1995 to 1998 because of concerns about wetlands and salamander migration, but it was built soon afterward. The bridge is our brief brush with civilization and the least attractive portion of the walk. But this is a part he likes because, after all, it's an adventure, especially if a car passes over us.

Much to my dismay, we found that someone had tossed a television set off the side of the bridge into the swamp. Good thing we weren't down there when this happened. We scaled the hill to walk on the bridge so I could take an "aerial" photo of the destruction.

Wow, we discovered that a troll under the bridge (or was it one of Santa's elves?) took parts of the smashed TV and made a decorative little Christmas tree! This is much sturdier than Charlie Brown's Christmas tree and much quainter than a Festivus pole.

A trashed TV tree! No, this wasn't my work. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid enough to cut my fingers or tear my gloves by yanking out television parts. I'm just stupid enough to hang around a discarded TV and wait for the tube to blow up in our faces. Realizing this possibility, I suggested that it was time to move on. But first we sang O Tannenbaum.

Well, I knew you'd appreciate this little present. Happy holidays.

Old McDonald's Farm

Follow me on a hike in Wilbraham through the farmland and forest owned by the family of the late Alton McDonald. I trudged through the property on May 9, two days before the town officially decided to buy and preserve the 29-acre tract at a Special Town Meeting.

The town will accept a state land grant of nearly $259,000, while Wilbraham’s Community Preservation Committee will fund $146,144 toward the purchase of the land, and the Minnechaug Land Trust will contribute $4,900.

The area, which will be known as the McDonald Nature Preserve, can be accessed at the end of Lake Drive (next to Jake's Restaurant on Boston Road), with the trailhead pictured below. (UPDATE: Now there is a parking lot for hikers off Washington Road by way of Manchonis Road.)

I take a right on what used to be the eastern portion of Washington Road, which, as you can see below, is more of a path than a road.

I soon pick up the trail into the woods on the left. Just look for the “no trespassing” sign. These notices will eventually come down, because the area will no longer be private property, but the path is plain enough to see.

The landowners were pretty tolerant of people hiking down this path anyway, because it leads to the town-owned White Cedar Swamp reservation. However, I did run into one of the owners last winter when I snowshoed onto the farm from my backyard. He is an outdoorsman who likes to observe the deer, and didn't take kindly to my blundering through the swamp onto his property from the adjacent condo complex called The Woods at Wilbraham.

“Aw, man, you’re blowing all the deer outta here,” he said with disgust. “Just stay on the pathways, if you don’t mind.”

I promised him that I wouldn’t scare the deer away. He didn’t mind hikers—it was the all-terrain vehicle drivers and the illegal dumpers that he had disdain for, along with the people who stole the wildlife cameras that he had placed in the woods. Below are barriers to dissuade the use of motorized vehicles on the paths, along with evidence of illegal disposal of trash.

We talked about the bobcat that we had both seen in the swamp, and then we went our separate ways. I was relieved that he wasn’t too pissed about my trespassing. After all, the McDonald Farm is a gorgeous piece of land and a convenient shortcut between my yard and the White Cedar Swamp, and I wanted to use the trails in the future.

Little did I know during this conversation that the property was in danger of being built upon. A developer had approached the family and was going to offer big bucks for the land—much more than the $400,000 the town will pay. However, the family wanted the land to stay in its pristine state.

There is tremendous amount of development pressure on the Nine Mile Pond end of the White Cedar Swamp. Unfortunately, last December the Planning Board approved a 26-single-family home subdivision in the woods just west of the farm. In recent years, the Cedar Ridge condos off Stony Hill Road (the former Oaks Farm) and The Woods at Wilbraham condos off Main Street have cut enormous swaths into the open space surrounding the swamp. For more information on the environmental threats to the White Cedar Swamp, which is the westernmost Inland Atlantic White Cedar Swamp in the country (and contains the state’s largest known population of both the rare Bristly Buttercup flower and the Eastern Worm Snake), read about my snowshoeing adventures here last year.

I apologize for the blurry picture of the farm itself (below). To get a better idea of its pastoral beauty, visit the place yourself!

In the sketch below, the McDonald Farm area is in red, and the town-owned portion of the White Cedar Swamp reservation is in green.

In 2007, the Minnechaug Land trust floated the idea of buying about 100 acres of the old Presz farm in these woods next to the future subdivision, and I hope this proposal is still on the table, because it more and more of the forest surrounding the swamp has been getting paved over in the past two years.

The trail leads to a clearing where the old Oaks Farm was (below). In the far distance is the Cedar Ridge complex, a development that will expand and march its way into this sensitive land in the coming years. Although the White Cedar Swamp area—combined with the public and private open space around it—is huge, running all the way from Lake Drive to Faculty Street (where there is another trailhead), it is shrinking, despite heroic efforts to preserve it.

