HIKING: ON LENOX MOUNTAIN

The modestly challenging stroll around the three-mile Burbank Trail on Lenox Mountain in Lenox, Massachusetts, makes for a terrific foliage outing. Photographers will appreciate the flame-like reflections on the wind-sheltered surface of Monks Pond. The forest canopy on these mountain lands hides not only deer and barred owls but the history of social change in the Berkshires.

 

Until the early 1700s, Lenox Mountain—part of the long range known as Yokun Ridge—was the domain of the Mahican Indians. Early European settlers colonizing the valleys began stripping the mountain’s forest for industrial uses: charcoal for iron-ore production, oak for barrels, and chestnut for construction.

        

Nineteenth-century immigrants such as John Gorman, who had left famished Ireland, purchased land on the denuded hills and became subsistence farmers. The Gorman homestead’s cellar hole, site of the family’s farm from 1852 to 1892, is along the Burbank Trail.

           

When the Gormans left in 1892, they sold their land to Anson Phelps Stokes, who was assembling the great Shadowbrook estate, later owned by Andrew Carnegie. The Burbank Trail, which the average walker will navigate in approximately two hours, is located entirely on lands once part of the Shadowbrook estate. Though the Shadowbrook cottage, a hundred-room mansion that was once the largest house in America, became a Jesuit monastery, and then, after burning down, was rebuilt into the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, most of the land was donated for conservation to Berkshire Natural Resources Council by heirs of A.P. Stokes. These conveyances were aided by the trail’s namesake, attorney Kelton M. Burbank of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who has served on the council’s board of directors since 1967.

           

Parking for the Burbank Trail is at Olivia’s Overlook, located on Lenox Mountain Road in Richmond, Massachusetts, just up the hill from Tanglewood and the Apple Tree Inn in Lenox. The trail itself starts across the road. A few steps into the woods one will find a kiosk with more information and trail maps. [October, 2009]

 

Tad Ames is president of Berkshire Natural Resources Council.

 

The Goods

Yokun Ridge Trail Guide and Map

www.bnrc.net/map.htm