9 minute read
Cover Story
Where there’s a will, there’s a trail: Midstate Trail is a ‘massive team effort’
VEER MUDAMBI
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The Midstate Trail is one of Worcester county’s best kept secrets — and the Greater Worcester Land Trust wants to let you in on it. The trail passes through some of the most beautiful scenery in Central Massachusetts and offers truly spectacular views.
The 92-mile hiking trail has come a long way, both geographically and historically. But on any long road like this, hurdles, bumps and full-on roadblocks are not only likely, but inevitable.
So how has the Midstate Trail lasted this long? “A massive team effort,” said Colin Novick of the GWLT, which joined back in 2000 with the Green Mountain Club and the Worcester Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club to create the Midstate Trail Committee.
The MTC’s primary purpose is to maintain the trail — both physically through volunteer labor and bureaucratically by protecting the land from development. The latter is often the more complex of the two, since the trail crosses large tracts of private land and relationships must be maintained with individual landowners, something that has grown markedly more complicated in recent years.
Last month, the state Conservation Partnership Program provided a $10,215 grant — via the GWLT — to the Midstate Trail specifically for the purpose of trail conservation.
The Midstate dates back to the 1920s when it was just a welltrodden path connecting Mount Wachusett, near Princeton, and Mount Watatic, near Ashburnham. It fell into disuse shortly after World War II, until an initiative by the Worcester County Commissioners led to its current, more complete incarnation as a trail across the entire county in the late 1970s, providing a hidden escape into the forest for anyone who knows where to look.
“The nature of Worcester county is different now,” said Novick. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, most of the area was owned by farmers willing to make informal agreements regarding a path through their property. “Nowadays, it’s office parks and subdivisions and you need more than a handshake with an old farmer who loves the land and wants others to see it.”
There’s also been an increase in suburbanization in the more rural areas along the trail. “With that comes landowners who buy a house on their half-acre and then they get the ‘not in my backyard’ attitude about people walking by their house,” said Mike Pekar, chairman of the Midstate Trail Committee.
With these changes, the MTC has begun an ongoing project of pursuing more official protections and agreements for the trails, that can be depended on to stay in place even as ownership shifts. There are a few different tools to secure the land for trail use and which one is chosen depends on the situation.
The most common is a trail easement, where an agreement ensures that the land stays as part of the owner’s property, allowing the MTC or GWLT to maintain the trail for hiking. These are very convenient agreements, but they aren’t free. The CPP grant to the GWLT allowed for the purchase of an easement which secured a vital crossing on Route 9. For a trail that extends as far as the Midstate, crossing highways can present a problem, and the CCP grant secured the north side of Route 9. The south side, Polar Springs Road, was already settled through an earlier Mass Audubon easement. “To ensure that the trail survives, we need good crossings,” said Novick.
A similar agreement, in that the landowner retains
Princeton volunteers and the Midstate Trail Committee of the Appalachian Mountain Club have joined forces in a major effort to build a 50’ footbridge that will allow a re-route of the Midstate Trail through Princeton’s Four Corners Conservation Area.
SUBMITTED PHOTO
ownership, is to place a Conservation Restriction, or CR, on the land. In doing so, the owner gives up rights to develop it. Some of these can have specific restrictions (no tree cutting, building, etc.) and, importantly for the purposes of the MTC, follow the land from owner to owner.
Finally, the land can simply be donated to a trust, such as the GWLT or conservation organization.
Whatever the legal agreement used, as the value of the land continues to increase, owners are less willing to give it up to easements, CRs and donations. “A farmer in 1970 who had 100 acres of land had no problem with a trail across the back of their lot,” Pekar said, but today that means relinquishing valuable real estate where every square foot counts. “We constantly see the kids of these landowners making a lot of noise about the fact their parents gave up land because they only see dollar signs.”
Compared to individual owners, towns tend to be easier to work with, but attitudes can vary from town to town as well, said Pekar. “It’s a bureaucratic challenge, of course, because each town has a different set of players that you have to be familiar with and a different relationship with nature.” Some can have a pro-development stance, being less supportive of preserving land, while others will be more in favor of conservation and the Midstate Trail.
A group of hikers on snowshoes approaches Mike Pekar on the Balance Rock Trail, a section of the Midstate Trail in the Wachusett Mountain Reservation.
“For land conservation, it’s all about local relationships,” said Novick, “figuring out who knows who, who cares about what.”
By far, the most helpful partners are conservation organizations and sanctuaries such as the Department of Conservation and Recreation or Mass Audubon, as their goals will align best with the MCT. Though conservation lands will
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have their own rules — the trail passes through three Audubon wildlife sanctuaries where no running is allowed.
The landowners are not the only relationships that the MTC needs to maintain. “We’re managing close to 20 individual volunteers who each have a section along the trail,” explained Pekar. Some sections may have more than one “maintainer,” while others have none at all. Ensuring the entirety of the trail is taken care of while accommodating everyone’s schedules, locations and preferences is “the definition of cat juggling,” Pekar said with a chuckle. It is widely accepted that if you leave any piece of land for even a year, the forest begins to take it back. So naturally the trail is dependent on this dedicated volunteer group that is out there with chainsaws and loppers every week of the year.
While the overarching objective is to secure the land it’s on, there are other priorities as well. One of these is to make the trail user friendly for thru-hikers, which requires more amenities for overnight camping. Though there are shelters in Douglas, Spencer and Rutland, they are too many miles apart. The Appalachian Trail, for instance, has shelters at set intervals. Novick is less focused on this aspect of the trail and pointed out that “the MTC should focus on making sure the bread and butter users — day hikers — have good trail markers, groomed trails, etc.”
Pekar, on the other hand, would like to have shelter spots no more than 12 miles apart, which makes for a long day for some hikers but not so much for others. He is appreciative of the fact that GWLT, which is steward of several plots through which the trail passes, has allowed the MTC to set up campsites.
Among other goals for the trail are sections in towns like Oxford, Charlton, Spencer, Douglas where the trail is on the road and the MTC hopes to move it into the woods. While there are some places where they can never do that, the hope is to reduce the number.
One of the biggest draws of the trail is that users can run into wildlife such as fisher cats, bobcats, otters and on occasion, even moose, bears, porcupines and coyotes. Pekar recounted seeing signs of otters while cross country skiing one winter — “the little slide marks that otters had made on the snow down to the river.” He continued to say that “if you’re as quiet as possible, you’ll see some great wildlife at any time, but dawn and dusk are best.” And passing, as it does, through bird sanctuaries makes it an especially rewarding destination for birders.
Both Pekar and Novick remind hikers that when you’re going through Worcester County you will see everything from farms, office parks, abandoned sawmills and sub-divisions. It’s a wild mix of everything in the area but tends more toward old farms and forests like the rest of Massachusetts, providing a trail user with a unique perspective of the countryside.
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ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Mike Macro is a painter and glassblower based out of Holden. He has been drawing and creating since he was a young child. Mike is very inspired by indigenous cultures and their artworks. This piece is a depiction of Patecatl, Mayan god of herbology and medicine.
