You Can Still Walk It

Here's something for the hikers among you. That thousand-year-old Native footpath we keep talking about — the one this whole road was paved over — well, a stretch of the original trail still exists, and you can walk it on your own two feet.

Through the Mohawk Trail State Forest, volunteers traced and reopened a piece of the old route and called it the Mahican-Mohawk Trail. It runs for miles through the deep woods along the Deerfield and Cold rivers, past those towering old-growth pines, on more or less the exact line that people traveled on foot for a thousand years. It's a genuine footpath — roots and rocks and river crossings, real hiking boots required — not a stroll, but not a mountaineering feat either. And walking it, you get something you simply can't get from behind the windshield: the trail at the speed it was meant to be traveled, the pace of moccasins, with the river loud beside you and the canopy closed overhead.

So if this drive gives you a taste for the old road, know that you can come back, park at the state forest, and walk a piece of the real thing. There's no better way to understand what this route was before the engines came. The pavement is the newcomer here. The path is the ancient truth of it.