Sustainable Sundays: Boston Harbor Islands


By Katie Koenig

From near the top of Spectacle Island the image shows a zoomed-out shot of the cobblestone remnants of the old pier. Three stone structures jut out of the water near the short, and green ferns furnish the hillside leading up to the camera.

Winter is upon us! Monday, October 14 was the last day to take a ferry to visit the Boston Harbor Islands, and I spent the day visiting Spectacle Island. It was drizzly most of the morning, but thankfully started clearing up by the time I got off the ferry on the island with my friends.

We went on a 45 minute walking tour on the history of the island. We learned about its formation, some fun information about glaciers, history of the Massachusett people on the island, then the harbor’s colonization and more recent history. 

After, we hiked to the top of the island, then spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the beach and looking for the best pieces of seaglass. 

Although the ferries won’t start up until next spring, likely mid-May based on 2024’s ferry schedules, it’s still an amazing day-trip with a short, 30 minute ferry ride to get there. 

Other nearby outdoor destinations

Spectacle Island also isn’t the only place you can go to get a similar outdoor experience with hiking and tours. Mount Auburn Cemetery is just up in Cambridge, accessible from downtown Boston through the Red Line, and it has plenty of walking paths. A close-up of an intact, reddish-orange crab shell. It sits on top of shells and dark seaweed.

If you want to go further, one park you can get to on public transit is Allandale Woods just west of Franklin Park. It has plenty of trails for hiking, and even though it’ll start looking bare as winter comes and all the leaves fall, it’s still a nice place to go on a day hike.

In downtown Boston, there are also plenty of walking tours, no ferry necessary. The Freedom Trail is the most obvious one, and provides a nice route through the city if you don’t have a specific destination or route already made up. 

Personally, one of my favorite things to do is looking for cool shells, and there are plenty of beaches to walk along, and some do have shells to look at. Although it’s best to leave shells and debris on the beach for others to explore after you, it’s still rewarding to find an intact crab shell on the sand. You can get to Revere Beach on the Blue Line, for one, and Magazine Beach up by Harvard has small trails and grassy areas to sit down on when the weather is nice, although it’s too far inland to really have shells.

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