Thaddeus Chandler Sanctuary – Duxbury, MA
I read about the Thaddeus Chandler Sanctuary on the North South Watershed website a while back so we drove by to check it out after we walked along the O’Neill Farm last week. This past Saturday we decided to hike the Sanctuary before the rain moved in and it was a pretty nice, although at times pretty poorly marked trail. I’m not sure if the trails are in the process of being reworked but there were a lot of different colored decals throughout the location and not a lot of information on them on the AllTrails or town website. It would definitely be pretty easy to lose your way here so I would recommend a GPS while you’re walking.
The sanctuary itself is an old cranberry bog, which you’ll see once you start venturing into the woods. From the parking lot, located at 14 Valley Street, there are two trails you can access. We started to the right which was a flat pretty wide open path that lead is Upper Chandler Pond. That was pretty much all that was back that way so we loops back around and headed into the woods.
For the majority of the hike we stayed on the blue-marked trail. We entered it by the pond, but we learned after we met back up with the parking lot that if we had started to the left instead of heading to the right is the actually beginning. The blue trail is where you’ll really see the old remnants of the cranberry bog. If you’ve even seen one, which if you live on the South Shore I’m sure you have because they are just about everywhere, you know there are a whole mess of little streams running through them. These all still remain on the property here which are pretty interesting. Also, there are a small amount of food bridges on this path so that’s a plus for us.
While in the middle of sanctuary there are two other trail markers that you’ll see, red and yellow. The red ones are the connecting trails so if you want to take some short cuts instead of doing the whole loop around the property you can hop on those. We were only on the yellow trail for a short distance because it way very narrow but according to the NSRW website there are footbridges along this trail as well as wetlands and the Pine Brook.
Overall this was a nice location that was pretty secluded. If you want to travel with a stroller you’d be able to out to the pond since it’s so wide open and flat. Once you enter into the woods though you’ll need to switch over to a carrier. There were only three footbridges here, which we came across just at the right time, which means my son was just about to lose interest. I’m guessing if we made it further through the yellow trail we would have need a few more so we’ll just have to head back another day!
