Cul-de-Quick
Blackledge Marsh, Bolton
April 2020
When I decide to “attack” a town’s trail system, I make a little game out of it. Look at the list of trails, sort out where they are and how many I can do in one trip, and make a plan. However, when I have Calvin with me, I must sometimes change things on the fly.
Calvin doesn’t share my “need” to hike every trail in every town. I don’t understand why not, as it seems like such a noble and fun objective to me. Sigh. Kids these days.
One thing that puts a pep in his step is if a property can be hiked in mere minutes. For these Bolton hikes, I didn’t really do any research; just sort of showed up at trailheads and got going. In other words, I didn’t really know that the entire Blackledge Marsh hike would take less than 10 minutes – and that’s with hiking half of it twice.
Put it this way: You could hike a quarter of this trail in the time it will take you to read this entire page. So why write this entire page?
Because Bolton is Bolton and there’s not too much going on in Bolton, so I want to give Bolton the respect it deserves.
This 19-acre parcel was given to the land trust in connection with the neighboring Strawberry Ridge development in 2004. It is notable for its beautiful marsh which supports a variety of wildlife and has been home to beavers intermittently over the past decades. It is a good bird-viewing area. The marsh is part of the Blackledge River corridor. A short hiking trail runs along the east side of the marsh. To access the trail park at the end of Cocconi Drive and follow the short set of steps to a kiosk at the beginning of the trail.
Yeah. That’s pretty much it. The trail begins near some large houses and then splits at the marsh. Calvin chose to go right which… is a loop back to the beginning. The marsh is a marsh.
We went back down to the split and went left this time, which took us alongside the marsh again. There’s a lot of moss here. And houses.
The trail ends at a road next to another house with a little fetid collecting pond. Calvin decided he’d skip some rocks here and insisted upon doing so. So he did.
Okay, I know I sound like I’m dumping on this little property and therefore the Bolton Land Trust, but I’m not. They got this land when the houses were built (cynically, because they couldn’t build houses in a marsh) and they’ve used it to their advantage.
And I love that. And I love that Calvin and I hiked another Bolton property in a few minutes and I was able to write it up in just a few minutes as well.
Bolton Land Trust maps
CTMQ’s Bolton Land Trust Intro
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