Several local favorite hiking and swimming spots remain closed this winter, after towns shut them down as visitors – often from out of state – flooded in when quarantine hit, cluttering town roadways, leaving behind trash, and causing overcrowding.
State parks remain open, including popular hiking spots including Mount Monadnock in Jaffrey and Pack Monadnock in Peterborough. However, precautions to prevent overcrowding remain in place even now, in the off-season.
Monadnock State Park, which includes trail entrances to Mount Monadnock, has implemented a reservation system with a limited number of parking spots, a system put in place this summer due to demand. Those who do not make a reservation prior to their arrival can be turned away. The same system is in place at Miller State Park, at the foot of Pack Monadnock.
The state isn’t the only entity which has had to limit access to local scenic spots. Regionally, hiking and swimming spots saw a huge number of visitors in the early part of the summer to small, isolated hiking trails and swimming holes, causing multiple problems for small towns.
Several local favorite hiking spots remain closed even now, in the winter months, after local leaders closed them down during the height of the summer.
Garwin Falls in Wilton, a privately owned parcel that’s open to the public, has long caused parking issues at its Isaac Frye Highway entrance, causing the town to enforce stricter and stricter parking regulations and penalties along the roadway long before COVID-19 was an issue. But after the pandemic hit, the problem only worsened, said Wilton Town Administrator and Health Officer Paul Branscombe.
“We were just getting overcrowding, it was terrible,” Branscombe said. “It just compounded the issue.”
Branscombe said other Wilton water attractions, including its reservoir and Goss Park, which is shared between Lyndeborough and Wilton, were able to stay open, but Garwin Falls has been advertised on public recreation sites and attracted out-of-state visitors for years, and when COVID-19 hit, the town was seeing a lot of visitors from neighboring states, including Massachusetts, even when there was a travel ban in place.
The town doesn’t own the land Garwin Falls sits on, but it does own a piece of property at its most popular public entrance, and the Select Board voted this summer to close that piece of property to the public, and removed Garwin Falls as an attraction on both its own town website, as well as contacting other websites that featured the falls asking them to remove it.
Garwin Falls wasn’t the only local waterfall that saw an influx of visitors. Lyndeborough Town Administrator Russ Boland said the Purgatory Falls trails in Lyndeborough are still closed to the public after a huge increase in visitors and trash left in the area this summer.
“One day, we had 80 cars on both sides of the roadway, most from out of state,” Boland said. “It really impeded traffic and emergency vehicle’s ability to get through there.”
Boland said the number of visitors was “unprecedented.” The town Select Board voted to shut down the trials mainly due to the safety issue of the clogged roadway, and the fact that the trails didn’t meet the state guidelines for hiking trail safety at the time, such as having a one-way loop, Boland said, but there was also a major issue of those visiting not adhering to the “carry-in, carry-out” rule, and littering and leaving large amounts of trash behind.
“What was environmentally happening to the trail system had to stop,” Boland said.
Usually, Boland said, the town provides two 55-gallon barrel trash cans on the trail, which are emptied twice a week by the town, and that’s always been sufficient. Those were overflowing, and an unprecedented amount of trash was being left on the trail.
After the town shut down the trails, it was approached by the MEMO Foundation, a group of volunteers, who offered to give their time to cleaning the litter left behind on the trails. The town granted that permission, and the group filled a dump truck with trash bags and litter, including camping equipment, building materials, dirty diapers and food bags, the majority of which had been left on the trail over a three-week period.
Branscombe and Boland said the Select Boards plan to revisit the reopening of the properties in the spring, with hopes that an effective vaccine will have alleviated many of the public health concerns.