WALK REPORT
Wednesday, 26 January 2022, Two Parks in Boston - A Winter Walk
Walk Leader: David Wean
6+ miles (3 hrs), 10:00 am start from Mattapan, MA
Walkers (7): David, Ann Northup, Annemarie Altman, Marie Keutmann, Susan Broome, Susan Sabin, and Tod Cochran.
On a cold but sunny morning, we started from Mass Audubon's Boston Nature Center (gathering indoors, with restrooms!), walking about a mile along the BNC Fox Trail. We stopped to view the dried cattails from the wetlands viewing point and circled back, following Canterbury Brook. Crossing through Boston's yard waste compost facility, we walked a half mile along American Legion Parkway’s new protected bike lanes to Franklin Park.
Circumnavigating the park, we saw the William Devine golf course, Schoolmaster Hill (Emerson lived near there in the 1820's), the zoo (though all the animals had the good sense to remain indoors), and finally reached the abandoned-in-the-1950s bear cages (which somehow ended up in the film Mystic River, though we were much closer to the Neponset). On our return, we passed the White Schoolboy Stadium (not Jim Crow, but instead built with the help of the George Robert White Fund, as was the Nature Center's building), visited the Overlook Shelter Ruin (of one of the few structures built by Olmsted), and headed through the Wilderness, down the "99 Steps" (but who's counting), past Shattuck Hospital and the new "cottage community" which provides secure housing for thirty of the former tent-dwellers from "Mass and Cass." We looped around Scarboro Pond and returned to the Nature Center for a quick visit to their future solar field and what's billed as the largest community garden in the Commonwealth, returning through the Food Forest to the parking lot.
Folks enjoyed seeing some unfamilar places, and everyone seemed to stay warm, or at least warm enough.
Report by David Wean.
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