Stewart Cairns for The New York Times
View of Shelburne Falls and the Deerfield River.
CLOSE your eyes and think of a great American road. Whatever ribbon of highway is unfurling across your mental windshield, it's probably not in Massachusetts. But the state that gave America Jack Kerouac also built the Mohawk Trail, a Berkshire Mountains-straddling, automotive-age incarnation of an ancient Native American footpath between the Hudson and Connecticut River valleys.
This isn't Route 66 (that came later). It's not I-40, either. The distance between attractions here can be shorter than an Interstate on-ramp. Instead of endless straight miles, think countless, joyful curves, inviting side roads, mountain streams and, in the fall, crimson foliage and bright blue, cider-ready afternoons. For America's highway-hungry soul, the Mohawk Trail is a slow-food, low-mileage feast.
Construction of the trail, one of America's earliest scenic roads, began in 1912, a decade before Kerouac was born. When it opened in 1914 the gravel road was just 15 feet across, about the length of a Honda Civic. Paved and widened to more comfortable proportions, the road, a top honeymoon destination in the '20s, still recalls an era of 20 m.p.h. speed limits, goggles, scarves and lap robes. Signs once advertised "ice cold tonics," "refreshment for man and motor" and "De Luxe, all-electric" cabins. One historian compared the Trail's inauguration of easy travel over beautiful, tough terrain to an early flight over the Alps.
The modern trail is part of Route 2, which runs east and west across northern Massachusetts. There are various formal and informal designations of the Mohawk Trail's endpoints, but the most rewarding miles lie between North Adams, in the northern Berkshires, and Greenfield. That's about 37 miles.
From the west, in North Adams, the road winds first up the precipitous slopes of the Hoosac Range. Minutes east of downtown North Adams — about four miles, or where your ears begin to pop — you'll reach the trail's famous Hairpin Turn. There's room to park, and a restaurant, the Golden Eagle, and the sublime view over the northern Berkshires that appears in so many vintage Mohawk Trail postcards.
Farther up and east — just before the sign welcoming you to Florida, the high-altitude town reputed to be the coldest in Massachusetts — is a pull-off in North Adams for trails in the Hoosac Range (413-499-0596; bnrc.net). Choose between two hikes: an hourlong, mile-and-a-half round trip to Sunset Rock, a stone slab well positioned for westward gazes, or a six-mile round trip to Spruce Hill, where hawks and soaring, multistate views of rolling hills await. Both trails form part of the Mahican-Mohawk Trail, a decades-old, partly finished effort to reblaze a modern 100-mile hiking path between the Hudson and Connecticut River valleys.
Your next stop is the Mohawk Trail State Forest in Charlemont (413-339-5504; mass.gov/dcr), where you'll find the state's largest surviving patch of old-growth forest of maples, birch, beech and ash. What's said to be the tallest tree in all of New England — an Eastern white pine that tops out at 171 feet — is here, too, though its exact location is kept secret by cautious naturalists. Easier to find are riverside picnic spots, campsites and a beautiful segment of the original Native American trail. You can swim, too, though no prizes for guessing why it's called the Cold River.
The Mohawk Trail's popularity peaked in the 1940s and 1950s; the allure of air travel is blamed for the road's genteel decline. Today, a different sort of air travel — zip lining — is a big part of the road's revival. It's exhilarating and easy; if you've never zip lined, imagine riding a chairlift, but downhill. Without the chair.
At Zoar (7 Main Street, Charlemont; 800-532-7483; zoaroutdoor.com), which offers rock climbing, rafting and kayaking adventures in addition to zip lining, your speed on the zip line is literally in your hands: riders grip the line with a heavy-duty glove to slow themselves. At Berkshire East (66 Thunder Mountain Road, Charlemont; 413 339 6617; berkshireeast.com) — in winter, a popular and family-friendly ski area — speed-control is built into the course's design, a plus for nervous types as well as those who want to focus on foliage.
Both places offer multihour, higher-altitude runs that start at about $85, but Berkshire East also offers a one-hour introductory experience ($30). Its ski-area heritage is apparent in the demeanor of Berkshire East's coaches, who have the cheerful modesty of ace ski instructors who wouldn't dream of humiliating you. On a recent visit our enthusiastic coach let slip that she's studying psychology and nursing, the perfect qualifications, we felt, for encouraging jittery first-timers to step from a windswept platform into thin air.
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