Mystery Spring
The Skinny
Mystery Spring is a spring that emerges from a crack between two boulders. The very short Mystery Spring trail might be something fun to do with kids in the Fall, if you can avoid bow-hunting season, or perhaps on snowshoes, or if you're on your way somewhere else that brings you down Tadmuck Rd. and want to get a little nature in.
You can connect the Mystery Spring trails to others, as we did, to get a decent walk out of it (2.3 mile loop), but I don't recommend it in the summer, as the mosquitoes are plentiful.
You can connect the Mystery Spring trails to others, as we did, to get a decent walk out of it (2.3 mile loop), but I don't recommend it in the summer, as the mosquitoes are plentiful.
Map
The Play-by-Play
As I was biking home from weight watchers the other day, I noticed a
sign for "Mystery Spring" along the side of Tadmuck Road. Obviously, my
interest was piqued, and we had to drag the kids along for the walk.
Mystery Spring itself is a paltry 0.2 miles off the road and not worth parking the mini-van on the side of Tadmuck rd. However, the trail to Mystery Spring connects to Flaherty Trail, which can be used to pick up Tadmuck Divide Trail and then Old Haul Road, creating a little loop (connected by a section of subdevelopments as you walk on Dana Drive).
The trails are very well maintained with white blazes on the trees (3 year-olds find it very entertaining to count the blazes and help ensure we haven't gotten off of the trail) as well as nice wooden posts at all of the trailheads.
The 0.2 miles brings you to Mystery Spring, which emerges between two rocks. Here it is:
Here are the kids looking happy they made it 0.2 miles.
The hike is mostly through wetlands with some pretty views of cattails and idyllic looking ponds that can be snatched amid attempts to outrun or outswat the plentiful insect life.
In spite of the wetlands nature in the trail, the walking is easy and mostly dry, with bridges provided to get you through the muck.
Along Tadmuck Divide Trail you ascend a textbook esker with nice views into the forest/Tadmuck Swamp on either side.
The kids enjoyed the "high point" of the esker. There were some ripening blueberries just off of the trail here.
From the Divide Trail, we looped back via Old Haul Road, which clearly was an old road, with a wide and easy to walk trail. You can also see evidence that people used to dump some things alongside the road; if it had been less buggy, we might have stopped to explore for any archaeological finds.
According to the Westford Trails guide (our inspiration for this blog), this road was used to haul gravel out of the numerous gravel pits in the Tadmuck Swamp area. You can see these gravel pits marked on the topo map.
The gravel that was taken out of these pits is the whole clue to why the Tadmuck Swamp area exists at all. When the glaciers retreated from New England some 10,000 years ago they left behind a hodgepodge of unsorted materials. This hodgepodge leads to really poor drainage, and thus a wetland.
Where there are periglacial (as the glacier was melting) features (like the esker we walked along) there are pockets of sorted material where there was running water under the ice sheet. Eskers are usually sandy when you dig into them. Other features like kames, of which there are several, have larger grain sizes, like gravel, which gave us the gravel pits that were numerous all over Westford.
Having a degree in Geology, it turns out, turns you into a Hermoine Granger on the trail ("I read it in Earth: A History!")
The Old Haul Road comes out on Dana Drive.
I'd actually recommend parking here rather than on Tadmuck if I were doing this again. At the end of the cul-de-sac you can pick up the Flaherty Trail back to the Mystery Spring trail and return to the Tadmuck Road trailhead.
Again, this seems like a lovely trail, with lots of pretty Wetlands views, but doing it in July was a mistake: even with lots of bug spray, the kids came out pretty well eaten. I'd recommend aiming for this hike if there should be a dry spell in early Spring, or perhaps if there's a cool spell mid-summer. Unfortunately, the Fall, which would be the ideal time to come, is rendered a bit precarious by the bow-hunting warnings posted on the trail.
So far, the bow hunting seems here to stay though there has been some controversy (note: the article on the controversy from the Sun was from Samantha Allen, who was actually doing some surprisingly real news stories there before she left us for the Worcester Telegram).
Mystery Spring itself is a paltry 0.2 miles off the road and not worth parking the mini-van on the side of Tadmuck rd. However, the trail to Mystery Spring connects to Flaherty Trail, which can be used to pick up Tadmuck Divide Trail and then Old Haul Road, creating a little loop (connected by a section of subdevelopments as you walk on Dana Drive).
The trails are very well maintained with white blazes on the trees (3 year-olds find it very entertaining to count the blazes and help ensure we haven't gotten off of the trail) as well as nice wooden posts at all of the trailheads.
The 0.2 miles brings you to Mystery Spring, which emerges between two rocks. Here it is:
The hike is mostly through wetlands with some pretty views of cattails and idyllic looking ponds that can be snatched amid attempts to outrun or outswat the plentiful insect life.
Along Tadmuck Divide Trail you ascend a textbook esker with nice views into the forest/Tadmuck Swamp on either side.
From the Divide Trail, we looped back via Old Haul Road, which clearly was an old road, with a wide and easy to walk trail. You can also see evidence that people used to dump some things alongside the road; if it had been less buggy, we might have stopped to explore for any archaeological finds.
 | |
| Old dump |
 |
| Piece of an old wheel? |
The gravel that was taken out of these pits is the whole clue to why the Tadmuck Swamp area exists at all. When the glaciers retreated from New England some 10,000 years ago they left behind a hodgepodge of unsorted materials. This hodgepodge leads to really poor drainage, and thus a wetland.
Where there are periglacial (as the glacier was melting) features (like the esker we walked along) there are pockets of sorted material where there was running water under the ice sheet. Eskers are usually sandy when you dig into them. Other features like kames, of which there are several, have larger grain sizes, like gravel, which gave us the gravel pits that were numerous all over Westford.
Having a degree in Geology, it turns out, turns you into a Hermoine Granger on the trail ("I read it in Earth: A History!")
The Old Haul Road comes out on Dana Drive.
I'd actually recommend parking here rather than on Tadmuck if I were doing this again. At the end of the cul-de-sac you can pick up the Flaherty Trail back to the Mystery Spring trail and return to the Tadmuck Road trailhead.
So far, the bow hunting seems here to stay though there has been some controversy (note: the article on the controversy from the Sun was from Samantha Allen, who was actually doing some surprisingly real news stories there before she left us for the Worcester Telegram).
Review
| Prettiness | Difficulty | Fun | The Best Part | |
| Lila (3) | 5 | 5 | 2 | Getting carried |
| Clara (5) | 4 | 3 | 3 | Mystery Spring! |
| Grace (7) | 4 | 3 | 3 | The walk to Mystery Spring specifically, nothing else. |
| Katharine (35) | 3 | 1 | 2 | Seeing the spring--though a striking memory is seeing Tom's head swarmed by deer flies and his shoulders clouded with mosquitoes. |
| Tom (36) | 2 | 2 | 1 | Moments of wetland serenity snatched between bug bites. |
Note: we're beginning to wonder about the meaningfulness of the children's ranking system. Lila, who was carried for this entire walk, rated it a "5" in difficulty. It's possible this was a reference to the bugs, but it seems equally if not more likely that her numbers are generated at random.
