Our little 5-acre swatch is bordered by the West River on one side and by several hundred acres of unspoiled forest on the other. Our neighbors live out of state and come to their house here for a week or two each year; their renters don't seem given much to exploring the woods. Excepting hunting season, we're really the only humans that wander back there. The land is criss-crossed by a network of overgrown trails and logging tracks and well-worn deer paths. We mostly stick to a single trail that roughly follows the flood brook that runs through. The trail kind of peters out at a wide 'S' in the brook, forming a beautiful outdoor room with a deep pool surrounded by big flat rocks. We call the spot Paradise, and at an easy 3/4 of a mile from the house, it's the perfect destination for our (almost) daily walks with the dog.
Winters with deep snow cover (which this one was not) open up the entire forest to exploring on snowshoes, and we pack out our own network of trails and spend hours (and hundreds of calories) muscling up and down and in and around. This winter we were confined to the road to Paradise, no snowshoes required. I'm a little rounder at the middle because of it.