M-M Trail Section 6

September 12, 2012:  For this section, Peanut and I faced our biggest challenges yet: 6.3 trail miles - our longest section yet - and by far the toughest terrain thus far.  We scramble straight up 1200' Mt. Tom and over a string of other peaks before descending to the Connecticut River at 100' above sea level.

But this section is easily one of the most spectacular on the trail, with exciting summits and cliffs that offer amazing views, tons of history, and even a playground!  Plus, it marks the end of our journey on the west side of the Connecticut River, and it is here the basalt Metacomet Ridge begins a slow arc to the east, allowing us grand views up and down the Valley instead of across it as we have had.  You can clearly see the curving ridge in the aerial below (trail in red and sections numbered in yellow):

The morning dawned foggy, but had cleared by the time we got to the trailhead.  An initial road walk on Rt 141 shows us our daunting climb-to-come:

And it didn't take long to start the UP.  The thing about New England trails is that often, they were created long before modern trail-building techniques such as switchbacks were standard.  The old Yankees had a thing for just going straight up a mountain no matter how steep it made the trail.  Here is a shot of the most vertical portion, and you can see the abuse it's taken - hikers walk the edges so they can get better traction and that creates erosion and widens the path.

The nice thing is that most of the Mount Tom range is a state-owned Reservation (some is held by private non-profits like the Trustees of Reservations), so there is (theoretically) the ability to make trail repairs.  The reservation is also very popular, being one of the largest public access areas in teh Pioneer Valley.  Public control of the mountain began in the early 1900s when the previous incarnation of popular recreation had faded: mountain-top hotels.

At the summit, remains of the Mt. Tom Hotel site, originally built in 1897, can be seen - but watch your step!

Here's the hotel in better days - the building site is now occupied by communications towers:

The Mt. Tom Hotel was the last of three mountain-top hotels in the immediate area.  We'll pass remains of the Eyrie House on Mt. Nonotuck later in this section, and the still-existing Mount Holyoke Summit House is across the river in the next section.  These were the great middle-class vacation spots for southern New England before everyone started flocking to beaches or taking cheap flights to Disney World in this past century.  Steamboats and later railroads brought tourists from the cities in Connecticut, NYC, Providence and Boston with relative ease.  Guests would either hike up or take horse-drawn carriages on cliff-side carriage roads up to the top.  Typical stays were for a week or more, and the hotels found themselves competing by offering concerts, dances, top-notch restaurants, croquet and lawn games, and other attractions.

 Even back then, visitors felt the urge to leave their mark.  I guess this is no longer graffiti since its old enough to be 'historic', but no matter - carving your name in hardass rock that's 100s of millions of years old is just plain cooler (and more permanent) than spray painting your idiotic tag name all over.  Lazy kids today. 

Apart from the fresh breezes and escape from summer heat, these places offered spectacular views over the pastoral farmland below and the ring of mountains around the valley.  In an era before airplanes and satellite photography, views like this were the only way to appreciate the enormity of the geography below:

This view (click to make bigger) is looking south from the summit of Mt. Tom.  The M&M trail runs atop the Metacomet Ridge, which is clearly visible in the right center, running almost due south into Connecticut.  Behind the tree on the far left is a partial view of Holyoke.  The city of Springfield and a portion of the Connecticut River is seen in the left half of the photo.  Hartford's skyline, 40 miles distant is hard to make out in the photograph but it was easily seen in person, on the horizon - directly above the blue watertower in the middle distance, which is above the lake in the near-ground.  On less humid days, you can even see the Hanging Hills near Meriden, Ct, south of Hartford, nearly 60 miles away from Mt Tom - the southern terminous of the Metacomet Trail in Ct!  Quite a view!

Looking north, we see the cliff side of Mt Tom, facing Easthampton, and the tilted slope of the basalt layer going gently down to the right.  Northampton is in the middle distance just to the left of the summit, while Amherst is the town seen in the distance through the gap to the right of the crest.  If you look carefully, on the horizon above Amherst is a distant lump - New Hampshire's Mt Mondadnock, 50 miles as the crow flies and the northern end of the M&M trail!!  Here's a closer look:

 Amherst on the left, and to the right, Mt Holyoke with the Summit House hotel on top.  And way far away: Monadnock, you monster! 

So from the top of Mt. Tom, one can see the entire 114 mile length of the M&M trail, as well as the length of CT's 63-mile Metacoment Trail.  In addition, you can see the tippy top of Massachusetts' tallest peak, Mt Greylock, in the northwest corner of the state and a few peaks in southern Vermont that I can't identify.  Four states, from a mountain that's only 1200ft tall.  Pretty amazing!


Continuing the excitement, after the summit,the M&M follows the cliff edges for about a mile, overlooking Easthampton with sheer drops hundreds of feet straight down:

I don't recommend setting up the camera with a delay and running along this edge in time for the shutter snap with a toddler on your back, but it does make for a nice shot:

The edge is not ever either, with several scrambles and squeezes.  Good thing basalt erodes in columns that make good steps:

After the cliffs, the trail dips down to a saddle between peaks, where there is a park access road and a holymoley, a playground!  (Is this not the best section??)  A welcome spot for peanuts who need a break.  And the playground is for real, pre-litigious, old school like I remember from my youth:  no plastic static electricity bombs, but all metal, Wisconsin iron!  Toddler swings with chains across an open seat front. A shiny sliding board that's both lightning fast and blazing hot from the sun.  They even have big see-saws, the kind where one kid would jump off and let the other kid slam down on his tailbone.  Nice to see.

