On May 29, I got the gift of walking proposed parts of Brunswick’s Perimeter Trail with Parks and Facilities manager and town forester Dennis Wilson and with representatives from the Lands Committee of the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust (note: I am also a member of that committee). On a morning when “more showers” were predicted, we gathered under a mostly blue sky in the new town parking area near the Mere Creek Golf Course. Our hope was to better understand the terrain and trajectory of three potential sections on the west side of the Perimeter Trail. That side roughly parallels Harpswell Road, aiming north until the trail bends east around Bowdoin College’s large solar field and then north again toward Bath Road.

Our group of six walkers met Wilson at his truck, where he gave each of us a copy of the Perimeter Trail RFP Project Sections Map. (Map note: this is another of the beautiful works by town GIS Specialist Jessica Hanscom; I could write for pages and pages describing all the information conveyed on this map.)

As the map makes clear and Wilson described, Brunswick will soon send out a Request For Proposal (RFP) to trail builders for three sections totaling nearly 2 miles of this decade-old, multiuse trail project. Eventually, the Perimeter Trail will guide users around the entire Landing and link to a host of other trail networks. What, we were asked, do you think of these possible routes and where might there be obstacles?

The magic of a woodland trail appears early. You take a couple of steps, reach the fringe of woods and step between two trees. “I want to be here,” I think as we follow Wilson across a damp, flat stretch and then feel the trail firm as it slopes gently uphill. A few hundred yards in, the woods change from the scrubby mix of an overgrown field to the more mature spacing of older trees. Soon after that, I hear the fluted call of a wood thrush, a bird that favors continuous woodlands.

A thin, single track winds ahead. The light shifts to forest-filtered; in this late-spring season, that light tints with gold from the new leaves. As happens annually, Robert Frost’s lines appear in mind: “Nature’s first green is gold,/Her hardest hue to hold.”

The trail rises along a stony spine that supports moss and lichens only. Here, I think, is both the promise and the challenge of this proposed trail section. As our map makes clear from its lidar renderings of contour lines, along this west side we are in knuckled land. Fitting a 10-foot-wide corridor for a multiuse trail through the glacial tumble of this land will challenge the trail builders. As if to underline that, we pass a handsome, rhino-sized glacial erratic. “Yes, I shaped this land,” the departed glacier seems to say.

Every so often a foot-beaten track departs left or right. “Goat trails,” says Wilson, and we all nod. Wherever open land admits people, curiosity draws some from the established way. They, in turn, establish another way, which becomes worn by our tendency to follow one another. Trail builders hope to preserve habitat by fashioning a trail that channels our foot and wheel traffic, limiting the number of informal tracks across the land.

Sam, BTLT’s stewardship coordinator and trails expert, is tracking us on his phone’s mapping program. It is crossed and recrossed by these unofficial tracks. “How do you get these informal tracks to show up so you can plan to manage them?” we want to know.

“It’s a heat map,” says Sam, and I add another term with all sorts of images to my walking vocabulary. In short, heat maps can count up passages along a path over a time period. The more use and users, the more likely the path will become a beaten track that shows up on a heat map. Heat maps also trace the way walkers navigate nubbly terrain. All of this can help trail builders choose good routes.

The morning passes underfoot, and — but for the noise of motors and some residual Navy fencing — we could imagine ourselves far from town. By near noon, we have also looked over a possible “deviation off-road from Samuel Adams Drive,” a paved part of the Perimeter Trail. Steep little ravines fall off to our west, and we navigate a grassy once-upon-a-field.

There, partially hidden by a leafy weed, we meet the day’s wilder life, a 2-foot-long eastern milk snake sunning beside the track. We pause to take in the snake’s banded design, and I am quietly excited by its similarity to the copperhead, a poisonous cousin whose northern range stops a hundred or so miles to our south. Close enough for a little shiver.

The snake, who would clearly sooner stay put, slides off into the grass, and we walk on along this future trail for the many walkers, runners, riders and wanderers of our town.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chairperson of the town’s Conservation Commission and the town’s Steering Committee for Mere Brook, and a member of Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.