First Day Hikes take place at nearby State Parks nationwide on New Year's Day. The annual hike originated more than 20 years ago at the Blue Hills Reservation in Massachusetts. The program was launched to promote both healthy lifestyles throughout the year and year-round recreation at state parks. On the North Shore, there will be First Day hikes at Halibut Point State Park.
While just about everybody on the North Shore has probably been to Crane Beach, the dunes of Castle Neck are a much less explored world unto themselves. Offering one of the most accessible dune ecosystems north of Cape Cod, Castle Neck has over six miles of trails, traversing the dunes, maritime scrub forest, and beautiful beaches on both the Ipswich Bay and Essex/Castle Neck River estuary sides of the peninsula. These trails take you through Pitch Pine forests, up huge dunes offering stunning views of Choate Island, and by the varied landscapes of Castle Neck, including naturally occurring cranberry bogs.
Welcome the New Year with a brisk hike through the Crane Wildlife Refuge! We’ll begin with a small fire on the beach – bring a slip of paper with regrets from the past year, and we’ll send them up in smoke. Then we’ll cleanse our psyches with a trek through the starkly beautiful landscape of the dunes; trails winding along the sandy hills, blood pumping, the smell of the sea in the air – what a perfect way to to enter into 2018! At hike’s end we’ll warm up with hot cider.
Celebrate the New Year with a Walk in the Winter Labyrinth on New Years Day, 2016 at Strawberry Hill, 56 Jeffrey's Neck Road, on Smith Island, along the Eagle Hill River. At its most basic the labyrinth is a metaphor for life's journey. The labyrinth is not a maze. There are no tricks to it and no dead ends. It has a single circuitous path that winds its way into the center. The person walking it uses the same path to return from the center and the entrance then becomes the exit. The path is in full view, which allows a person to be quiet and focus internally.
