the Way of the Turtle

3 Mile Hike at Mendon Ponds Park
Sunday, February 15, 2009

Mendon Ponds site
Mendon Ponds trail map (PDF)

Ann and I wanted to get outside today... where to go, where to go... eventually I settled on Mendon because I wanted to take bird seed over to the trails by the Nature Center and see if I could get chickadees to come and eat out of my hand.

Mendon turned out to be very busy when we got there... lots of walkers, runners, ice fishermen, and so on. And lots of deer - we spotted a trio not long after entering the park and across the road from them there were more bounding through the fields. The Nature Center parking lot was packed - guess we should have expected that on a sunny February afternoon - so we headed back through the park to the beach parking lot to hike some of the trails in the northeastern parts of the park.

After a quick trip down to the beach (the wind blowing across Hundred Acre Pond was viscious) we headed across the road to some of the trails I've run before during a number of the races at Mendon (most recently, the Winterfest 10k snowshoe race about a month ago.) I was surprised to hear that Ann had never been on these particular trails before. Not much snow, a little bit of ice in spots, but best of all - we were out of the wind. Walked up and down a few small hills and eventually found ourselves at Canfield Road, which we crossed so that we could walk a loop trail I'd run once several summers ago, through a nice pine forest at the edge of the park.

At one point I stopped to take a picture of the woods and was surprised to see a deer staring back at me... guess I shouldn't have been all that surprised, they're all over the place there. We ended up taking a shortcut and missed most of the loop, but got to see a group of deer go sailing across the path about an 1/8 of a mile ahead of us before we ended up back at the road.

We walked down the road a ways until we could find a relatively dry spot to cross the fields and then made our way along some more trails I'd run in various races, back to the parking lot. Made another trip down to the beach - fortunately the wind had died down a bit, so we spent a little while there before heading back to the car for the drive home. We went by the Nature Center again in hopes that it had cleared out a bit, but no such luck... maybe we can get rid of the birdseed somewhere tomorrow before I have to head back to Albany.

JMH