Biking
Head of the Meadow Bike Path

Not as popular as other biking destinations in the Cape Cod National Seashore, but just as dramatic, this bike ride will take you through a thickly vegetated habitat that was formerly a salt marsh.

As you ride, take time to enjoy these surroundings: a wall of wetland flora on your right, an upland forest of oak and pine to your left. This mixed environment attracts myriad bird species, especially during spring and fall migration periods.

“You’ll see lots of sand, scrub, oak, pine,” O’Connor says. “What you have here is the least visited of the Cape Cod bike paths.”

After riding a little more than a mile, you see a trail on the left leading to the National Seashore’s Pilgrim Heights picnic area. You find no bike access here, but the small park area and trail network is worth a visit, so you may want to consider leaving your bike behind and exploring.

As you continue your ride, you can’t miss a small spring just off the bikeway. A plaque here reads that this was the site of the first fresh water the Pilgrims discovered during a desperate exploration of their new surroundings in November 1620. Known as “Pilgrim Spring,” the historic shrine is today considered suspect by researchers and the story apocryphal.

Fun Fact: Nearby Head of the Meadow Beach is part of a stretch of coastline that has been called an “ocean graveyard” because more than 1,000 shipwrecks have occurred there since the 17th century.

Rating and Distance: Moderate, 2 miles

Directions: Take Route 6 through Truro, past Truro Vineyards on your left, and to Head of the Meadow Row on your right. Follow to its terminus at the beach parking lots. The bike path begins just before you reach the parking lots (at a sign and kiosk).

Paddling
Gull, Higgins, and Williams Ponds

Many kettle hole ponds can be found on Cape Cod, created in the wake of the retreating ice sheet from melting glacier water left behind in geologic indentations. But Wellfleet’s Gull, Higgins, and Williams ponds seem special, in terms of both “swimability” and general beauty.

The largest, Gull Pond, is fairly popular, but if you paddle to Higgins and Williams ponds, you will find peace and solitude. When the water table is especially high you can probably make it from Gull into Higgins without leaving your boat. If you do need to portage, it requires only about a 30-foot haul.

Entering Higgins Pond is like passing through a portal to the past; it’s quiet, with few or no other boats to disturb the scene. The few homes on its shores provide a study in contrasts—and construction eras. Across the small pond on the northeast shore, an old, classic, Cape-style farmhouse is the picture of simple elegance. Hidden off on the northwest shore is a low, flat, single-story, Modernist home that reflects the architectural aesthetics of a Boston/Cambridge/New York design influence dating to the 1930s.
   
Adjacent to Higgins Pond is Williams Pond, the smallest of these three Wellfleet ponds. Access to it may require a 20-foot portage. A beautiful, intimate body of water ringed by water lilies, thick grasses, and red maples, Williams Pond offers a prime setting to view great blue heron, turtles, gulls, and osprey.
   
“You can just relax and enjoy these ponds,” O’Connor says. “You’re surrounded by pond grass and lily pads, frogs plopping around, turtles sunning themselves on logs. You can lie back and look up at the sky.”

Fun Fact: Henry David Thoreau wrote about Gull Pond in his book Cape Cod, published in 1865. He described it as “the largest and a very handsome one, clear and deep, and more than a mile in circumference.”

Rating and Distance: Moderate, 1 mile 

Directions: From Route 6 East in Wellfleet, turn right on Gull Pond Road, across from Moby Dick’s Restaurant. Follow 1.5 miles to School House Road and stone marker for Gull Pond on the left. Follow School House (dirt) a couple hundred yards to parking on the right.

PREVIOUS PAGE

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

NEXT PAGE