Enjoyable mid-afternoon 4-mile run along Main Street, once the sidewalks were cleared of last evening's snow (3" or so through the night).
Also, wonderful news -- from the
Berkshire Eagle (January 17, 2020) concerning DCR:
Mothballed Berkshires
recreation area to rise
again!
State to reopen Windsor State Forest park area, once
power restored.
Windsor State Forest, which was closed in 2009 for state budgetary reasons, is set to reopen this year, after an investment of $1.2 million from Massachusetts has been used for capital improvements.
The lights already had gone out at a popular scenic destination here when the double whammy came. The popular Windsor State Forest was closed in 2009 to save the state money.
After a decade offline, the forest's recreation area will reopen this year, the state says, first to day use. Overnight camping might return later.
When the commissioner of the state Department of Conservation and Recreation announced in May 2009 that the Windsor site would be shuttered due to budget cuts, he was asked when it might be back.
"I don't think it'll be fiscal 2010," Richard K. Sullivan Jr. told The Eagle.
Turns out, it was a decade.
A spokeswoman for the DCR, says the state will invest $1.2 million to make a slew of capital improvements at the River Road site, located along a fast-moving section of the Westfield River not far from the Hampshire County towns of Cummington and Plainfield.
Work at the remote area, long popular with local families, is expected to start in April and be complete by late summer or fall. The site will open as soon as work is finished, Dorrance said.
Work will include restoring a riverside beach, upgrades to the area's bathrooms and other public buildings, fresh pavement, accessibility improvements and new guardrails along River Road and over the bridge that provides access into the area.
Some of the coming construction will lighten the impact of use on the environment. By rebuilding the parking lot, the DCR will seek to reduce stormwater runoff into the Westfield River, a prized cold-water fishery that carries a federal designation as a wild and scenic river. Similarly, new landscaping will seek to channel and filter water before it reaches the river.
When closed in 2009, the site was one of two state-funded parks in the Berkshires to be affected as the agency moved to cut 15 percent of its workforce in the wake of the Great Recession. That forced the DCR to lay off 330 workers, it said at the time.
Since then, the agency has struggled to operate its facilities in the region due to austerity, a report in The Eagle revealed in 2016. But, recent grants have enabled the DCR to improve trails.
