State Highpoint: Mount Greylock via Bellows Pipe Trail

Ralph Waldo Emerson once warned his frequent hiking companion and fellow nature lover, Henry David Thoreau, that Mount Greylock was a "serious mountain." Thoreau, of course, climbed it immediately. He summited the 3,491-foot Massachusetts high point via what he described as, in the purplest prose, "a road for the pilgrim to enter upon, who would climb to the gates of heaven." That road is now the 5.5-mile Bellows Pipe Trail.

Hike it by heading 2.2 miles south from North Adams on Notch Road to the trailhead at Notch Gate. The path rises 1,000 feet through the falls-filled ravine between Mt. Greylock and Ragged Mountain. The state's only boreal forest grows here. (Want to make it an overnight? The trail passes a shelter hidden in the pines at mile 2.7.) Link to the Appalachian Trail at mile 3.7 and wind through birch and pines another half-mile to the summit, a flat, open field with a lodge (see right), the Massachusetts Veterans War Memorial (built in 1932), and wide-screen views of the rolling Berkshire Mountains.

Thoreau, of course, didn't have it so cush. He bushwhacked the final part of the ascent and slept on the summit under a plank of wood. And he wasn't rewarded with the now-legendary five-state view. It was socked in, or, in more Thoreauvian terms, obscured by an "undulating valley of clouds." In fall, the panorama draws foliage-heads (the majority drive to the summit on the newly restored road). Return the way you came or make an 11-mile loop with the AT and Bernard Farm Trail. Don't like to share? Wait until snowfall to trek—or snowshoe—in total solitude.

--O'rya Hyde-Keller

Note: The route shown on this map is approximate.

TO TRAILHEAD: From Williamstown, MA, take MA 2 east for 2.7 miles. Turn right onto Phelps Ave and in about a mile turn left onto Pattison Rd. In .5 mile, turn right onto Notch Rd. Go 1.1 miles and veer right onto Notch Rd. Look for trailhead on left.