I wasn’t looking for an adventure that morning. I just wanted to get outside.
No sunrise chase. No long drive across Maine. Nothing that required an entire day or my hip and me having a serious discussion about our recent life choices. Retta was up for a walk, I’d been looking at nearby trails, and Head of Tide Preserve in Belfast kept coming up.
It was close to home. The River Loop looked easy enough.
Good enough.
Grab your gear. We’re going for a walk.
Head of Tide Preserve sits along the Passagassawakeag River on Doak Road in Belfast. Coastal Mountains Land Trust protects 92 acres here, including old farm fields, woods and river shoreline. I wasn’t expecting some grand destination. That wasn’t what I wanted anyway.
The plan was pretty simple. Walk the River Loop and see what we found along the way.
Turns out that was enough.
Trail Snapshot
📍 Location: Head of Tide Preserve, Doak Road, Belfast, Maine
🥾 Difficulty: Easy
📏 Trail: Blue River Loop. Coastal Mountains Land Trust currently lists the loop as approximately 1 mile and easy.
🚙 Parking: Well-marked lot off Doak Road. I estimated room for roughly four vehicles.
🌲 Trail Surface: Grass through the fields, then dirt, roots, rocks and bog bridging through the woods.
🐜 Conditions: Very dry during our September visit. Smaller streams were dry or nearly dry, and there wasn’t any mud to speak of. Bugs were surprisingly active.
💡 Good to Know: There are several trail junctions, but each one we encountered was signed and easy to follow. There are also smaller paths leading toward additional river views. Watch for private-property and wildlife-protection signs near the water.
Starting Out
There was one other vehicle in the lot when we arrived. The preserve sign was easy to spot from the road, parking was simple, and from there we walked toward the building and garden near the beginning of the preserve.
It wasn’t quite the start I expected from a morning walk in the woods.
The garden is part of an educational permaculture project managed by Belfast Transition. Head of Tide includes former farm fields, and the garden sits right there at the beginning, before the trail really gets going.
We looked around for a bit and then headed toward the trail.
I didn’t get very far.
There was a tree near the entrance that was absolutely enormous.
Coastal Mountains Land Trust mentions old apple trees, stone walls and large “wolf trees” around the former farm fields as some of the things to look for here. I can’t tell you whether this particular monster was technically one of those wolf trees.
I can tell you it was huge.
I’m 6’3″. I don’t spend a lot of time feeling undersized.
That tree could probably take me.
Naturally, the camera was already out.
Following the Field
Not far beyond the tree we came to the first fork.
Left or straight.
We went straight.
That put us alongside the open field, where late-summer flowers were still hanging on and a few leaves were beginning to show the first signs of fall.
It was a perfect morning for it. Mid-60s, a slight breeze and easy walking through the open section.
We reached another junction.
Straight or right.
Straight again.
There are enough forks at Head of Tide that I’d wondered beforehand if following the loop might get confusing. It didn’t. Every junction we encountered was signed, and we never had much question about where we were headed.
We continued along the field until we reached another fork. This time we turned left toward the River Trail.
That’s where the walk changed.
The field fell behind us and we entered the woods.
Into the Woods
The trail was still easy, but this was more familiar Maine walking. Roots, rocks and uneven ground replaced the grass.
Nothing difficult. Just enough that staring through a camera while walking would have been a poor decision.
Especially for me.
The hip had been behaving itself.
No reason to surprise it.
There were plenty of bog bridges along the route too, although they weren’t exactly being pushed to their engineering limits that morning. Maine has been dry, and it showed everywhere.
The woods were dry. There wasn’t any mud to speak of, and the smaller waterways we encountered were either low or empty.
Looking at all those bog bridges, though, I have a feeling spring tells a very different story.
Even with temperatures in the mid-60s and a slight breeze, I was still sweating under the pack.
Apparently weather forecasts do not account for large men carrying camera gear through the woods.
The hip, however, filed no formal complaints.
I’ll take it.
The bugs were less cooperative. They were surprisingly annoying for such a cool, dry morning. Summer might have been losing its grip, but apparently nobody had notified them.
Along the River
Before long the trees started opening enough to give us glimpses of the Passagassawakeag.
The River Loop follows the high banks along part of it, and there were smaller side paths through the woods where we could get better looks at the water.
This was probably my favorite part of the walk.
The water was low from the dry weather, but some of the quieter sections were almost perfectly still. Trees reflected across the surface, and every so often the usual woodland clutter organized itself enough to make me stop.
I hadn’t come here expecting a portfolio photograph. There wasn’t one particular thing I wanted to shoot.
