My Neck of the Woods

This 30-year-old photo shows almost all of the southwest corner of Massachusetts, from West Stockbridge to Sheffield. We stand on Tom Ball Mountain's peak at 1,927 feet above sea level and look 14 miles south to Mount Everett's dome at 2,602 feet. The further peak to the right is Mount Race at 2,322 feet, and to the right of Race is Mount Frissell at 2,453, both a bit more than 15 miles away and only just in Massachusetts. In late summer such thinly soiled highlands offer fine blueberries to hikers along the famous Appalachian Trail, which crosses Mt. Everett's peak, rounded by the scouring of glacial ice once thousands of feet higher still.
The New York border lies just a mile or so further to the right. The distant Litchfield Hills on the left lie in Connecticut, past Canaan, just south of the Massachusetts line. The fabulous day we took this photo, New York's larger Catskill Mountains were plainly visible some 40 miles to the west. MLH and our daughter arrive on the left, slowed, perhaps, by a few sweet blueberries.
This photo shows much of the bucolic area of our youth, where out of school we spent countless hours tracking, hunting, fishing, and trapping and yet were home in time for supper, most of the time.