The saddle also hosts the Reservation's visitor center, built by the Civilian Conservation Corp in the 1930s.  The CCC, as it was known, was a remarkable program of President Roosevelt's New Deal during the Great Depression.  It put young unemployed laborers to work building camps, trails, roads, bridges, erosion projects, fire towers, etc in the national and state parks and forests, teaching them skills and exposing them to nature at the same time.  Someone once told me that the federal funding for the program required that something like 85% go towards labor - I don't know if that's true or not, but certainly the projects that were built were all very labor intensive such as the hand-laid stone visitor center on Mt Tom:

I've hiked portions of the Appalachian Trail built by the CCC and the trails are still fantastically well-built.  Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway, with their great bridges, and hundreds of miles of stone walls, still welcome tourists.  Its amazing to think that 80 years later, we are still able to enjoy this legacy of labor, done for purpose of creating national, not personal, wealth. 



The second half of this Section 6 wanders from the saddle up over two or three minor summits, each with excellent views.  Goat Peak has a firetower, with 360-degree views.  To the northeast, you can see the broad sweep of the entire Holyoke Range, which hosts the next three sections of the M&M.

The photo here shows the Connecticut River flowing from the left through the gap between Mt Nonotuck (dark green) and Mt Holyoke, with its white Summit House on top.  The other peaks form the Holyoke Range, with Mt. Norwottuck (in shade at the far right) anchoring the end.  The tall smoke stack is a coal-fired power plant on the river built in the 1960s.

Also fun in this section: walking down from the fire tower on open grate steps with a wriggling toddler on my back:

A brief side trail up the last summit, Mt Nonotuck, leads to the remains of another mountaintop hotel, Eyrie House.  While hiking, one tends to look down a lot to not trip, especially in deep woods like on this ridge, so you can imagine my surprise to look up and see this huge stone wall:

This was the foundation of what was to be the last iteration of the Eyrie House, which was originally built here in 1861.  It was probably the most successful of the area's hotels, since the Connecticut River directly below provided steamship access, and more importantly, the railroad was built on this side of the river.  At its largest, the Eyrie House was only 30+ rooms, but it entertained hundreds of people daily.  Promenades, viewing towers, picnic groves, a stable for 40 horses, a croquet lawn, swings, a huge outdoor pavilion (with roller skating!), clam bakes, bands, a menagerie of animals (including a bear, monkey, and alligator), and a very early telephone system all added to the attraction.  Unfortunately, in 1901, just as the summer season was about to begin, a cremation of a few dead horses got out of hand and the hotel, pavilion, and stable burned to the ground.  Patronage had been dropping anyway, and new competition from the Mt Tom Hotel doomed the idea of rebuilding.  The land was added to the reservation in 1904.

The last big vista on today's hike, from Nonotuck, overlooks the Oxbow, another landmark of the Valley.  It was once a tight meander of the Connecticut River, but a storm in 1840 allowed the river to push straight through, leaving this long C-shaped portion as a stranded lake (see the aerial at the start of this post).  In the view below, the Connecticut is just to the right of the frame, hidden by trees.  Interstate 91 cuts across the ends of the C.

At this point, the M&M descends from the ridge, using the carriage road that once led to Eyrie House.  In the 1879 view from the hotel seen below, you can see the road winding down, eventually turning into those tall hemlock trees, planted there to conceal views from ascending passengers until they popped out up top.

Those trees are still there, now huge!  Unfortunately they appear to be under attack by the woolly adelgid, which is a funny name for a very sinister insect that I will talk about in a later section.  For now, at least, the great trees still stand there lining the roadway, among the oldest trees on the entire range (since everything was logged at some point or another).

The trail pops out of the woods into a loud mess of civilization: giant overhead powerlines, houses with political lawn signs, busy surface roads, and an interstate highway.  A little roadwalking gets us to the official end of Section 6: the state boat ramp on the southern prong of the C-shaped oxbow, where an outlet to the Connecticut River is maintained. 

Looking east, under the Route 5 and railroad bridges, you can see the mighty Connecticut River, New England's longest.

If Vivi and I were thru-hiking, we'd have asked for a ride across the river from one of the two boating parties we saw here.  But we are not, and besides, the first boater was already pulling his fishing boat from the water onto a trailer, and the other group - two young Russian-sounding guys in a huge and expensive powerboat - appeared to be occupied with beers and bikini-clad women.  So, we turned around and walked the entire section back to our car, making for a very tired Peanut, and even more exhausted Dada.

At least the car ride home allowed Peanut to catch up on her reading:

Today: 6.3 trail miles, about 12 hiked miles.  M&M completed: 25.6 out of 114 mi.