The Mountain Outside My Window
Mount Watatic was only about two miles from where I lived on Billy Ward Pond, and I could see it in the background of the lake every day. For nineteen years that mountain was part of my normal life. It was there when I woke up, there when I came home from work, there when I paddled, ran, mountain biked, swam, camped, and sat beside a backyard fire looking out over the pond.
Some places become more than scenery. Mount Watatic became one of those places for me. It was close enough to climb after work, wild enough to feel like a real little mountain, and familiar enough that I could hike it in almost any season, any weather, and sometimes under a full moon.
Learning to Ski the Hard Way
Mount Watatic was the place where I learned to ski with my dad and my Uncle Bert back in 1972, when I first moved from Florida to Massachusetts. I remember the toughest part of learning to ski was not the skiing. It was the old J-bars.
I kept trying to sit down on the J-bar instead of standing up and letting it pull me, so I fell about six or eight times. Every time I fell, they had to shut off the lift to get me up. Eventually I just gave up, and they gave my dad a refund for my lift ticket.
A year or so later, when I was working at McDonald’s in high school, we had a Thursday night ski club. After work we would go skiing for a few hours on the mountain. It was icy and cold, and some of those trails were pretty steep, but we all had a heck of a lot of fun.
College Days, Kegs, and a Concert on the Mountain
A few years later, when I was in college in the 1980s, we would hike on the mountain every now and then. One time they had a concert on the mountain with three bands playing. The night before, we had a keg party at our house because it was right next to the college and was almost like a frat house. So naturally, we took the leftover keg with us to the concert.
There were school buses to get everyone from the big parking fields up to the concert area. We got some ice for the half-empty keg, put it in a big barrel, and Mike, who owned the house we lived in, helped me carry it from the bus up the side of the ski area so we could watch the bands.
Everything was lots of fun until about halfway through the concert, when we realized we had way more beer than we could ever finish. We had already been giving free beers to people around us, but there was still too much left. So we went up to the hot dog stand, got a white paper plate and a helium-filled balloon on a string, and used a magic marker to write a sign on both sides of the plate.
25¢
Sometimes there was a line of four or five people waiting, which did not exactly make the people behind us happy.
But it was a heck of a lot of fun, and it was an excellent concert. It was one of those odd, funny, slightly ridiculous college memories that stays with you forever.
The Trails That Started So Much
Mount Watatic was much more than an old ski area. It was the terminus of the Midstate Trail, a long-distance trail that ran through Massachusetts, and it was the start of the Wapack Trail, which ran north from Watatic to Pack Monadnock in New Hampshire. The Wapack was one of the first multi-day hikes I ever did in Massachusetts.
The mountain had beautiful hiking, old woods, open ledges, and the feeling of a real New England monadnock. I hiked it hundreds and hundreds of times and camped on the summit many times because it was so close to my house.
Since it was part of the Midstate Trail, there was also a three-sided wooden shelter, or lean-to, on the mountain. It had a fire pit, and we camped there many times in winter.
Snow, Ribs, Potato Chips, and Blackberry Brandy
Some of my favorite memories from Mount Watatic were winter nights at the lean-to. I remember being up there with Dan cooking ribs around the campfire, and at about 10 o’clock at night in heavy snow, we suddenly heard voices coming up through the woods.
We hiked up to the summit and found our friends from Fitchburg coming up through the snow. They had sleeping bags, bags of potato chips, and hot dogs for the fire, while we already had ribs cooking. There was probably plenty of beer and some blackberry brandy too.
Those nights were so good. Snow falling in the woods, a fire going, friends arriving in the dark, and a little wooden shelter on a mountain that felt like it belonged to all of us.
When the Mountain Was Almost Lost
Around 1998 or so, there were rumors that the old ski area, which had been abandoned for many years and was in disrepair, was going to be sold and converted into a water park. Most everyone in town was upset about it because the land was a huge tract of undeveloped land, and it was one of the most important trail junctions in the area.
Mount Watatic was also a beautiful hike with old-growth forest on it. I did some volunteer research with Audubon to help document the old-growth forest up there. We were trying everything we could to find a way to preserve the mountain from development.
The Start of a Land Trust
That was when the idea of a land trust formed in our heads. Jim Diener and I were both on the Conservation Commission, and we spent about a year holding public meetings. Usually it was just the two of us, and sometimes one or two other people, but we kept going.
Eventually we were able to form the Ashburnham Conservation Trust, get our 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, and become an official land trust. Over the next year or so, we partnered with the Ashburnham and Ashby Conservation Commissions, local land trusts, and state environmental and conservation agencies. Altogether, about six different partners helped raise the money, mostly through donations and grants, to purchase and protect the land that makes up Mount Watatic.
Today it is an incredibly nice mountain for hiking. That still feels amazing to me, because there was a time when it could have been lost.
Life at Billy Ward Pond
One of the coolest things about Mount Watatic was that it was only a five-minute drive from my house. After work, I could go mountain biking, paddling on the lake, or running when I was still doing a lot of jogging. Then at the very end of the day, I could climb the mountain for sunset, and if there was a full moon, watch the full moon rise.
After sunset I could drive back home, take a swim in the lake in the middle of summer, sleep outside in a tent in the backyard, maybe beside the campfire, and then get up the next morning, go to work, and do it all again. It was like the perfect life.
The place was an A-frame, and my landlord Bruce was the best guy in the world. Only one time did the rent go up in the entire nineteen years I was there. I also had a cat named Spaz who lived there for all nineteen of those years, plus two years before that. Spaz lived to be twenty-one years old.
What Mount Watatic Taught Me
Mount Watatic showed me something that has stayed with me for the rest of my life. When you have something special, like a mountaintop, an old ski area, a trail corridor, or one of the best last undeveloped places in town, it does not automatically stay protected just because everyone loves it.
The way it works in America is that if someone has the money to buy something, and the rules do not prevent them from developing it, then that is probably what is going to happen. That is how special places get bought up, cleared, and turned into some type of development.
The answer is to volunteer your time, work with others, leverage the people and organizations already doing similar work, and find a way to preserve these places. In many cases, that means raising money and actually acquiring the land. It can take years of meetings, paperwork, fundraising, grants, public support, and persistence.
But we found out in Ashburnham that this is how it works. Since we formed the Ashburnham Conservation Trust, many thousands of acres have been preserved around town, especially connecting corridors and undeveloped land that had been mostly untouched since it was logged eighty or a hundred years ago.
That would be my message to everyone. Instead of just complaining when you do not like something, you really need to do something about it. Mount Watatic is a shining example of that.
Mount Watatic Links
These are the links I want to keep with this page, along with related places that shaped the story.
The old page ended with the hope that this beautiful monadnock would somehow be protected forever. This new version gets to tell the rest of the story: people stepped up, worked together, and helped make that happen.