I’ve walked through Mullins Head park hundreds, maybe thousands of times in the almost 20 years I’ve lived on North Haven.
The entrance is next to my house, the dirt road leads tantalizingly to five beautiful and often empty beaches. The 2.4-mile loop is an easy run, and the unplowed road in the winter is a perfect cross-country ski track. It’s familiar territory.
Which is why, on a walk this summer with a New York friend and her two boys, we halted at the site of new red blazes on each side of the road, before we’d reached the field, beckoning us down a trail I’d never seen before.
The boys were intrigued. We’d planned to walk the loop, but this was irresistible, a little path between some young birch trees. Should we go right, or left?
Left seemed like it might wind up back at my house, so we opted for the right-hand path. It was narrow and rock-strewn, but cleanly cut and well-marked with more red blazes and ribbons. The sensation of walking down an unknown route was disorienting and adventuresome. It’s tempting to believe that one can truly know a place after some years of habitation, but North Haven continues to surprise me.
In a Robert Frost mood a few weeks later, I took the trail to the left. It was as well-maintained as its counterpart…
We traversed a wooden plank over a small bog, then banked up a rocky outcropping. We went back down between some juniper bushes, and finally up again, standing on the lichen-crusted basalt and admiring the view of the ocean afforded from this height. Where were we? Where would we emerge?
We pressed on, looping down through milkweed patches and stopping to notice monarch caterpillars and pick a few early blackberries. We crossed a dry stream bed and walked alongside a stone wall, finally arriving back at the road by a large tree. We had gone almost all the way through the park to the exit, but via a completely new-to-me route.
In a Robert Frost mood a few weeks later, I took the trail to the left. It was as well-maintained as its counterpart, sending the perambulator through dense ferns, along stone walls, and amongst hardwood trees.
I am no genius at mapping, and although I felt that the twists and turns of the path would eventually lead back to my house, I was surprised to find the glint of the ocean through the woods in front of me after about a half hour of walking.
I popped out between the trees onto a beach, covered in familiar smooth blue stones. I looked to my right: picnic tables. I had, by some mysterious art of trail making, arrived at Big Beach. I followed the familiar dirt road back to the entrance and home.
I suppose that there was some public notice of the new trails, presumably in the North Haven News, but I missed it, so the new trails seemed like an unexpected gift.
And what a gift! Through their hours of clearing and blazing, the park commissioners have given the community both a new way to support our mental and physical health through walking in the woods, and a new way of seeing the island.
For the real woods-walking enthusiast, the new trail to Big Beach offers a wonderful opportunity: a coastal walk of nearly 3 miles of trail, the longest I’m aware of on the island, plus about a mile on the park road. To complete it, the walker can begin at the left-hand trailhead, walk down it to Big Beach, then walk the length of the beach. There, a trail picks up as a mown grass path and continues through the woods to Boy Scout, the next beach in the chain.
After walking the length of Boy Scout, a trail entrance is easily seen connecting to Vista, a lookout point. This part of the trail is the best known and most dramatic and includes a little bit of a cliff walk with a safety rope. From Vista, the park road reconnects.
I did this walk by myself in late summer, almost completely alone except for an odd trio napping and looking at their phones at the Vista picnic table. I say alone, but I was well accompanied by the ocean, which accommodated me for a quick dip at Big Beach, a few shy garter snakes, a red squirrel, and the clouds of birds enlivening the woods.
For them, these ways of seeing North Haven have always been accessible, and they’re generous to share it with us.
Courtney Naliboff teaches at North Haven Community School, plays in the band Bait Bag, and writs on North Haven. She may be contacted at Courtney.Naliboff@gmail.com.
