The Old Eastern Marsh Trail Extension construction project in Salisbury is now complete, and it was celebrated on August 18 with a ribbon cutting featuring Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, state Secretary of Transportation Jamey Tesler, other officials, and trail advocates. The ribbon cutting was documented in this Facebook post from the Coastal Trails Coalition.
The northernmost length of the Border-to-Boston Trail and a segment of the East Coast Greenway, the Marsh Trail now extends from the Merrimack River to the New Hampshire state line along Route 286. Previously, it stretched only about 1.3 miles from the river to Mudnock Rd. The extension conveys the trail about 2.5 miles further north to the border. (There is a short, on-road, sharrowed portion on narrow Gardner St.)
The connectivity benefits of this extension are hard to understate. First, it creates a connection to the Salisbury Ghost Trail, which itself connects with the Garrison Trail and (except for a short gap) nearly joins with the Amesbury Riverwalk. These three trails make up three off-road sides of a rectangular bike route through Amesbury, Newburyport, and Salisbury. Second, the extension includes a new bridge over heavily-trafficked US 1. Third, it will someday in the future join with the NH Seacoast Greenway to forge an almost completely off-road path from the Merrimack River to the Piscataqua River (and a nice stretch for ECG bike tourists).
I rode the trail with a few friends a couple of weeks ago. It was quite nice, although we did a round trip south from the Ghost Trail to the river and back, so I still haven’t been on the part north of there. The trail was generally 10-ft. wide and asphalt, as is the older portion of the trail south of Mudnock Rd. Also like the older section, the surroundings were bucolic, including a long, wide boardwalk over a forested wetland and pastoral scenery south of Elm St.
Jeff Brubaker 