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Hikers at the summit of Mount Greylock look out over the town of Adams.

Category:
Hikes

Mount Greylock / Photo by Kate Abbott

The Berkshires are rich in walks and hikes — gentle rambles in the hills and treks along the Appalachian Trail, and anything in between. Kayak on a mountain lake or get a taste of white water.

Photo by Kate Abbott
By the Way

Can we stretch out for a moment in the sun? (March 10 newsletter)

March 11, 2021
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The sun is coming out today for an hour or two. Where should we go for a walk? It’s one of those unexpected early spring days that jumps ahead for a flicker, like that afternoon in mud time in the Robert Frost poem …

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The Hoosic River runs through golden maple trees in Williamstown on a fall afternoon.
Photo by Kate Abbott
About

Looking for fall brightness on the back roads (Oct. 1 newsletter)

October 1, 2020
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Color has come all at once this weekend. … The leaves let the light through, and here for a stretch the woods are rich and sunlit and almost too bright to look at. I can’t ever take it for granted.

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Analia Saban’s Teaching a Cow How to Draw, one of the six new works in the Clark Art Institute’s first outdoor sculpture show, Ground/Work, plays with the form of a split-rail fence.
Photo by Kate Abbott
Visual Arts

Ground/Work gathers international artists at the Clark

September 17, 2020
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Songbirds were flying through the sculpture. … I was walking slowly along Analia Saban’s Teaching a Cow How to Draw, one of the six new works in the Clark Art Institute’s first outdoor sculpture show, Ground/Work.

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A weathered boardwalk protects a thick mat of sphagnum moss in Hawley Bog.
Photo by Kate Abbott
Outdoors

Northern orchids bloom in Hawley Bog

July 12, 2020
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Orchids grow here. I knelt on the boardwalk, balanced over the floating peat mat, to look up under the hanging blossom of a rose pogonia.

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A pitcher plant blooms russet and gold in Hawley bog in June.
Photo by Kate Abbott
Outdoors

Pitcher plants and wild bloom iris in Hawley Bog

June 17, 2020
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Half a mile from the trailhead, the boardwalk heads into ferns almost as tall as I am, and I’ve only seen a place like this once or twice before. It’s been eight years since I came to Hawley Bog. 

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Native shrubs bloom on the slopes of Lenox Mountain at Mass Audubon's Pleasant Valley Sanctuary.
Mass Audubon / Photo by Kate Abbott
Outdoors

Coming round the mountain at Pleasant Valley

April 3, 2020
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It was a Saturday in the middle of May, and the day was warm in the sun, and I decided to take a walk at Mass Audubon’s Pleasant Valley Sanctuary in Lenox. It didn’t go as planned — gloriously.

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A White Pine stands more than 150 feet tall near the south end of Ice Glen in Stockbridge.
Photo by Thom Smith
Outdoors

Thom Smith looks for giants — old growth trees

February 27, 2020
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Old growth woods have never been harvested. As much as 70 percent of the Berkshires’ woods were cut down between the arrival of the first European colonists and the Civil War — but in pockets, often in hard-to-reach places, giant trees still grow.

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Eve Ensler and Jane Fonda perform at V Day. Press photo courtesy of VDay.org
Photo by Scott Gries
Pittsfield

10×10 Upstreet Arts Festival warms up downtown

February 18, 2020
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The 10×10 Upstreet Arts Festival is in town, and Pittsfield is at play. Every year in late February, downtown Pittsfield holds a weeklong celebration with art and music, new plays, independent film and more.

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Vuyani Dance Theatre will perform Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero at Mass MoCA.
Photo by John Hogg
Dance

Movement and light come to the Berkshires midway between winter and spring (By the Way column)

January 29, 2020
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Sunday is midwinter, halfway between the first day of winter and the first day of spring, and in the Berkshires energy is stirring in performances like Vuyani Dance Company’s Cion, on college campuses and in the woods.

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A cross country skier in a spruce forest at the Notchview Reservation in Windsor. Courtesy of The Trustees of Reservations.
Photo by J. Monkman
By the Way

The Berkshires welcome winter solstice with firelight and evergreens (BTW column)

December 18, 2019
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We have almost reached the longest night of the year, and for hundreds of years people have taken time for it around the world, and in the Berkshires too.

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Explore the Berkshires
From back roads to backstage
Kate Abbott
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