Nickerson State Park

 My family is vacationing on Cape Cod this week. The weather has been meh, so I took advantage of a non-rainy, yet non-beach day and explored Nickerson State Park in Brewster. I actually walked to the park from the house we rent to save paying $30 out of state parking within the park itself. Only added a mile, works for me! Nickerson has 3 official hiking trails and many, many bike trails, so having a map is handy as trails come in and out from all over the place. There are several campsite areas within the park also, so add in more trails to and from those. It wasn't confusing with a map, but I imagine it might be without. Once in the park, I headed down a paved bike trail so as not to be walking on the main road. I turned left onto Flax Pond Road and walked a short distance to Area 5 camping, where there is access to the Flax Pond hiking trail. It was an overcast and dreary day, but very humid. The camping areas seemed bustling, there were several people out on the ponds enjoying water activities and I passed quite a lot on the trails as well, but not overwhelmingly so. It was fun hiking on a more sandy trail, which after several days rain were well packed down and not too soft. While mostly flat in comparison to mountain hiking, it was a consistent day of rolling ups and downs with little elevation. Just enough to keep it interesting. I reached an intersecting trail joining Flax Pond to Cliff Pond and headed that way. Cliff Pond is the largest of the 3 ponds with official hiking trails around them. All were very pretty and thankfully it wasn't too buggy either. I passed a few boat rental areas and saw a few people fishing. I reached the parking area at the end of Flax Pond Road and jumped over to Little Cliff Pond. Doing an almost full circumnavigation of that, I reached back to Cliff Pond. Closed that loop and then headed back over to Flax Pond to finish that also. A really fun area to explore. I imagine if the weather was nicer, it would be much busier, but I liked the quietness today. The bike trails, particularly the Cape Cod Rail Trail when I crossed that, seemed very busy. One thinks of the beach when vacationing on the Cape, but there are lots of other activities to enjoy as well. 

Strava Activity

First sighting of Flax Pond

Flax Pond Trail blazed in red

Onto yellow blazed Cliff Pond Trail

Cliff Pond

so many little side ponds filled with lilies all over

this is a private youth camp area that the trail passes through

Blue blazed Little Cliff Pond Trail

Little Cliff Pond

a more remote area of the trail at the bottom of Little Cliff Pond

The trail went right across the beach

can only imagine how busy this is on a nicer day