Outside in North Central Massachusetts

Skiing, hiking, biking, hunting, fishing, walking, and getting outside in the Northeast and elsewhere.

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Borderland Festival and Site ofWoodstock 9/2019

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2019 NY Crossbow.

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Brighton -- bar, lift, lodging within 200 yards of one another. Tough to beat. (at Brighton Resort) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtE389IAPBB/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1cdtekw1ptdz

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NY Crossbow.

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Spectacular hike up Gros Morne peak. (at Gros Morne National Park)

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Scenes from North Central Mass.

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The Legendary Single Chair, Mad River Glen, VT.  January 4, 2018. If you can ski here, you can ski anywhere. 

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Mt Washington, MA, apparently the home of "Wolf Piss."

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NY has plentiful deer and sportsman-friendly regulations, both of which have conspired to make me hunt the Bay State a whole lot less.  The results, as they say, are in the freezer.  One with the bow Oct 5 and one with the crossbow on Nov 17.  Aim small, miss small.

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The River Runs Through It

Harry, the old bow bender, once arrowed a deer down by Electric Light brook. The deer did a Usain Bolt downhill and came to eternal rest in the shallow, flowing water. Harry loved it, dubbing it The River Runs Through It deer. Yesterday I was hunting NY. The access is via a stinky, tick infested briar patch, which then leads to the backside of an open hardwood ridge. At the point of the ridge, the slope falls away down to another patch of thick undergrowth. The vegetation and the terrain funnel the deer across the slope toward the point. White oaks, mixed in with maples and red oaks, also help to bring deer to that spot. A small 6, no doubt a year and a half old deer, crossed down below me about 20 minutes after I settled in. He was quartering away, moving right to left, at about thirty yards. The arrow sliced through at an angle and emerged on the other side, just aft of his right leg. He was hit hard but just a smidge low. He ran off back toward the direction from which he came, skirting the very edge of the thick stuff. Blood was good, both sides of the track and plentiful. He lay down in the brook, water gently running past, and that's where I recovered him. He's The River Runs Through It Too deer.

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The town of Dana once occupied the Western edge of North Central Massachusetts.  In the 30s, its buildings were razed and its citizens moved to make way for the Quabbin reservoir.  Today only foundations and cellar holes remain, testimony to a slower, simpler, and some would argue better way of life that will never be again.   Access is via Gate 40 on Route 32A in Petersham.  The walk to the Dana town common is flat and paved. Along the way a series of fields and foundation holes appear. Dana also holds the remains of a crashed Lockheed F-94 Starfire jet from the 1950s and the lone remaining grave in the vast expanse of the Quabbin.  “In Heaven There’s Rest”

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Other stones in other places may commemorate the histories of people and things now dead and gone. This stone marks the site of a mountain that lived, a mountain that lives on because of people who cared, people who started with nothing but a dream, and the will to work for it, until the dream became as real, as solid as this stone, as sure as this ground beneath your feet, as true as this mountain on which you stand, this mountain holding you up to meet the sky ...

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MA muzzleloader, New Year’s Eve, 120 lb doe.

Shot her with two hours left in the season on a stand behind my house. I was leaning against a bull pine watching a piece of thick woods. A skim of crusty snow made walking ill advised. She came from the left at a trot, maybe 25 yards out. Stopped behind some dense underbrush for a couple of long seconds and then stepped out into the spot I was scoping. 25 yards broadside, separated the atria from the heart. She ran 15 yards, dead on her feet.

Must have been my payback for picking up trash in the woods all season.

Fitting bambi’s mommy in the back of a three door Yaris hatchback was a trick, sorta resembled a mob hit or something.

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Tailgate Party! Princeton, MA