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Route: Tully Trail (MA)

Location
Massachusetts, US
Distance
35 km
Vertical Gain
875 m
Description

Ben Nephew posted the route:

The Tully Trail is an isolated trail loop in North Central Massachusetts.

www.thetrustees.org/assets/documents/places-to-visit/trailmaps/Tully-Trail-Map.pdf

More information on the property can be found here:

www.thetrustees.org/places-to-visit/places-to-stay/tully-lake-campground/tully-trail.html

The trail section heading west from Tully Lake is closed, the trail now continues down the dirt road to start the singletrack at the trailhead on Mountain Rd.

The loop consists of singletrack and carriage roads with some short road sections. It only has about 3000' of climbing, but some of the singletrack is extremely technical and/or difficult to follow due to the fact that the trail sees very little traffic. During my recent run, I only saw three people over 3.5 hours. It is listed as 22 miles, but I am guessing the actual mileage is closer to 24 miles.

GPS track for my run of 3:19:24:

connect.garmin.com/activity/132970100

Results of a supported run of the Tully Trail may be seen here: tullytrailrun.blogspot.com/p/results_15.html

Please note that the section headed down to Royalston Falls from the road in CW direction can be confusing.  There are two trails heading down to the shelter.  The correct trail is to the right as the left is off the TT and a shortcut.

GPS Track
Tully_Trail.gpx567.49 KB

FKTs

This route on the old FKT site
http://fastestknowntime.proboards.com/thread/199/tully-trail

Comments

cogburner
Sun, 08/14/2022 - 11:41am

Ben Nephew and I ran this yesterday just as a fun run. FYI the course is much harder to follow now due to recent logging and lack of signage, despite fancy GPS watches with the course loaded on them. It is still a great loop, just as a tip consider scouting it out first before attempting a full-gas FKT. It would be great service to the community if doing a scouting mission / training run to bring along a yellow can of spray paint... 

Dan Grip
Fri, 09/09/2022 - 08:15am

I'm currently in the process of appealing the flagging on my run.  I was aware of where the trail splits down to the falls and consciously went the way I did because that's the way the original submitted route goes, even thought the official NET trail goes the other way.  I knew it didn't make much of a difference, but I looked it over beforehand and made the decision to follow the posted route to avoid any issues like this!  I meticulously looked over the route on the landing page before attempting the FKT, and if you zoom in you can see it goes left at the fork.  In my opinion, flags like this should not be submitted or posted, or I should have at least been questioned about it.

I just looked over the differences, and the way I went is .05m shorter, and at downhill pace is the difference of maybe 15 seconds.  Then I looked over Ben's route (which I had to beat), and found that he went off of the Tully Trail and out to the road just before he finished, which took off .05m and made the terrain easier.  This may have taken off 30 seconds from his time.  Do I want to flag his effort for such a small deviation?  No I don't, but I don't want to see a flag on mine.  And also, the way I went followed the originally posted route. Ben's deviation is clearly off route.  For all this, I feel my flag needs to be removed.  Also, I do not want to see Ben's effort flagged, and I hope people will use a little more discretion on issues like this.