Highpoint #21: Mt. Greylock, MA (3489')

Western Massachusetts was an interesting place, a prelude to the northeastern countryside I'd spend the rest of this leg driving through. At first glance, it was much the same as any other mountain-land I'd seen, but subtle differences revealed themselves as I drove.

New England was full of old, small towns whose boundaries seemed almost to overlap: each time I left a town the next one was just a few feet down the road. (I didn't discover until I got home that in Massachusetts and Connecticut, "town" refers to a subdivision of a county, not necessarily an urban area.) What development there was was sparse yet evenly spread through the land. The countryside was rural, but on an entirely different scale from the vast, machine-shaped fields of the South and Midwest. The (literal) towns were made of small, old buildings joined by narrow streets. I could tell most of it hadn't been built with this century in mind. There was less fast food and fewer chain stores than I'd seen elsewhere in the country--though a lot more hipsters--and the few churches I saw all seemed to be historic.

I'd planned to camp on Mt. Greylock that night, so I picked up dinner in Pittsfield, then rushed on to the mountain's visitor center. I would have stopped to eat, but I didn't want to arrive too late to get a site. My instincts were right in that regard, but not enough, as it turned out...