Ashville Pond Loop
Posted By auntie on May 30, 2012
★★★★★ 3.56 miles
stunning. my new favorite hike, even though it’s not that long. it starts (and ends) at the long pond parking area off canonchet road in hopkinton. from there i went down canonchet road to the blue pond pull-off, and down the trail towards blue pond. what you need to know about blue pond is that it’s not so much blue “pond” anymore… it’s more blue “faint trickle of water in the distance surrounded by fields and marshy spots,” due to the spring floods of 2010, which washed away the dike that made it a pond. this made it somewhat problematic to follow the trail that originally followed the pond shoreline. i ended up doing a bit of bushwacking to get to the old woods road that is the 2nd part of the trail. this road heads back out to canonchet. my route then took me down canonchet to stubtown road, and down stubtown to the small parking area at the western end of ashville pond, and a trailhead for the yellow-blazed narragansett trail. that’s where the hike got especially pretty, although as is the norm, apparently, for the narragansett trail anywhere i’ve hiked it, it’s kind of boulder-y. also, this stretch, from stubtown road to the parking area at long pond, is quite climby, tho i didn’t find it arduous. not sure if that’s me or the trail, but either way, it was a great hike.
the trail to blue pond
beautiful stretch of the narragansett trail
cool old log bridge, narragansett trail
cool old log bridge, narragansett trail
Looks beautiful! Can I ask you a question? How do you choose your hikes? I sometimes have people asking me that question so I thought it would be interesting to find out how others pick theirs. Thanks.
interesting question. i read about a lot of these hikes in ken weber’s books, walks and rambles in rhode island and their spawn. but mostly i get jazzed by looking at maps. i’ve gotten some great maps from great swamp press in carolina, ri. how about you?
[…] is the blue pond/ashville pond loop that i did back in may. i also did the narragansett trail stretch of this last month, as part of […]