It was a spectacular late February day. The glistening snow, the cold refreshing air, but most of all, the clear blue sky drew me up Mount Wachusett via a combination of its roads and trails.
The trails and roads on the mountain were snow-packed. I carried spikes but ended up wearing snowshoes, one of only three other people I saw doing so. Some people skied up, including a 12-year-old way outpacing her father.
The West Road starts under tall dark pine trees. The midmorning sky was of an almost unimaginably intense dark blue color. Long white blades of windmills were rotating in the distance, distorting perspective as they appeared and disappeared in the tree openings and over the treetops.
After about a mile and a half, I took the wooded Harrington Trail till I emerged from the trees onto the wide-open Administration Road. I looked up as far as my neck would allow and saw a sky that was such a pure ultramarine that it could be felt physically. As I lowered my head the blue became cobalt, like blue glass. The sun was behind me.
Then the Administration Road joined the Summit Road, which is now closed to motorized traffic for the season. The climb was now steeper, the trees seemed to fall away, and there I was at an overlook called The Ledges, which was dripping with glassy icicles, and overlooking 180 degrees of lower land under a light blue bowl of sky that faded to white at the horizon. Distant hills could be perceived as lines of purple-blue.
After a quick jaunt up the Mountain House Trail through scrubby trees and across the parking lot, I was at the summit, from which the buildings of Boston and peaks of the Zakim Bridge could be seen in a blue haze.
On the walk back down the Summit Road, snow-peaked Mount Monadnock became visible through the trees. The mountain was a heart-stopping blue.
Walking downhill, with the sky in front of me, I detected a tinge of turquoise in the sky, and then dove into the woods where the trees cast long blue-gray shadows over the wavy snow.
At the end of this 6-mile walk I felt like a child wondering why the sky is blue.
To download a hiking trail map, go to Wachusett Mountain State Reservation/Mass.gov or www.mass.gov/locations/wachusett-mountain.
The miracle of blue: Part 2
That day on Wachusett was a “bluebird day,” a day when the transparent sky is the same color as the opaque blue on the back and wings of the eastern bluebird. In the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau observed, “The bluebird carries the sky on his back.”
By the mid-20th century, pesticides and competition from house sparrows had negatively impacted the bluebird population in Massachusetts. In fact, the first time I heard Thoreau’s quote was during a tour of Walden Pond in the ’80s, and the nature guide thought it referred to blue jays. But, according to Mass Audubon, the bluebird population has recovered well and is stable, thanks in part to people who have put up bluebird boxes in their fields.
Then one winter day, about five years ago, I was surprised to come across a flock of bluebirds in some bushes off Slough Road. Mass Audubon reports that seeing them in the winter was once a rare event in Massachusetts, but winter sightings have increased, and they are now predictably seen at Delaney and in Shaker Village, and probably other neighborhoods as well.
About that blueness: David Allen Sibley, in his beautiful new book, “What It’s Like To Be A Bird,” states there is no blue pigment in birds; it’s the structure of the feathers that causes blue light to be reflected. On a bright day the blue is unmistakable as the bird flies, but harder to detect on an overcast day.
Now, why is that sky the bluebird was said to carry on its back blue? I probably should have learned this in school, but I Googled “why is the sky blue” and found articles from reliable sources like Scientific American and NASA. The sky is blue because molecules in Earth’s atmosphere scatter the shorter wavelength and higher frequencies of the blue component of sunlight.
Blue skies, bluebirds, everyday miracles of happiness.
