These Saturday hikes are becoming a bit of a tradition, as our daughter spends a few hours in gymnastics and we explore our surroundings one trail at a time.

On this Saturday we returned to Leadmine Road, where we had previously parked to explore the Heins Farm property.  This time, though, we descended onto the trails which explore the Leadmine conservation area which borders Old Sturbridge Village.  A trail map can be seen on the Friends of Sturbridge Trails website.

Looking at that map, we basically followed the red trail until it met the blue trail, and then the blue trail until it returned to the red.  We covered a bit over 3 miles on those two trails.  The FrOST team has done a great job marking these trails, but there are some mismatches between the trail blazes and the colors on the map.  Modern life has certainly spoiled us; we took a picture of the trail map at the kiosk, and cross-referenced it with our GPS apps to make sure we were on the right track.

The trail is moderately hilly but nothing too difficult.  The area is open to hunting in season, unlike the Heins property across the street.  The area has an interesting history, as it used to contain a mine used to extract graphite for pencil lead.  If you explore the right areas you can find evidence of the old mines, but we didn’t make it that far.

Definitely a place we’ll return to, to explore further.  There are some geocaches hiding in here too — we found a couple but stopped looking when our network reception got spotty.