Backyard Recreation
When our children were little, my husband mowed paths through the fields around our house, swaths wide enough and gentle enough for toddling. These meandered through the old apple orchard, around the full perimeter of the field, and down to a glacial erratic the kids soon dubbed Big Rock. Years later, the kids now bound up Big Rock in confident strides, run through the fields for fitness, and have crafted a few trails for biking in the woods nearby.
Like many other folks during the last several months, we've stuck close to home. We have been acutely grateful for the woods close by and have spent time resurrecting old trails and clearing blowdowns along popular routes. We've even thought about building some new trails. I imagine we're not the only ones looking to get into the woods close to home these days. Lucky for all of us, trails can be crafted on a half-acre plot, a woodlot of hundreds of acres, or anything in between, And autumn is as good a time as any to embark on a backyard trail-building endeavor.
Meghan McCarthy McPhaul’s story was originally published in Northern Woodland’s Magazine’s in Autumn 2020.
