Beaver Brook is really three separate parks, all under one name and POTA reference number. Most conspicuously, just off Trapelo Road in Belmont is a playground and spray deck—not the best POTA site in summer but it does have a picnic shelter to protect an operating position from inclement weather. On second thought, maybe a great POTA site as long as the operator scrupulously avoids the creation of tripping hazards and electrical hazards. You’re likely to get a lot of inquiries from curious kids, but that can be part of the fun as long as you’re not there for serious contesting or trying to maximize your QSO per minute rate at any cost.

Down the trail from the playground area is a wee bridge over the eponymous brook that will lead you into a large open field, likely full of dogs. Officially dogs must be leashed, but longstanding local consensus has made the field a popular if unofficial off-leash dog park. The dog park area is also the lowest elevation in the park, so probably not ideal for a POTA site.

Back up to the road, turning southbound from Trapelo onto Waverly Oaks Road, there are two separate parking areas for this small park. The northernmost serves largely as a gateway to the dog park. A bit further south, off Wilson Road, a second parking area is positioned between the tennis courts and the baseball diamond. There are picnic tables located conveniently near the parking lot, and some mid-size trees can support a wire antenna. I chose this site to activate on August 31, 2025. I put up a low end-fed half-wave antenna with the feed point at my picnic table, the midpoint supported by a SOTABeams 6-meter carbon fiber mast, and the far end in a tree, maybe only 10 feet off the ground. The 24 AWG antenna wire is barely visible in the photo above, so I painted it in to better illustrate the setup. The baseball backstop was probably within the antenna’s radiative near field, but despite this far-from-ideal antenna installation I got plenty of QSOs on 40, 20, and 15 meters and even had enough of a pileup on 20 that I had to declare “last call” and pack up while the hunters were still calling—a first for me! All this with 20 watts from a Xiegu G90, all SSB.

The second section of Beaver Brook Reservation lies north of Trapelo Road and west of Mill Street, across from the McLean Hospital campus. For the motor-vehicle-inclined, it has a parking area off Mill Street. It is also readily accessible by bicycle and your author can attest that the trails make for some good gravel-bike terrain! This section features no dogs, less open area, and is more thickly forested. The central feature is an old mill pond, the ruins of the old mill, and a waterfall—presumably where the mill’s water wheel would have once stood. I haven’t operated from this section but it’s all at higher elevation than the first area, and there are some areas that could make for a decent operating position. A small-footprint station, such as with a Wolf River Coils or similar vertical antenna, could work well on any of several scenic overlooks by the pond, while open areas to the north or near the parking area might have room for a wire antenna.

The third and final section of the park, Beaver Brook North, lies in Waltham and Lexington between Trapelo Road and Concord Ave. On the left bank of Beaver Brook, south of Concord Ave and west of Mill St, Belmont’s Rock Meadow Conservation Area is contiguous with Beaver Brook North. Rock Meadow is a lovely park with excellent hiking, but as a municipal park it is not a POTA reference in itself. Rock meadow has a very small parking area that is often full, while Beaver Brook North has ample parking off Trapelo Road. For those who may want to hike and operate with a canine companion, be aware that the leash rules at Rock Meadow are serious business. Not that Belmont Police have the resources or inclination to come bust you, but there are ground-nesting birds in the meadow. To avoid disturbing the nests and habitat, your dog should remain leashed and on-trail in the meadow area.

Beaver Brook North is built around the grounds of the abandoned Metropolitan State Hospital—a place where people deemed “mentally ill” were once locked away, often for life. (I put “mentally ill” in scare quotes because the standards of the time were quite different from what would be recognized today). South of Trapelo Road, the Fernald School served a similar purpose for the developmentally disabled, and both both sites have a dark legacy of human rights abuses. On the Beaver Brook North site, the old “MetFern” cemetery is the final resting place of inmates who died in the custody of those two institutions, marked only with serial numbers. For more on the cemetery and efforts to identify those whose remains are interred there, see https://www.metferncemetery.com.

Scoping out the Beaver Brook North area for an activation site, I briefly thought I had struck gold with the old flagpoles at the abandoned headquarters building. Did one of them have an intact halyard? Could I hoist a wire antenna 50-odd feet in the air? Alas, on close inspection I found the halyard was in such poor condition that I feared it would crumble in my hands if I exerted the force necessary to undo the ancient knots and unwind it from its cleat. Mackerel Hill, one of the higher points in Beaver Brook North, also looked like an attractive potential activation site, but the ground on the hilltop was too hard and rocky to drive a spike or stake to support my carbon mast. This area would work well with the vertical, or with a wire in a tree and some ingenuity to hold tension on the far end in a sloper configuration.

As a final note, the City of Waltham bought the old Fernald site from the state, with 139 acres dedicated to open space, recreation, and historic preservation. When redevelopment is complete, this area will provide more park land contiguous with Beaver Brook North, but as a city park it will not be eligible for a POTA designation.