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Sunday, August 30, 2009

More on Biking Mine Falls

We get a lot of "google hits" for Mine Falls Park in Nashua. If you're not familiar with the parking and entrances, it can be a tad confusing. So consider this my attempt to make the information about MF more accessible. For those who don't know, Mine Falls is a 325-acre walking, jogging, and biking park between the Nashua Canal and Nashua River. I've included links to some maps below.

For quick reference, check out pdfs of these maps. To view them you'll need to do a quick sign-up on the Keep and Share site...only takes a minute:


The first link is a drawn-to-scale scale map showing all of the park's trails, although it doesn't list trail names. To be honest, the trail names are not all that important. You really can't get lost here if you stick to the trails since they all loop around.

We rode Mine Falls today for a little over an hour. We parked at the end of Whipple Street, started out going west on the yellow trail, passed under the turnpike (this part is really noisy) and then followed the green trail to the gatehouse and dam.

Retracing our steps, we returned to our starting point and then headed east on the blue trail that took us behind the Millyard (shown above) in downtown Nashua. Doug says the park seems to "shrink" each time he rides it. That's probably because he's getting more familiar with it!

The second link is a map (not drawn to scale), that has a description of each of the seven entrances. This map is helpful if you want a general overview and points of reference.

So there you have it. I wrote a longer post about Biking Mine Falls Park last year. If you're a newbie to the area, you might find some useful tidbits there. Happy biking!

3 comments:

Bowie Mike said...

Lucie, is that the millyard at the end of Pine Street Extension - the one that they converted into a mini-mall for a time in the early 80s?

As a teenager, these trails provided me bike access to downtown from my old neighborhood off of Broad Street. They also helped get me from Nashua High to my after school job at the old Alexanders grocery store. I didn't appreciate the nice scenery at the time.

Lucie said...

Hi Mike,
Yup! It's the same millyard you remember from the 80s. I think the scenery has improved over the years, thanks to hard work by the Conservation Commission and others. How long has it been since you've visited?

Bowie Mike said...

Lucie, I get back at least once a year, but I generally don't have too much time to check things out around town. My parents still live in the same house in a neighborhood North of the Nashua River, and my father still takes his grandchildren for canoe rides on the "rivaaa." And I have sisters in the area. I also get up to the Fidelity Investments campus in Merrimack for business every now and then.

I had been in that mill building around 1982 before it was turned into a mall. Rather than a nice even floor, there were numerous 8-foot deep wells that were filled with dye in the old days when it was a working factory. And there were tunnels that ran between the wells. It was a little bit cool and a little bit spooky. I wish I had taken pictures. The building was owned by a guy named Rocky Lapierre, and he owned several properties downtown. He wanted to convert a section of the building into usable space to rent it for storage. I worked with my father and brother in-law to create a deck structure above the wells to make the building usable. Everything that we built was torn out when they put the mall in.