This roughly 4 mile hike occurred on Monday, November 18, 2024. It was myself and Tim Schmidt on this one.
When I arrived at the Mt. Hope RD trailhead at around 8:15 AM it was 47 degrees. I had to wear glove liners while waiting for Tim. Tim arrived shortly afterwards. We drove his car around to the Reservoir RD trailhead and then started the counterclockwise hike.
We hiked the northern half of this trail back in April, 2024. You can read about this hike
Here.
We could not hike the entire 7.1 mile loop around Beaverdam Reservoir in April because a portion of this trail was closed during the construction of Beaverdam Park. This park officially opened on October 21, 2024. So we decided to hike the other half of this trail today.
The first few miles of this trail were very flat and easy to hike. We saw some old rock walls, crossed some streams and talked about this and that. It was warming up as we hiked. We would see the reservoir to our left occassionally while hiking this stretch. Then, it would go away as we pulled away from the reservoir.
The blazing and signing were good the first mile or so. However, when we got down to the southern end of the reservoir it started getting harder to follow the trail. We passed under a power line, then turned left onto a gravel road. I had to keep using the
app to determine the correct way to go on subsequent intersections. We started seeing other colors of trails, a golf cart path and a section of closed trail under construction along the next mile or so. We also passed a bridge on our left. We were not sure where it went so we didn’t take it. We saw another bridge coming in from the left in about a quarter mile later. Was this the same bridge that we saw previously? Was it a shortcut that would have saved us about a half hour of walking around? I’m not sure. The official trail route did not go over this bridge.
Around mile 3.7 we passed a canoe rental and launch, then a crew storage building for the local schools. We saw the main visitor center to our right along with the parking area for this new park. We didn’t go to the visitor center. We then hiked another .4 miles and made it back to my vehicle around 11:45 AM. So we did the 4 miles in 3 hours. Not bad considering that we were lost for about a half hour. The temperature at the end of the hike was 74 degrees.
Overall, I thought that this was a decent hike. There were a lot of stream crossings over big rocks and there were piles of logs on the trail for no apparent reason. I think that once they get the trail work done, that this area will be easier to navigate. But the reader should be aware that some difficulties exist on the southern end of this hike and they should bring a paper map and use a trail app to help navigate this area.
Mike C
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