Fort Pond Brook Overperforms

 

Launched into Warners Pond in West Concord, MA on a fickle Sunday morning.  With conditions feeling more like March than May it made sense to stay on local waters.

Entered the pond's tributary, Nashoba Brook, and headed upstream...

 ...arriving shortly at the confluence of Nashoba and Fort Pond brooks which is also the convergence of the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail which, unlike the former railroad, goes up-and-over the busy Route 2...

Two railroads used to cross the brook here, the Nashua, Acton, and Boston RR and the Framingham and Lowell branch of the Old Colony RR...

The two railroads ran side by side between the long gone Middlesex Junction (just to the east of this spot) and North Acton.  Their bridge abutments remain beneath the rail trail bridge.  I'm not sure what purpose the sloping steel I-beams in the distance served...perhaps a way to get farm equipment across the brook? 

Paddled up Fort Pond Brook to the abandoned county road bridge to nowhere...

Returning back to the confluence I came across this...

The large plastic bag contained 120 capped and empty single-serve water bottles still retaining their flimsy labels.  It would have been hard to paddle past it.  The bag was located about a quarter of a mile downstream from several athletic fields.

Before returning to the takeout I visited one of the pond's two outlet structures...

Expected to encounter a few plastic bottles but not the overload Fort Pond Brook provided...

Such a bag of single-serve water bottles found in the State of Maine would've been valued at $ 6 and if found in the State of Connecticut a whopping $ 12.  Here in our Commonwealth of Massachusetts their value is zippo.