Winter Walk 2022: “A Stepping Stone to Heaven”
Event Details
Join us for the annual Winter Walk on
“A Stepping Stone to Heaven”: A Celebration of the History and Biology of Fairhaven Bay
Sunday, February 13, 2022
1:00PM
Wright Woods
This event will occur in rain, snow or shine. Dress for weather conditions, including bringing snowshoes, skis or boots — depending on personal preference. Microspikes are recommended in icy conditions.
Park along Arena Terrace off of Fairhaven Road. This is accessible only from the eastbound lanes of Route 2 and is about one third mile past the Sudbury Road intersection.
Walk Description
Join us for this winter walk and travel from Arena Terrace to the Fairhaven Overlook where biologist, Amity Wilczek, and local historian, Richard Smith, will meet us by a warm campfire for refreshments and a conversation — and an additional guided loop for the truly adventurous! — about how the woods and Sudbury River have transformed over the past 150 years. What would be instantly recognizable or familiar to 19th-century Concordians, and how has the landscape changed? What might these woods look like in the future? And just in time for Valentine’s Day, explore Fairhaven Bay’s unique connection to Henry Thoreau’s romantic aspirations and his close call with matrimony. Why did Thoreau call this overlook a “stepping stone to heaven”?
Walk Guide Bios
Dr. Amity Wilczek is an evolutionary ecologist whose role as an educator and researcher has been shaped by attention to place, history, and student experience. Her teaching career started at Harvard and Brown before transitioning to Deep Springs College, where over 10 years she served as Herbert Reich Chair of Natural Sciences, Academic Dean, and Vice President. Her work on plant responses to changing environments has appeared in many journals including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecology, American Naturalist, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Amity currently lives in Concord, Massachusetts and serves as trail steward of the Emerson-Thoreau Amble for the town.
Richard Smith has lectured on and written about antebellum United States and 19th-Century American history and literature since 1995. He has worked as a public historian in Concord, Massachusetts for almost 23 years, specializing in Henry David Thoreau, the Transcendentalists, the Anti-Slavery movement and the Civil War. As a Living History Interpreter, he has portrayed Henry Thoreau at Walden Pond and around the country since 1999. In addition, he has written six books for Applewood Books, including two about Henry Thoreau, and is the current Scholar in Residence at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury.
