By Dan Brosgol
Winter blew in with an icy, nasty mix on Tuesday, rendering pavement and sidewalks across town borderline un-runnable. I went out after the storm had passed and the wind had flash-frozen the wet surfaces, and proceeded to shuffle my way through the iciest run in recent memory. That was fun. Or it was less fun.
Click each image in the gallery to see it at full width – Images (c) Dan Brosgol, 2015 all rights reserved
With that run (thankfully) in the bag, and 2015 almost in the books, the year of running is basically over. While it was probably my most frustrating year of running in the past decade, as I battled through four separate running injuries in rapid succession, things seem to be fully healed and I’m hoping to be a smarter, happier runner in 2016, with a lot more exploring and trail-running certainly in the cards.
With that in mind, I’m happy to report that in the middle of the otherworldly heat wave over the holiday, I checked another Bedford trail run off of the list when I explored the Pine Grove and Langone Conservation Areas in between Davis Road and Carlisle Road. It’s another example of me having running PAST a trail marker for, oh, 8 years, and never turning off to see where it led. Those days are now over.
The Davis Road trailhead into Pine Grove is in between Revolutionary Ridge Road and Redcoat Lane on the opposite side of Davis. The blue trail then winds for a little less than a mile through, you guessed it, a beautiful pine forest, before transitioning into a maple forest and then a cedar forest towards the end, parallel to Winterberry Way. The orange spur trail can drop you at the eastern end of Jeffery Circle if you keep left, or will run you in between the private homes on Winterberry and the Great Meadows Wildlife Refuge. The orange trail crosses Winterberry and reconnects to the blue-blazed trail about a 0.3 miles before its end at Carlisle Road/225. It’s a flat and easy run with above-average footing, and if you bang a right onto 225 it’s less than a mile to North Road. I incorporated this trail segment into a nice little 10K run and certainly didn’t regret it.
If you’re up for some additional adventure, go ahead and cross Carlisle Road and enter the Carlisle Road Conservation Area, then trot up into Huckins Farm and Two Brothers Rocks via some trail-hopping. Since I didn’t have time to bite off that segment this time, though, it looks like that will have to wait until spring. That is, unless we get some 60 degree weather again sometime soon. You never know.
To all the runners out there, good luck with your winter training. I wish you all a year full of personal bests and free of injuries in 2016.
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