Brookline's Outdoor Sculpture Park

Even if you've never heard of an outdoor sculpture park, you can probably form a good idea of what one is just by hearing the term. And I think you'd be right. The idea is to take two things that are each really cool in their own right - artistic creations and hiking through the woods - and combine them into a single afternoon of fun and adventure.

Brookline's Outdoor Sculpture Park, officially known as the Andres Institute of Art, was founded in 1996 by philanthropist Paul Andres and serves to "provide a place in which individuals may experience art and nature in tandem." Their Facebook page describes them as "always open", and with 140 acres they've been able to expand to more than 90 exhibits and counting while still leaving plenty of room for social distancing.

There is no charge to visit here - your only costs are going to be the gas it takes you to make the drive plus a small donation should you choose to leave one. Nor does anyone actively work here. Just show up and grab yourself a map to begin your self-guided hike, and prepare to see all ranges of exhibits. At one extreme will be things like this one that could almost be believed to be a curiosity of nature.

And at the other extreme will be those that have no earthly business in the woods of New Hampshire, exhibits that will leave you marveling at how someone got them out here to begin with.

Expect a few yuks out here, as well. Several exhibits do a good job of combining both talent and humor, such as this one where by the time I figured out what the joke was, it was on me.

But the day I can't come to a place like this and have some laughs is the day I no longer like fun, and our day soon turned into seeing what scenes we could create by interacting with each exhibit. In this one I was nearly tricked into trading my brand new cell phone for a chunk of rock.

 When Technology Meets the Stone Age

As the person who accounts for 100% of the hair in our relationship, my wife was the only one qualified to pose with this next statue. 

Mirror Image

We took this trip back in 2018 with our friends from WeRmudfun - two people who enjoy fun so much they included it in their name - and it turned out to be one of our most memorable adventures that year. If you'd like to see a little more of what Brookline's Outdoor Sculpture Park has to offer, watch this video Chuck & Cheryl recorded of our antics that day. But as you're watching it remember one thing, my day job is as an accountant, not an actor.

The Raymond Cliff Caves, Weare NH

Raymond Cave is in the side of Raymond Cliff, near Everett station. Its opening is large enough for a man to comfortably enter erect. For the first forty feet it is about twelve feet high and eight feet wide, then for the next forty feet it is of smaller dimensions. It is very cold in summer. The cave is formed of huge, angular blocks which have fallen from the cliff above.

- The History of Weare, New Hampshire, 1735-1888

In 1876 John Clough paid $16.76 in taxes for 339 acres of property he owned in eastern Weare, near the bordering town of Dunbarton. Although a pittance by today's standards, these taxes were something he paid for year after year to hold on to the land, refusing to sell despite many offers. Clough loved this area and feared that if he sold the land it would be logged, and in 1932 he deeded the property to the State of NH, forever preserving it. A subsequent lawsuit trimmed the state's portion down to 150 acres, but Clough would be happy to know that nearly 100 years after gifting it away we still have his former property to enjoy, now known as the Clough State Park.

 

We explored here during the beginnings of the Covid-19 craziness, back when seeing someone in the woods with a mask on would still make you look twice, and probably pick up your pace. We chose this location thinking there wouldn't be any crowds, and although we counted a few dozen cars in the parking lot there was enough open space for us to obey the six-foot rule before it was even a rule.

No matter which trail you start off with the first thing you're going to notice is the 2,000 foot long Hopkinton Everett Dam, situated smack in the middle of everything. Completed in the 1960s after years in the making, this 115 foot tall structure is part of the Hopkinton-Everett Lakes Flood Risk Management Project, a mouthful of a project put into place to end a series of devastating floods that rampaged this area in the first part of the 1900s.

Our son Logan joined us for this trip, but it wasn't to admire the engineering of the dam or for any history lessons. To the west of the park are the Raymond Cliffs, and they are loaded with all sort of rocks and ledges to climb on, one of his favorite pastimes that doesn't require a keyboard and a mouse.

And for anyone without a teenager of their own, when you go climbing with your 16-year old son this is their idea of waiting up for you.

Logan had his own motive for coming here, and my wife Tina did as well. I have taken her on some hellacious hikes over the years, but today meant an afternoon of walking on her perfect idea of what a trail should be - flat, near water, spacious, and most importantly without any bushwhacking.  

Then there was me - and I was here for the caves. These ledges are a playground for all sorts of caverns and cubbyholes to explore. Many are small like this one, dark places where you're apt to go eyeball to eyeball with a porcupine or something equally cuddly.

Other caves were much larger. Steve Higham mapped these ledges in the June 2017 edition of The Northeastern Caver, with three of them being large enough to qualify for a name. There is the Lower Carr Cave, the Devils Step Cave (a name you'll understand if you navigate its southern entrance), and the largest and most well know of this area, the Raymond Cave. It's a mid-size cave as far as New Hampshire goes, measuring 99 feet in length, and throwing in the historical aspect makes for a really cool place to explore.

After our afternoon of playing - I was able to find all three of the named caves - we still had one more quest to complete. John Clough left his mark on society by giving us all this land, but he left his mark in a more literal sense, as well. Look for the largest free-standing boulder at the base of the Raymond Cliffs, then take a walk around it toward its water-side. Although perhaps not as prominent as it was a hundred years ago, where he engraved his name on this boulder is still clear enough to read to this today: John Clough.

Clough State Park is one of those places where we hadn't even left the parking lot and we were already planning our next trip here. This is a beautiful and unique area that has something to offer for anyone who doesn't like spending their weekends on the couch. That describes probably every single one of our friends, and we look forward to introducing them to this place when, and hopefully not if, our world returns to normal.

References:

https://extension.unh.edu/resources/files/Resource006141_Rep8795.pdf

https://www.nhstateparks.org/visit/state-parks/clough-state-park