Boston's Best Parks For A Winter Nature Walk

There are city parks and suburban parks within close proximity to Boston. Just minutes away from the hustle and bustle of the city lies bountiful acreage with beautiful plants, trees and wildlife for every walker to behold and enjoy. Some parks have water sources like ponds and streams, while others have other interesting nature points. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder when walking wooded trails in parks in and around the city.

This 600-acre reservation with 17 miles of wooded trails is a perfect place to take a nature walk in all four seasons of the year, but especially during the winter months. Walking trails that also support cross-country skiing and snowshoeing are also available. There is a kid-friendly half-mile walk on the Caryl Trail, which leads to an old mill site. Nonet Woodlands is a great place to take a walk in the winter and enjoy nature at its best.

A winter nature walk through Rocky Woods' 500 acres provides an opportunity to explore a variety of ice formations as well as the woodland bounty. There are frozen brooks and ponds and panes of ice along the walking trail. The terrain is varied throughout the venue, which has 6.5 miles of trails, but the 3/4-mile loop around Chickering Pond is a favorite hike. Picnic tables are available all year, so a fun winter picnic or just a quick snack is a great activity to top off a walk through Rocky Woods.

With Boston only 15 miles to the North, World's End has beautiful views of the Boston skyline along the 250-acre coastscape designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, a landscape architect. The varied terrain World's End includes saltwater marshes, woodland, drumlins or spoon-shaped hills, granite ledges and beautiful rocky shores. The landscape at his preserve is beautifully maintained to stay true to the architect's original design plan. 

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deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum is about 20 minutes west of Boston and allows the visitor to enjoy both the beauty of nature and contemporary art in the winter months. This 30-acre park provides guided 90-minute snowshoe walking tours during the winter. There are more than 60 modern and contemporary art sculptures on loan throughout the park. The landscape architecture is large-scale and constantly changing to please the year-round visitors. Interestingly, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum has the only contemporary art museum-based preschool in the country.

Douglas State Park is about a one-hour ride from Boston, in the Blackstone Valley. Wallum Lake, a shared pond between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, provides a perfect ice fishing site for salmon and trout during the winter months. The 4,600-acre state forest provides miles of breathtaking walking trails. There is a special boardwalk trail, which provides access to a five-acre Atlantic White Cedar swampland. This swampland, which is rare in the area, is named as an official Massachusetts Wildland.

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