I photographed whatever caught my attention.
Flowers. Trees. Bridges. Water. Trails disappearing through the woods.
Basically my normal highly organized photographic process.
Woodland photography can be a pain in the ass. There’s stuff everywhere. Branches cross branches, sunlight punches random holes through the canopy, and every composition seems to contain one stick whose entire purpose in life is to annoy photographers.
But every once in a while things settle down.
Click.
Then we kept walking.
We only encountered one other person during the entire trip. We passed each other somewhere in the woods, exchanged the standard trail acknowledgment and went on our separate ways.
That was it.
For a preserve this close to Belfast, I wasn’t complaining.
What the Drought Left Behind
Eventually the trail moved away from the river and carried us farther through the woods.
Then we reached a wooden bridge over one of the smaller streams.
There wasn’t much stream left.
The nearly empty streambed probably told the story of Maine’s dry summer better than anything else I saw that morning.
I can imagine this part of the trail looking completely different with spring runoff or after a stretch of wet weather. On our visit, though, the bridge was spanning mostly rocks and dry ground.
At least there was no mud.
See? I found something nice to say.
A Bench in the Woods
A little farther along we found something I wasn’t expecting.
A bench.
The name Skip Pendleton was carved into the top.
I had no idea who Skip Pendleton was while we were standing there. It was simply a name on a bench in the middle of the woods.
So I looked him up afterward.
Turns out the bench wasn’t random.
Pendleton was a longtime Belfast resident who volunteered with Coastal Mountains Land Trust for nearly 30 years. He worked on trail crews and stewardship, served on the Land Trust’s board and spent years helping care for trails and conserved land around the area. He received the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, and a bench was later installed at Head of Tide in his honor.
I like knowing that now.
We walk across bridges, follow blazes and use trails without giving much thought to the people who spent years building and maintaining them. I certainly wasn’t thinking about any of that when I first saw his name.
At that moment, I mostly thought we’d found a pretty good place to sit.
So we did.
Then we kept going.
Apparently There’s a Picnic Table Too
Not much farther down the trail, we found a picnic table.
An actual picnic table.
In the woods.
At this point Head of Tide was eliminating my excuses one at a time.
Tired? Here’s a bench.
Still tired?
Fine. Have an entire table.
From there we continued through the woods until the trees finally opened again and we stepped back into the field.
And suddenly the whole loop made sense.
Ahead of us was that first fork we’d passed near the beginning of the walk.
We’d gone straight there earlier that morning.
Now we were coming back from the other direction.
No wondering whether we’d somehow wandered onto the wrong trail. No consulting the phone while pretending I knew exactly where I was.
There was our starting point.
Loop complete.
A Little Respect Goes a Long Way
There were a couple of signs along the river section worth mentioning.
One made it clear that the property on the opposite side of the water was private and there was no trespassing. Another asked visitors not to disturb ducks in a nesting area.
Neither request is complicated.
Places like Head of Tide only stay enjoyable if we remember we’re visitors. Stay where you’re supposed to be, leave the wildlife alone and don’t assume every little path or interesting patch of shoreline belongs to us.
Explore.
Just don’t be an ass about it.
Would I Go Back?
Yep.
We only walked the River Loop, and I’d like to return and try the other trail. I’d also like to see Head of Tide later in the fall. There were already small hints of color during our walk, and those fields, big trees and river views could look completely different once autumn gets serious.
Winter interests me too. Coastal Mountains Land Trust lists snowshoeing and cross-country skiing among the activities here.
I’d probably bring grippers if things were icy. There aren’t any serious climbs, but there are enough little slopes, roots and rocks in the woods that I don’t particularly feel like conducting a field test on exactly how much abuse the replacement hip can tolerate.
It behaved this time.
Let’s not get cocky.
Spring could be another story entirely.
I haven’t walked Head of Tide during mud season, so I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what it’s like. But after seeing all those bog bridges and low areas?
I have suspicions.
Hip Explorer Verdict
Head of Tide Preserve isn’t somewhere I’d tell you to clear your entire day for.
That’s part of what I liked about it.
Retta and I wanted to get outside for the morning, so we grabbed our gear and went for a walk. We wandered past a garden, stood underneath a tree that made me feel unusually small, followed an old field into the woods, walked along the Passagassawakeag, crossed a stream that barely existed, learned the story behind a bench and somehow found a picnic table out there too.
No mountain. No waterfall. No big destination waiting at the end.
Just a good morning in the woods.
The bugs were annoying. Big man still managed to sweat in the mid-60s. The hip behaved.
Hip approved.
Even this grumpy bastard liked it.
