The gate at the Boyd Rd. end, which had been closed last summer, has been open for at least a few months. I parked at the Finson Farm (the CSA that I'm a member of), a short ways up the road. The gate at what is now Country Time Kennels (and I believe used to be Marlee Animal Shelter) was ominously closed.
Serenity Lane is straight as an arrow for a while and quickly picks up a tall chain-link fence that marks off Pike's property. You can't see anything industrial through the trees. Maybe 3/10 of a mile in, there's a small cemetery on the right. It appeared to be a Jepson family burial ground, and someone had been added as recently as 2001. Apparently the Jepsons have been in Wells for almost 300 years--anyone know any of the current generation?
As an aside, ghost hunting back here would have been about 5x as scary as doing it back on 9B. For the psychology project where we had Emily (among others) dress up as ghosts and recorded people's reactions to seeing them, we could have used this graveyard and then had somebody close the gate, "trapping" us. And we could have had somebody over at the kennel/shelter getting the dogs riled up and barking like crazy. That was a missed opportunity.
At this point, the road was a good dirt road with some gravel sporadically spread on top. You could tell that typical passenger cars could and had been down it. Things were pretty quiet for a while, with only a few "Blasting zone--keep out" signs disturbing the peace. The one gate in the fence not only was locked, but had large boulders on the other side that precluded any vehicle larger than a scooter from getting out. An old stone wall ran down the other side of the road for a while before petering out.
Maybe 3/4 of a mile in, the fence and the road took a left turn--not quite 90 degrees, but apparently we had reached the back of the Pike property, when a red sedan was suddenly headed my way. It looked like there were 3 people inside but I avoided eye contact and breathed a sigh of relief when the driver didn't stop.
It looked like the sedan had pulled out into the road, and indeed a side road that looked less-traveled soon popped up on the right. Somebody had duck-taped an empty bag of Quik-rete to a tree and, a short ways down the "driveway", had clumsily attached a "Keep Out" sign to a too-thin branch. I still kept out. Soon, the fence changed from chain link to wire. The road became rougher, muddier, and more grown in and as the dusk set in, it got incredibly buggy.
Soon, I came to what I assumed was an old gravel pit. It was now a small pond with a steep rock face rising on one end and assorted boulders on another. Either they had been strategically arranged or mankind got very lucky as the boulders form a rough semicircle. As you approach, the boulders are covered in graffiti (the "Guitar Hero" writing and drawing of a guitar player is presumably fairly recent, and who knows about the picture of a cat and the scrawled "MEOW".) There was a fire pit and a bunch of trash. I thought that it was similar to, but not the same as, a spot I came to a couple of summers ago. I believe that one was on one of the trails between Cheney Woods Rd. and the Newhall Road extension, but my memory could be scrambled.
Here's a map of the area:
You can see on the map that the marked road ends at some weird purple stuff. Similar purple stuff just off of Route 9B between the Turnpike and Loop Rd. is labeled as "Sand and gravel pit". By the way, I got the map from http://www.digital-topo-maps.com/, and its get-a-map technology is great--once you have a topo map, you can zoom in and out and drag it just like a regular Google Map.
On another side of the pond was a large, very rusted piece of equipment. It looked sort of like a crane with a thin, circular piece of metal on one end that looked like it would have had run some kind of belt or pulley.
I wish I had thought to check what the fence did around this spot...is the piece of equipment now outside of the Pike boundaries? Or is this where you could"break in"?
The road turned into an ATV trail here, albeit one with quite a few recent tracks. I followed it for a while, bypassing a number of muddy patches, before the mother of all mud patches turned me around. I was surprised to not have reached Cheney Woods Rd, but looking at the map now, I shouldn't have been. One narrower but discernible trail had left to the right--looking at the attached map, it was probably headed for the Allen Rd. extension.
Having now been gone for quite a while, I was starting to get a little creeped out and didn't dawdle on the return trip. I was my garden work clothes (long-sleeved shirt and lined wind pants) and the air was not cooling off so I was sweating buckets. I won my race with the sun back to the car, but, surprisingly, the creepiness continued into the drive home.
I hadn't stopped sweating yet and soon had sweat running into my eyes, which stung to the point of me being barely able to keep them open. This was on the part of Thurrell Road where the road makes a few sharp turns and the asphalt is badly eroded. I kept it together for what felt like eternity before finally getting to a good spot to pull off the road.
It was getting foggy, and a short while after starting up again, I came around a turn and thought I had lost it. I was driving straight into the woods! No, it was just a branch that had fallen across the road. Fortunately, it was suspended high enough in the air that I could drive under with just leaves grazing the top of the Honda.
The really weird part (at least to me) was that 1) The branch hadn't been there when I drove through there about 8 hours before and 2) Had the branch been there 2/3 hours before, when I was driving to the farm, I wouldn't have seen it as I decided to take the "front way" of Route 4 for the first and only time in my life. It was as if those Jepson ghosts knew I was coming and conspired to make the experience as creepy as possible.
Next up is to wait until things dry out a bit and then try trails off of Cheney Woods Rd. until I find the other end of this one.
