March 25, 2023
Southern New England Trunkline Trail (SNETT). Longest National Recreation Trail in MA. 22 miles. I ended up doing between 24 and 25 miles when you add walking around a closed section and getting back to my car.
Carl, a kind man who is the brother of a high school friend, offered to give me a carspot so I could do the trail in one go. I parked where the SNETT website says you should – at the lot on Forge Hill Road by Franklin State Forest. Note you can now park directly at the end of the trail itself on Grove Street. Parking at Forge Hill Road adds a mile+ to your walk and involves route finding through the forest.
Carl drove me to Douglas State Forest. I entered the woods as close to the western terminus as I could, turned right to reach CT, then turned around and walked back to where I began and continued east along the trail.
The trail is mostly flat and usually wide, and it’s more suited for casual walkers and bicyclists than hikers. It goes through Douglas, East Douglas, Uxbridge, Millville, Blackstone, Bellingham, and Franklin, though it sticks to the woods and, except for Blackstone, never goes directly through the towns.
Scenery is mostly the wide and flat trail in front of you with trees on either side. Some parts offer views of adjacent marshes, streams, and rivers.
SNETT is not well marked except in a few places, and I relied heavily on my Gaia app in areas where local trails intersected, where SNETT crosses a highway, and in Blackstone where the trail was closed with no detour signs or descriptions of how to get back on the trail. The map I downloaded from the SNETT website wasn’t much help in those areas. Gaia all the way.
Conditions change from town to town. Sometimes the trail is dirt, sometimes it is paved, sometimes it’s handicap-accessible, sometimes it is a fairly narrow mud-filled trench.
It was a good way for me to start to get back into real hiking shape. I hadn’t done this many miles at once in months. Now I need to start adding elevation.
