“We wanted to come out earlier in the season, but we were waiting for good snow,” said Carol Fairbank, who visited the Highland Center Monday. “It’s a really easy way to distance, so I feel it’s a safe outlet right now during the pandemic.”
The trail is free to visit from dawn to dusk, though some patrons choose to make a small donation to the Highland Center.
On weekends, the destination provides bonfires and runs a food window at lunchtime.
The cross-country and snowshoe trail expands on an offering from last summer and fall that saw art installed on a walking path at the Greensboro property.
Johnson artist
Harlan Mack has sited three of his earlier works along the trail. Bear Suit, crafted from bike parts, won the 2016 Upcycle Art Bike Competition grand prize from
Catamount Arts and Kingdom Trails. The other two, Giraffe and Granilla, are among the first sculptures Mack made, in 2006. Welded scrap-metal creations, they appear remarkably animated; the latter, a gorilla, reaches out a friendly hand from his perch on a preexisting fieldstone. Rusted metal parts come together in a graceful abstraction, titled Celestial, by Underhill sculptor
Thomas Douglas, used stainless steel for Aloft, an evocation of industrial machinery and speed in the spare form of a paper airplane angled into the sky.