Another Saturday, another Saturday hike!  We had to suffer through some rain for this one, though.

We decided to explore Opacum Woods, a property held in trust by the Opacum Land Trust.  It’s a beautiful wooded area located behind a nice neighborhood in Sturbridge.  It fills the corner made by the connection of Interstates 84 and 90.

At the trailhead we met some folks from Opacum who were closing up shop; earlier in the day they had officially opened up a new bridge built as an Eagle Scout project and were handing out new trail maps.  They gave us one of the new maps; a definite improvement on the one we had picked up when we ran into them at the Big MOE.

We wanted to get around 3 miles in, so we first walked out to Perry’s Point and admired the foliage by the pond.  There is rampant evidence of beaver activity here, including many felled trees and a few which are barely hanging on.

After returning from Perry’s Point, we followed the three trails on the property in one big loop.  Under a gentle rain we covered all kinds of terrain, from the swampy pond area to steep rocky wooded hills.  At all times, though, the background sounds of the interstates accompanied our hike, and honestly sometimes it was a bit distracting.

We finished with about 3.3 miles covered, a fine accomplishment for a rainy Saturday.

It’s a beautiful hike, with excellent trails which have obviously been lovingly maintained.  It’s just unfortunate that the biggest interstate intersection in Central MA is right next door.