Durfee Hill Management Area

We have one of those books by the late Ken Weber, More Walks and Rambles in Rhode Island, in fact we have 3 of his books and he never fails to get us lost. But silly me, pulled out his "More Walks and Rambles" two weeks ago to find a place to walk after church with our neice & nephew. We were supposed to take Route 44 west to Route 94, but before getting to Route 94 we saw a big sign for Durfee Hill, so we turned around and pulled into that parking lot. After having some leftover pizza for lunch, we took to the trail. The first part of the trail is pretty straight-forward, a wide trail with a small brook running alongside in some areas, some old apple trees and nice clearings off to the right. We even saw our first butterflies of the season, one a Mourning Cloak: http://www.simplybutterflies.com/Images/Butterflies/Mourning%20Cloak%20(2).jpg
and the other was a small white one. I was very surprised to see a butterfly so early (it was early April), but when I checked my field guide, it indicated that they fly early through leafless woods, and the range in New England starts in March.
Off to the left of the trail, probably about a quarter of a mile, there was a small man made waterfall, and the remains of an old foundation.
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Shortly after the waterfall, we came to an intersection with the choices seeming to be left or right, but we should have gone straigt where there is a path, but it was not very noticeable because it is only a footpath, the other paths are made with trucks I think. Unfortunately, we took the left trail, which ended up in a clearing where some people had decided to have an outdoor art installation involving 3 televisions and probably shotguns, what a mess! This trail eventually ended in some very mucky grooves that looked like some yahoo with a motorized vehicle had gotten stuck. We returned to the intersection and took the footpath, which was quite nice and led us down to a nice body of water that I found out later was named "Burlingame Reservoir". I am not sure if it is an active reservoir at this time, I did not see any postings to indicate thus.




This was a very beautiful spot, and we spent some time just chilling here, breathing in the beautiful, sunny day, taking photos and exploring. There was a ladder going down into the dam area so of course Dan had to climb down and check it out:


After spending some time at the pond, we went to what would have been the right fork of the previously mentioned trail and this was a combination of tall trees, one nice trail that seemed to peter out after a while, and more areas for Dan to explore, namely a very old foundation.




After exploring in this area, we headed back to the car. You could probably spend some time checking out the old fields and other areas in this section of Durfee Hill, but I think that this may be a new area that has opened since Ken Weber wrote his book, when I check the DEM website, it indicated that there is 1176 acres to this management area.