the Way of the Turtle

12 Mile Run at Thacher Park
Sunday, April 20, 2008

My original plan was to run the Muddy Moose 14 mile race in New Hampshire today, but earlier this week I got word that the race had been postponed to May 11 due to snow and ice still covering the trails (hard to believe with all the warm weather we've been having, but as RD Fergus Cullen pointed out Wolfeboro received over 120 inches of snow this winter... yow.) Just as well for me... I'm really not in shape to run 14 miles of trails yet. So I changed my plans to heading over to the Berkshires to get in an early season run at Beartown or Pittsfield State Forest... but then decided to save both some travel time and gas money and headed to Thacher State Park instead.

I typically park at Hop Field when I run the Thacher trails, but today I decided to go to Mine Lot instead, since that's more centrally located and would give me more options to stop back at the car and pick up fresh supplies. Given the beautiful weather I wasn't at all surprised that there were quite a few people at the various picnic areas, especially along the escarpment. I warmed up with a run along the escarpment trail over to the Haile's Cave picnic area (HQ for both the Indian Ladder 15k and the Hairy Gorilla Half Marathon) with an early pause to admire the turkey vultures soaring on the air currents off the escarpment - they may not be the loveliest birds around, but it sure is cool to watch them glide back and forth. I ran into a fair number of hikers along the trail, which helped me decide to do the bulk of my run up in the less-travelled OSI property in the northwestern portion of the park... a good choice, it turned out, as once I hit those trails I didn't see another person until I returned to the main parts of the park roughly 2 1/2 hours later!

I followed the service road up to the waste treatment plant and then headed through the woods along the aqua-blazed Long Path, coming out on a trail I've run many times between the Indian Ladder and Hairy Gorilla races. Stopped for a while to check out a woodpecker who was making an incredible racket on a dead tree limb, then headed up the hill to the top of the ridge and followed the same route we follow for the latter parts of Indian Ladder, through woods and scrub fields and pine forests. Along the way I startled a grouse and definitely enjoyed the fact that the trail was both somewhat drier and less overgrown that it has been the other times I've run it.

more to come