I really haven’t gotten much out of the Capital Region in recent months bar the December trip to Kingston and Mount Tremper, along with the January 1st trip to North-South Lake, and my mini-trip to Schoharie County. It was cold out and I really wanted to get out, and not spend another boring Saturday night at home. Gas is cheap, figured I’d take a trip before it gets really expensive again.

I decided to take US 20 out to Pittsfield MA and then head east on MA 9 towards Northampton. Never been over that road, and I knew once I got out of Pittsfield I would loose the traffic and it would be quite scenic.

Rural Massachusetts state roads kind of sucks. They are narrow, windy, and steep. But the scenery is well worth it, especially MA 9 as it winds through various mountains and state forests. I kind of wanted to see the Pioneer Valley as it had been years since I had been out that way.

I forgot how built up the Pioneer Valley really is. I thought I’d be out in the sticks in farm country for most of the trip but Northampton and towns North of it in the Pioneer Valley are fairly populous suburbs of the Springfield MA metropolitan area.

It’s not to say there aren’t farms in the Pioneer Valley, it’s just there more smaller crop farms that were formerly tobacco farms. Still many of the tobacco drying barns still exist – they’re pretty neat, large barns. But I was envisioning Preble NY with it’s large dairies, not a lot of sprawl and only a little open land.

Got on MA 116 heading towards Ashland and Conway. What a pokey little road, that literally is an unimproved except for blacktop road. They certainly didn’t remove any curves from it. The gorges and streams it followed were beautiful, wild country but like most of New England, there were plenty of uppity little but bustling villages. Outside of the villages there really was nothing.

I think in the whole time I was in Massachusetts, I saw one operating dairy farm and maybe one other farm that had a few beef cows. Just not a lot of agriculture going on in Western Massachusetts. I guess the soil is too poor to grow field crops like New York.

Western Mass also seemed a lot more populous, although the population was a lot more concentrated than upstate, at least away from the Erie Canal and Hudson River.

It started to get dark as I reached Buckland, which is as podunky as it sounds. Which sucked, as I ended up driving the Mohawk Trail from the Pioneer Valley outskirts to North Adams, which is basically a blacktop trail through the mountains. The headlights worked fine except they were a bit dim but still blinded folks. Silly headlights on my lifted truck.

The Hairpin Overlook was pretty after dark. As was the Taconic Trail Overlook, although the snow was deep when I went for a short hike up there. Couldn’t see the Empire Plaza buildings from there, but it was pretty.

A long trip but pretty. I like getting out and seeing new places in the wild country – the shacks, the mountains, the farms, and everything else not so perfectly dominated by man.