Читать книгу 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Boston - Lafe Low - Страница 10

PREFACE

There is nothing so restorative, so calming, so fulfilling as a walk in the woods. Whether a peaceful stroll through the trees, an aggressive hours-long hike up and over rocky crags, or something in between, you can’t help but feel better after getting out into the woods. It is truly essential.

Everyone has different reasons for wanting to get out in the forest and go for a hike—to get in better shape, relax, get back to nature, take the dog for a walk, take your kids for a walk—and they’re all good reasons. As long as you’re getting out.

At the risk of sounding old, being out in the woods always takes me back to my childhood. I am reminded of the days when my friend Dan Quagliaroli and I would head out with overloaded backpacks, a huge sense of adventure, lofty ideals, and no idea where we wanted to go. Often we wouldn’t even tell our moms where we were going because we truly made it up as we went along. Those were the days.

While this was not an original work for me, it still required that I retrace all the hikes in the original edition. I was chosen as the revising writer to update and expand on Helen Weatherall’s excellent Boston-area hiking guidebook. As part of the update process, I also researched and wrote about five new hikes.

Boston is a remarkable area. You can truly get a sense of just how much green and wooded space is intermingled with the urban jungle when taking off from or landing at Logan International Airport during the day. It’s quite a sight. There’s the obvious density of the extended city but lots of green space as well. In fact, two of the largest reservations—the Blue Hills and Middlesex Fells Reservations—are so close you can still hear traffic on the highways when you first set out for a hike. Interestingly, those are also two of the more challenging hikes in this book. And both trails are called the Skyline Trail. Be prepared when you try them both. They will test your mettle.

The best part of writing these guidebooks is the pure process of exploration. I have also done Best Tent Camping: New England and Best Hikes of the Appalachian Trail: New England for Menasha Ridge Press, and each project has been a spiritual and emotional windfall. I can be somewhat of a creature of habit. I’ll go to the same places over and over again. In writing this book and the others, my list of favorite places has grown by orders of magnitude. And for that I am grateful.

—Lafe Low