37 places
Featured locations
Real places with challenges written for what's actually there, from the park's own maps and records.
37 locations · page 1 of 2
Sheffield, Massachusetts
Bartholomew's Cobble
Two rocky knolls above the Housatonic holding one of the greatest diversities of fern in North America, five miles of trails, and a hilltop field looking straight up the river valley. No dogs at all.
Ages 4–12
Milton, Massachusetts
Blue Hills Reservation
Seven thousand acres of woods and rocky hilltops minutes from downtown Boston, 125 miles of trails, and Great Blue Hill rising 635 feet above the whole metropolitan area.
Ages 3–12
Saugus, Massachusetts
Breakheart Reservation
Two lakes inside a big forest, with rocky hills above them you can climb for views that reach Boston one way and New Hampshire the other.
Ages 4–12
Charlestown, Boston, Massachusetts
Bunker Hill Monument
A 221-foot granite spike on a hill over Boston, standing where the redoubt was dug overnight in 1775, with 294 steps inside it and the whole city laid out at the top.
Ages 3–12
Eastham, Massachusetts
Cape Cod National Seashore — Fort Hill
A whaling captain's yellow house on a hill above an enormous salt marsh, and a boulder people sharpened their tools on long before the town existed. A one-mile loop takes in both.
Ages 3–12
Fall River, Massachusetts
Copicut Woods
Five hundred acres of quiet woods with vernal pools, an abandoned farm settlement in them, and a cart path nearly a mile long lined with stone walls that were built a hundred and fifty years ago.
Ages 4–12
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
Cranberry Bog Reservation
Three hundred acres of old cranberry bog, with paths running out across the water on causeways and peninsulas.
Ages 3–12
Lincoln, Massachusetts
deCordova Sculpture Park
Thirty acres of lawns and trails with enormous sculptures standing about in them — the biggest sculpture park in New England, and the rare kind of art you are allowed to walk all the way around.
Ages 3–12
Lincoln, Massachusetts
Drumlin Farm
A working farm and a wildlife sanctuary at the same time: pigs, sheep, goats, chickens and cows in the farmyard, crops growing in rows, and owls, hawks and foxes that live here for good because they cannot go back out.
Ages 3–12
Fairhaven, Massachusetts
Fort Phoenix
One of the smallest state parks in Massachusetts and one of the most crammed: the stone remains of a Revolutionary War fort, a beach below it, and a hurricane barrier you can walk out along into the Atlantic.
Ages 3–12
Carlisle, Massachusetts
Great Brook Farm State Park
A working dairy farm with more than twenty miles of trails running out from it, past stone walls, seventeenth-century cellar holes and ponds worth walking to. The dairy tour is free and runs at weekends.
Ages 3–12✓ Playtested
Concord, Massachusetts
Great Meadows Refuge — Concord Unit
Two big impoundments with a dike path along the wall between them, an observation tower a few steps in from the road, and one of the best inland birding spots in the state. No dogs at all — it is a wildlife refuge.
Ages 3–12
Rockport, Massachusetts
Halibut Point State Park
A granite quarry filled with water on a cliff edge above the Atlantic, tide pools on the rocks below, and forty miles of view to Mount Agamenticus in Maine on a clear day.
Ages 3–12
Westminster, Massachusetts
Leominster State Forest
Fire roads, single track and bare rock, with a pond to swim in and a ninety-five-mile trail clipping the western edge on its way across the state.
Ages 4–12
Lowell, Massachusetts
Lowell Heritage State Park
Two miles of riverfront along the Merrimack, with exhibits about the canals and mills that were dug and built here to turn a river into a city.
Ages 4–12
Lowell, Massachusetts
Lowell National Historical Park
Nearly six miles of hand-dug canals, locks and gatehouses threaded through a mill city — proof the game works as well on a sidewalk as it does in the woods.
Ages 4–12
Lowell, Massachusetts
Lowell-Dracut-Tyngsboro State Forest
Over a thousand acres of woods at the top of a mill city, with six miles of trails and enough ponds, swamps and wetlands to lose an afternoon in.
Ages 4–12
Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Monument Mountain
A pale quartzite peak with three short trails up it and the whole Housatonic valley laid out from the top — Mount Greylock one way, the Catskills the other, and hawks going past below you.
Ages 6–12
Lanesborough, Massachusetts
Mount Greylock State Reservation
The highest point in Massachusetts, 3,491 feet up, with a lit stone tower on the summit and ninety miles of view on a clear day.
Ages 3–12
Boston, Massachusetts
Neponset River Reservation
A river running down to the harbour through marsh and wetland, with a riverwalk beside it, playgrounds along it, and the city standing up behind the whole thing.
Ages 3–12
New Bedford, Massachusetts
New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park
Thirteen blocks of a whaling city you can walk in an afternoon — a sailors' chapel, a customs house, and the street where Frederick Douglass chose his own name.
Ages 4–12
Saugus, Massachusetts
Rumney Marsh Reservation
Six hundred acres of salt marsh in the Saugus and Pines River inlet — flat, open, full of birds, and important enough to be named an Area of Critical Environmental Concern.
Ages 4–12
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
Russell Mill Pond & Town Forest
A hundred and thirty acres of oak and pine with three thousand feet of shoreline on Russell Mill Pond, and a trail network the mountain bikers made their reputation on.
Ages 3–12
Salem, Massachusetts
Salem Maritime National Historic Site
A half-mile stone wharf running out into the harbor with a small lighthouse at the end, and a street of merchant houses behind it from when this was one of the richest ports in America.
Ages 3–12