Estabrook Road in Concord starts as a beautiful, paved road bracketed by picturesque gentleman farms and estates.
Soon enough, the pavement ends; at first, there's a handsome, graded dirt road.
Shortly, a sign welcomes you to the Estabrook Woods, and tells you what's what. Note that among the list of prohibited activities is "marking of trails"; this turns out to be significant...
My goal today was to ride Estabrook Road, an abandoned carriage road running through Estabrook Woods, from the maintained section in Concord to the maintained section in Carlisle. I had done this once before, a couple of years ago, on my LHT, and recall some hard riding and a couple of pedal-strikes on stones. Thought I'd do better on the old mountain bike with the 55mm balloon tires. I was a half right.
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map of Estabrook Woods exists; I didn't use it. As it happens, I left Estabrook Road almost immediately, bearing right when I should have borne left. From then on, I was having an adventure. The trail I found myself on wound around the East side of Mink Pond, beautiful, but narrow, planted with rock gardens and carpeted with roots, with sharp up- and down-grades in rapid succession, too steep and too closely spaced to permit use of anything but the low range on my MTB triple, and punctuated with windfall trees, fordable brooks, and one sluice.
This was strenuous, and slow going. I clanked along, disturbing frogs and herons; this confirmed me in my decision not to invade Great Meadows NWR, where the critters have a reasonable expectation of not being clanked at. Eventually, my little trail came to a much broader one; this, as it turns out, was the missing Estabrook Road. Without consulting the GPS gods, I turned left when I should have turned right, and soon found myself back where I had started, on the edge of the Woods. Realized my error, but also realized that there was only an hour of daylight left, and headed home, noting as I did that the Congresscritters had also succeeded in closing the North Bridge park. Since our Congresscritters are generally well-behaved and not throwing bombs, writing them wouldn't help; perhaps writing somebody else's might... assuming they can read...
I did learn that the Big Bens can roll and bounce over many things that would cause a wreck with skinnier tires. I also learned that simply mounting 55mm tires on an old mountain bike does not magically endow me with technical riding skills that I never had. Damn. Tyler was right...
36 miles that felt like 50, through Arlington, Somerville, Lexington, Bedford, and Concord.
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