The Southern New England Trunk Trail (SNETT) is another of those disused railroad beds that cris-crosses the wooded landscape of Massachusetts. It’s something like 22-24 miles long, running from Franklin Mass. to the Connecticut state line at Douglas, Mass.
I looked it up because we had a couple rainy days that weren’t conducive to singletrack riding (wet leaves hide rocks on the trails making for potentially hazardous conditions). All I needed to see in the SNETT description on NEMBA.org was “few people will ride the entire length..” and my tiny dinosaur brain responded, “BUT I WILL!” Ugh. I need to stop doing that.
It took me two tries to bike it this week… and you can skip to the end of this if you’d like because my assessment is .. blah! Once and done, folks! Bore me to sleep.
Those photos are from my first attempt to ride it. I started in Franklin, MA and rode to Blackstone. The trail surface is (in late 2020) generally dirt/gravel/unpaved but some sections aren’t too bad while others are terrible, necessitating a mountain bike. In one neighborhood there was a “welcome to the trailhead” sign (with somebody’s pontoon boat parked in the right of way) and a really lousy, hard-to-follow, unmarked trail. I’m guessing “trailhead” was just aspirational.
Before I headed out I’d studied what maps I could find online and thought I might make it much further than the 8 miles that got me to the sidewalk next to a CVS in Blackstone, an old mill town, but luck was not with me that day. I rode through Blackstone’s streets trying to find the connection to the rest of the trail heading west but was stymied.
Off Canal Street the Blackstone Greenway has a nice parking area and kiosk but if you try to go west from there you hit a chainlink fence blocking access to an essential bridge. I rode around on the streets looking for another way to get on the trail west of there but couldn’t find it. Perhaps I’d missed a connection that might have sent me from the unimproved SNETT trail to the Blackstone Greenway’s paved surface? I still need to investigate that. Blackstone is a puzzle to me — the SNETT comes in one place, and somewhere becomes part of the Blackstone Greenway, but there’s another stub of a brand-new trail called the Blackstone River Trail (it’s about a mile long total, see image in gallery above). My head aches just trying to sort it all out.
Seeing the East Coast Greenway sign here in the midst of a hideous industrial area was just depressing. I turned around and rode back to Franklin.
Day Two: I studied more maps. This time I thought I’d start at a parking area/trailhead in a different part of Blackstone and go west. I was pleasantly surprised to find the smooth, paved trail busy with Sunday walkers and bikers. Wow. I started to think I should have ridden my gravel bike instead of my mountain bike with its heavy lugged tires.. but there would be time to reconsider that thought. It crossed into Millville, then stopped at Route 146, a north-south divided highway.
Finding the railroad bed again west of Route 146 was interesting. You go under the highway bridge and come to a four-way intersection where there’s a farm on your left, a dead-end street on the right and no indication of where you should go. Fortunately I’d done my “old school” method of photographing maps from my computer screen and noticed that the dead-end street (Colonel) supposedly had a “parking area” at the end. Once I got there there were no “welcome to the trailhead” signs to indicate where the hell to go so I followed four-wheeler tracks into the woods. After about a quarter mile I was on an unimproved railroad bed again, motoring through desolate woods. I must have traveled more than five miles without seeing another person (kind of unusual in this congested part of the country). Here I reconsidered my thought that a gravel bike would have been better, because some places still had the chunky railroad stones in the trail. Still, pushing my Maxxis tires so many miles was arduous. They’re meant for singletrack trails, not this sort of slog.
So it’s not exaggeration when I say I was bored with the SNETT. I tried to think of it as an adventure but it lacked excitement. It also lacked scenery, signage, and any reason to do it again. Thank God I had my old school iPod with lots of tunes on it or I might have lost my mind. Earth, Wind, and Fire and Van Morrison kept me going. I almost wept when I realized the battery was running low.
Once I hit Douglas State Forest I knew the end was near. But was it? Not really. I kept pedaling and pedaling, hoping the Connecticut line would materialize. It took forever. There were swamps and beaver dams on the right, woods on the left and dull gray skies above. My legs were beginning to signal a need for a break.
At the Connecticut line there’s a marker where Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut state lines meet. It’s up in the woods, away from the trail. There was no NEED to see it but I figured I’d come so far I might as well. I thought walking a little would feel nice after the endless monotony of the SNETT, so I hiked in with my bike (I had no way of securing it at the base of the trail). This is not recommended. The trail was rugged even by hiking standards and rather tough in biking shoes.
Upon leaving the marker I decided to take an old carriage trail going southwest, hoping I’d be able to ride some in the woods and get to a road more quickly than hiking back down the same trail. Wrong again. The carriage path was awful, un-rideable, then I had the fun of crossing posted private property (no way was I going back up to the marker in the woods and out yet another hiking trail..) but there were no dogs barking at me so I hopped on and got going.
So it was 15 miles from the morning’s trailhead in Blackstone to the Connecticut line, a long boring ride. As much as I hate to ride along roads with traffic I couldn’t wait to head home. It was only 18 more miles.. ugh! Fortunately Jumbo Donut in Uxbridge was still open. Oh. Yeah.
Tags: Blackstone Greenway, Blackstone Massachusetts, Douglas State Forest, maps, Massachusetts, mountain biking, NEMBA, rail trail, SNETT, Uxbridge Massachusetts
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