The Metacomet-Monadnock Trail

We’ve just started hiking the Metacomet-Monadnock trail, a 114 mile hike beginning at the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, winding through the hills of western Massachusetts, culminating at the top of Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire. The trail is conveniently broken up into short pieces which makes it possible to hike it with children. We’ve done the first two sections already, and plan to finish in New Hampshire sometime this fall before we leave for England.

The trail is managed by the AMC and some of the sections have recently been accepted by the National Park Service as a “National Recreational Trail”. I guess there has been some controversy about this from private landowners, so the sections that have been federally designated are all publicly owned land. There is more information about this issue, as well as a excellent on-lin trail guide at the AMC website

The following descriptions and history are excerpted from the AMC site.

The M-M trail was originally laid out by the late Prof. Walter M. Banfield of the University of Massachusetts starting in the late 1950s, and has been evolving ever since. It passes through some of the prettiest landscape in Western Massachusetts, including the Mt. Tom State Reservation, Mt Holyoke Range and Skinner State Parks, and numerous other state, municipal, and land trust properties. Today, over half of its length crosses public lands. The trail is marked or “blazed” with white painted rectangles on trees and rocks and supplemental white, metal, diamond-shaped signs affixed to trees and poles at road crossings and other trail intersections.

The Metacomet-Monadnock Trail starts at the MA/CT State line at Rising Corner in Connecticut. An extension of Connecticut’s blue-blazed Metacomet Trail, the M-M Trail in this section crosses an open field, a swamp on bog bridges and gains the top of the trap rock ridge extending north from Connecticut’s Suffield Mountain which is to the south. The trail passes through property owned by the Agawam Bowmen Archery Club on its way to MA 57 near the Southwick-Agawam town line.

The second section of the trail runs along the Provin Mountain Ridge, mostly along its western rim — a skyline path through the woods — past the former facility of TV station WWLP to the Springfield Underground Reservoir, thence down to the Westfield River in Robinson State Forest.

I’ll keep y’all posted as we continue along the trail, and I’ll try to remember to bring the camera!