God bless the White Cedar Swamp. Without it, the forests here would have been developed long ago. It filters the brooks that wind into the North Branch of the Mill River in Sixteen Acres, as well as the stream that flows into Nine Mile Pond. Yes, swamps are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, but I love them (swamps, NOT mosquitoes!). Like Henry David Thoreau, I see swamps as a refuge from modern society, virtually untouched by humanity since their creation. During Thoreau's time, people still thought of wetlands as stagnant pools that emitted the fog of disease. However, he suggested that "the steam which rises from swamps and pools is as dear and domestic as that of our own kettle." In his essay Walking, he wrote, "Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps."

The path I'm on continues to the fields at the Wilbraham Middle School, and, ultimately, if you’ve got the time and the energy, you can go to the school, double back, and hike all the way to the trailhead on Decorie Drive off Main Street.

But the mosquitoes are getting pesty, and my lawn awaits mowing. So I turn around and head back with an extra spring in my step, knowing that at least the land I’m walking on will be preserved forever.

"I enter the swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature."

--Henry David Thoreau

Snowshoeing in the Swamp

This winter’s first significant snowfall gave me the chance to practice one of my new favorite “sports”: snowshoeing. Years ago my wife bought each of us a pair of snowshoes, but most of the time they sat around and collected dust. However, now that we live next to Wilbraham’s White Cedar Swamp, I strap on a pair and go tromping whenever I can. Winter is the only time much this swamp is hikable, and there is great appeal in walking from your back door into the woods.

In the photo below, the swamp’s wetlands extend to a ravine behind our house after a heavy rain (background, middle of the picture). The gully sure filled up after a day-long downpour on December 12 (it was an ice storm north and west of here), and my three-year-old son was ecstatic when I hurled rocks in the water the next day. No rock throwing today, though: I must trudge on.

This huge wetland is the westernmost Inland Atlantic White Cedar Swamp in the country, and contains the state’s largest known population of the rare Bristly Buttercup flower. It also has another rare species: the Hessel’s Hairstreak butterfly, and is home to the largest concentration of the Eastern Worm Snake in the state. Last summer, while driving by the swamp’s southernmost edge on Faculty Street, I saw a bobcat at the woods’ edge.

Let’s follow the deer tracks, shall we? No, deer aren’t exactly rare in Massachusetts these days, are they?

Wild turkeys have also made an amazing comeback. In the photo below, follow the tree in the foreground from bottom upward, and about halfway up you can barely see two turkeys to the right.

Below: graffiti on the back of the 150-unit condo complex known as the Woods of Wilbraham. This project, which cut a 50-plus-acre swath into the swamp’s forested areas, was the source of much controversy when it was first proposed in 1995. It received town approval in 1998, only after the developers promised to build on its access road a bridge over wetlands and a tunnel under the road to allow blue-spotted salamanders to cross.

Area residents and salamanders managed to delay the project, but it was finally built. Unfortunately, development is gradually eating away at the swamp’s borders: in 2005, the town gave the OK to build 218 condominiums on the former 76-acre Oaks Farm off Stony Hill Road. There was concern about four endangered species of salamanders there, as well as the endangered spotted turtle, but they couldn’t crawl in the way of progress.

Then, on December 20, 2008, the Planning Board approved a 26-family home subdivision off Washington Road, which will cut into the northern edge of the swamp. Although there are efforts from the town to purchase the former Presz Farm, to the east of this site, and protect it from development, the edges of the swamp and its wooded uplands seem to be getting quickly filleted, year after year.

For now, however, I’ll enjoy the scenery (below) and not dwell on overdevelopment.

Now I’m heading down the Nine Mile Pond area. One great thing about snowshoeing: if you start to get lost, you can always follow your own tracks (below).

Whoa, what is that wet feeling on my right foot? Oops, I stepped into the marsh (below. It’s been cold lately, but not enough to freeze all the water.

Pow! Pow! Pow!

I hear the shotgun blasts from a hunter. No photos of Nine Mile Pond this hike. It’s time for me to get the fuck out of here—but not before snapping a shot of this tree stand (below).

There are no tracks around the tree stand, but someone’s shooting around here, and I’m not wearing bright colors. Needless to say, it’s safer to hike in January, when hunting season is over. But I had been jonesing for some snowshoeing. Before I go I’ll also get a shot of some White Cedars, which were used to build ship masts back in the day.

I choose to snowshoe with my cross-country skiing poles. This way I can get an upper-body workout, fend off aggressive dogs (I haven't had to yet) and whack the snow from the low-lying branches (below), so I don’t get any snow dumped on me as I limbo-dance under them.

Back to my backyard, where a bench built by my grandfather sat on his lawn in Hungry Hill, and then in his yard in East Springfield. Now it’s mine, with a fresh coat of white paint and snow.

Thus concludes my first swamp trek of the winter. If you’d like to know more about Wilbraham’s White Cedar Swamp, check out an in-depth ecological analysis of the area by William Slezak, which is available at the Wilbraham Public Library. Written in 1975, it’s somewhat dated, showing areas of forest and swamp that are unfortunately now paved over.

These wetlands are also in danger of not being a White Cedar Swamp in the future: as Slezak points out, more development around the swamp increases storm and fertilizer runoff and siltation. This contributes to nutrient enrichment, which is bad for the White Cedars but good for such hardwoods as red maple, so it could become a hardwood swamp.