New path honors Stokes Brothers, conservation trailblazers

The Brothers Trail, the latest link in BNRC’s ever-growing network of trails around Berkshire County, opened to the public on Labor Day thanks to your support and the special contributions of key individuals and institutions.
Greenagers, a Great Barrington-based youth environmental organization, is one of those institutions.
With your support, BNRC has worked with Greenagers the last two summers to build trails. You may not think of your support for conservation as helping to build young environmental leaders for the future, but that’s one of the terrific benefits of community partnerships.
The trail is named in honor of brothers Anson P. Stokes and Isaac N.P. Stokes. In the early 1970s, the brothers gave BNRC and the Berkshires many of the wonderful mountain lands that surround Olivia’s Overlook.
The overlook itself, together with additional lands, was gifted by Anson and Isaac’s sister Olivia Stokes Hatch and her husband John D. Hatch.
In 2010, Isaac Stokes’ children preserved an additional 84 acres, which has allowed BNRC to build a connecting trail, nearly a mile long, between the Charcoal Trail and Old Baldhead Road. The connector, which employs elaborate stone construction at the crossing of the hemlock-draped Shadow Brook ravine, opens up a variety of loop options on the mountain.
The Stokes siblings – Sam, Tom, Olivia and Mitch – followed their gift of land with a generous pledge to help build the trail.
Kripalu Yoga Center, whose campus abuts BNRC’s Yokun Ridge Reserve, provided a generous gift matching your support to sponsor BNRC’s two-week engagement with Greenagers. The Greenagers crew received invaluable training from Peter S. Jensen & Associates, national leaders in trail design and construction.
Essential funding was also provided by the Nion Robert Thieriot Foundation, The Robert and Tina Sohn Foundation, by the Fields Pond Foundation, which supports land conservation, trail building and other means of connecting people to conservation land throughout New England, and by you.

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