The Blogfather

A walk in the woods, on bikes in East Harwich

The new "Muddy Creek" Nature Walk is seldom used but beautiful
Why am I telling you all about this wonderful "secret place"?

My grandson Will got a new Mountain Bike for Christmas, and Cape Cod being Cape Cod, has had little chance to ride it lately.

Sunday was a good day to start, and the nature walk carved out of newly acquired Harwich Conservation Trust land on Bay Road a 1/4 mile up the hill from Pleasant Bay is a wonderful place to begin an 8-year-old's off-road training. 

The Cape Cod Americorps created a simple, gravel and fence-posted parking area on Bay Road opposite Blue Herring Drive last month, but with our weather as it's been, I've been able to walk the new trail once and ride it a second time to check out it's viability for training my grandling Will. In all our visits I've met only one hiker, Tommy Johnson of Church Street, a real Cape Codder and nature lover.

The new nature trail is just under a half mile from the parking lot to the two benches overlooking the creek, thus less than a mile round trip. The trail has two paths running off to the right . The both continue west a half mile or so to the Harwich Water Dept. land (see map below) and a power line. From either spur's end you continue on the powerline (left if you took the first spur, right if you took the second) and look for the trail to enter the nature area back to the trail to started on.

The second right spur is at a single bench about 1/4 mile into the walk, and you can rest there, although the river is barely visible through the trees. I suggest you amble on past the bench another 1/4 mile or so to the two benches at the trail's end and sit quietly in hopes of spying the Blue Herons which hang out on the tree stumps below you.

The photos on right show at Blue Heron on a tree stump on the river, then flying off (click on image to see larger). On right is Will discovering a strand of bamboo among the scrub pine, white and red oaks, and at bottom the two benches at trails' end overlooking the river.

42 acres preserved forever

A look at the Kelsey Airview below from the HCT site shows the enormous difference a conservation effort which is made early can make. All those homes on the right of the photo are on the Chatham side of Muddy Creek  (mislabeled "Monomoy River" by the HCT in a misguided effort to curry favor with washashores who would much prefer being treated as peers by using the proper, although less elegant, real name of the non-river).

A Chatham developer won the land on the Chatham side of Muddy Creek from a local judge in a poker game around 1960, and renamed Muddy Creek as "Monomoy River" to empress the swells he was trying to sell into what he called Riverbay Estates.

Not even a river (Cape Cod doesn't have any)

This bucolic little body of water, which is the boundary between Harwich and Chatham, isn't even a "river". The lower part nearest Pleasant Bay was known as Long Cove to differentiate it from nearby Round Cove, but when Route 28 was constructed as a State Road early in the last century, the state saved money on a bridge by using a large culvert to connect the cove with the bay. The little stream which feed the cove was always called Muddy Creek by natives.

Below I have placed yellow dashes approximately where the trail lies.