I’m not sure that I’ve ever been in the woods with more dead people than at Wickaboxet. For the most part they are a quiet bunch, mainly settler families who came here starting around 1750 to what was then the …

For some reason I thought it would be an easy thing to drive out to the summit of Mt. Greylock in Adams, three hours to my west in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, do a quick POTA + SOTA activation, and …

You don’t so much summit Mt. Tom as notice that you’ve been walking on flat ground for a while. It tops out at just 400-something feet, and the views are somewhat obscured by high brush and knots of scrubby pine …

Apparently it is becoming a habit for me to pack the bag and head for Arcadia in December. There was a really nice weather forecast upcoming after some bitter cold and I was casting around for a place to hike …

I did something at Big River WMA in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, that I very rarely do these days: I wandered. I entered the WMA on the east side, along Hopkins Hill Road at Tarbox Pond. This was due to …

Over the weekend I activated two wildlife management areas, one in Rhode Island and one in Massachusetts. I’d never really paid much attention to WMAs, but POTA has really brought them to the top of my list for both ham …

JL Curran is primarily a fishing site, with two ponds that are stocked by the RI environmental agency. It’s relatively small, around 300 acres including the ponds. There are two small parking areas on the east side of the park, …

In a remote corner of New England, three state boundaries meet, commemorated by a four-foot granite pillar. It’s one of those rare locations where you can walk along with one foot in one state and your other in another! …

I stacked firewood most of the morning and decided to reward myself with an activation. I packed up the rig and a lunch and headed for Rhode Island and the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (whew!). It was my …

At just six acres, this might qualify as the smallest POTA reference I’ve activated. I had great expectations going in – this is a small park on the site of the former Canton Airport, and on a satellite view you …

Beaver Brook is really three separate parks, all under one name and POTA reference number. Most conspicuously, just off Trapelo Road in Belmont is a playground and spray deck—not the best POTA site in summer but it does have a …

When you ask people in Boston about the Blue Hills, many will tell you that they were built up during the expansion of the young city as the harbor was dredged. One has visions of long trains of horse-drawn carts …

At 2,602 feet, Mt. Everett is the second-tallest mountain in Massachusetts, behind 3,489-foot Mt. Greylock. To be fair, the two are part of different geologic formations, with Greylock astride the Taconic and Everett sitting at the tip of the Berkshires, …

Mt. Tom was the first place I revisited after hitting 100 unique parks, which should tell you something about its appeal. The major attraction at Mt. Tom is classic Holyoke basalt. And dinosaur tracks …

Near the end of the last ice age quite a bit of North America was covered in a thick layer of ice, in some place reaching a thickness of two miles. Around 12,500 years ago the planet began to warm …

I was completely unprepared for what was around the corner …