We also got on the beach before dawn to allow us to watch the sunrise and do the majority of our walking during the cooler hours. While I am sure you can do it any time, I’m not sure I would want to do it during a hot stretch in July or August. We chose to do our walk in September when the temperatures were cooler. The choice of month will impact the availability of facilities and the climate. You will also want to consider when to do the walk. We turned on location tracking so my niece could watch us remotely, and gave her estimated times for pickups that we would update throughout the walk. When it comes to arranging for pickups, bear in mind that while cell coverage along the seashore is much better than in previous years - ironically due to emergency services for shark attacks - you will still lose connectivity in several places. My niece was kind enough to volunteer to be our personal driving service. Whether you do your Thoreau Walk over one or multiple days, you will need to arrange a dropoff and pickup. One other tip to pass on: by choosing a date between a new and full moon, you can minimize the risk of flood tides. But you definitely do not want to get caught between a flooding beach and a 70 foot vertical bluff. This will of course change each season based on the impact of storms. ![]() To minimize the risk here, we talked to rangers at the Salt Pond Visitor Center in Eastham, since they have the best knowledge of the dangerous areas. For our September 2021 journey, the areas north of Marconi Beach and around Ballston Beach were washing over at high tide. While the Cape Cod National Seashore is really one continuous beach, not all areas are impacted the same way by the tides. Also, given the aggressive coyotes in this area, you should think twice about being on the beach at night. Rangers patrol the entire length of the beach, so it is best not to violate these rules. The Cape Cod National Seashore is open from 6 AM to 11 PM, and does not allow camping or fires on the beach. The entire trip can be done in about 9 hours of walking with no breaks - but most people split this over two or three walks to allow time to enjoy the scenery. While your pace will vary based on the softness of the sand, you will cover about a mile every 20 minutes. The walk is 28 miles, all on the beach, and walking almost continuously on a slight incline. I did it for the first time this month, and thought I’d pass on what I learned to anyone else interested in making the journey. The book chronicles the flora, fauna, landscapes, people and culture of Cape Cod in the 19th century, freezing in time a long gone era.ĭue to the creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961, you can replicate Thoreau’s 28 mile hike from Eastham to Provincetown today. With Orleans as his base, he walked up and down the seashore multiple times, both the backside (the side facing the Atlantic) and the bayside (the side facing Cape Cod Bay). Cape Cod was so rural in those days that Thoreau had to take a stagecoach from Sandwich to Orleans - staying in Sandwich for such a short time he said he only had “half a sandwich” (that’s naturalist humor for you). ![]() It is like traveling back in time to see what the Cape was like 170+ years ago. But I make an exception for the book Cape Cod. ![]() A few pages of Walden almost always guarantees me a sound sleep. I have often wondered why people take medication to sleep at night when they could just take Thoreau. I am not a big fan of naturalist writers in general, and specifically Thoreau. ![]() Thoreau, a native of Massachusetts, is best known for his book Walden. I was introduced to the idea of a Thoreau Walk by reading Cape Cod, a collection of essays by naturalist writer Henry David Thoreau on his trips to Cape Cod in the late 1840s and early 1850s.
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