Sally Heiter (left), along with Deb Fraize (right) is attempting to walk the length of the river for their Paddle-a-thon challenge, which they are calling the Bipedal-a-thon. Sally describes the route so far below.
The trick with walking the entire length of the Ipswich River is that you can’t do it. The headwaters have for the most part been subsumed by Suburbia.
So Deb and I (with advice from mavens Wayne and Rachel) chose to begin at a spot in Wilmington that was as near as we could get to “a headwater.” We parked at the Veterans’ Park and started walking downstream. At the bottom of Lisa Street, we could look right into the woods where Mill Brook probably is.
There was a lot of suburban landscaping along our route, which was mostly along Route 62–sidewalks in the wilds of Wilmington. Then, all of a sudden, the road crossed the Ipswich River!
Our first leg ended at the Congregational Church in Wilmington, 3.1 miles.
Leg 2: From that same congregational church we walked to Ipswich River Park in North Reading, a distance of 5.66 miles. We took the rail bed along Martin’s Brook from Shea Concrete Products to the power lines cut-through to route 62 again, because that’s often the easiest road at this end of the river.
Leg 3: We were hoping to walk from Ipswich River Park to Bostik, Inc. along the Old Salem and Lowell railroad bed, which is indicated on the maps BUT–I found a site that indicated it had a walk-ability rating of 3 out of 100. So, rather than more road walking, we’ll skip right to Bostik and take the Independence Greenway and more power line cuts that actually parallel the river.
On other legs we’ll walk through Middleton, Topsfied to Bradley Palmer State Park, along the river to Julia Bird Reservation to Ipswich River headquarters at Riverbend, eventually ending at the mouth of the Ipswich River at Pavilion Beach.