My brother Fenster and I, Dickens, are two Welsh terriers who are very happy that the 2008 hiking season has finally begun.  It is not possible to do much hiking when the snow is three feet deep, as it was at our home for most of the long winter.
     The Holyoke Range in Massachusetts is a great place to hike in the spring, with lots of great views. 
 The trail is fairly well drained and does not fill up with mud as badly as many other trails.  Bruce's plan today was to take a trail, called the Black Rock trail, which does not show up on the Holyoke Range map in 1994 but does show up on the 2005 map.  Black Rock is a lookout on a spur coming off the range to the south.
      We wanted to start on Pearl St. but evidently that trail has been closed off.  Instead, we went over to the southwest trailhead for the Metacomet Monadnock trail and started up that trail.  Soon, we turned off the MM trail onto the Dry Brook trail.  Here we met a bicyclist who had gone up the road to the top of Mt. Holyoke and then took the Dry Brook trail downhill to here. 
      We continued along the Dry Brook trail.  The Holyoke Range has some nice stands of hemlocks which supply pleasant shade.  We two dogs often bathed in Dry Brook which was gushing along very strongly.  We then turned off onto the Lithia Springs trail, and then onto the Black Rock trail. 
      We  arrived at the top of Black Rock at 12:33 PM and had lunch.  Bruce  gave us each a roast beef sandwich and a bite of his ham and cheese sandwich.  It was a good 80 degrees and Bruce hung his shirt up to dry in the breeze (that's it in the photo).  There was a delightful view of Lithia Springs Reservoir down below and you could see out to the far horizon off to the south and east. 
     On the way back we heard a chickadee and saw a few crows.  Most of the wildlife seemed to be out of sight on this warm, sunny day.    No flowers were out yet and only a few bugs.  The whole range is made of basalt and has a wonderful supply of interesting, symmetrical rocks.  It was a very pleasant hike to begin the season with.