Posted By auntie on July 17, 2012

2.33 miles  ★★★★★

i gave this hike 5 stars, even though it was 75-degrees when i started and 86-degrees by the time i’d gone a mile. it was a lot of fun because i walked this backwards from my usual order and explored a couple of side paths… one intentionally. funny how side paths that go unnoticed in one direction become forks in the other! and i finally found the fabled bridge abutment over the wood river.

bridge abutment

this was a bridge on the hope valley line, which was a spur railroad line which fed into the main line at wood river junction. on sections of the trail you can still see coal clinkers. and there was a creative and seemingly ad hoc bridge over a little creek to get to this point…

creative bridge

guess they didn’t need that trailer anymore. it still had its tires. and here is a picture of the pond that is in my blog header, now amply festooned with pickerel weed.

plain pond in summer

that red you see on the far shore is a pine-needle-covered access path. and here is pickerel weed up close.

pickerel weed

this is good cover and food for a lot of native birds and wildlife, like ducks and deer and muskrats. beautiful, too, both up close and en mass. and finally boy are you missing out because nobody’s invented nose-o-graphs or scratch and sniff web pages yet. the clethra alnifolia is starting to bloom. they don’t call it summersweet for nothing! it’s an absolutely heady scent, and it’s a very common native, so it’s everywhere i walk.

clethra alnifolia (summersweet)

Categories: Rhode Island, Walks and Hikes
Tags: 2–5 miles, Hope Valley RI, RI