Walk the Reversing Falls spur at low tide this month and you will notice the same thing regulars have noticed for eight years now: the trail simply stops at a marsh crossing where a wooden footbridge used to be. Water moves through the gap, birds work the mudflats around it, and hikers either turn back or pick their way across on exposed rock. This is the old Boy Scout Bridge site, and until this past June, nobody in town government had committed real money to fixing it.
That changed on a Tuesday in June, when the Weymouth Town Council approved $84,000 in Community Preservation Act funding to design and permit a replacement pedestrian bridge across the tidal marsh. The bridge washed out in a 2018 storm. It had been used heavily by the community and by the Great Esker Park summer nature camp before that, and the town had tried and failed to land state trail grants to rebuild it. Mayor Michael Molisse pushed for local preservation funds instead. The design and permitting phase alone is expected to take about a year, with engineering, geotechnical work, and a full set of local, state, and federal permits required before a shovel goes anywhere near the marsh.
That timeline matters if you are the kind of Weymouth resident who treats this park as a fixed backdrop, the ridge you have always known. It is not fixed. It has been under slow, visible repair for most of the time you have lived near it, and knowing which entrance you use has quietly shaped which parts of that unfinished story you have actually seen.
Four entrances, four different parks
Most people pick one entrance to Great Esker Park and stick with it, which means most people only know one version of the place.
| Entrance | Parking | Terrain | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elva Road | Largest lot on site, room for roughly 25 vehicles | Sits below the ridge, so reaching the main trail means a steep climb right out of the gate | Families starting near the Nature Center and the shaded picnic pavilion |
| Bridge Street (Route 3A) | Very limited, just a few spots | Already at the top of the esker, the most forgiving walking of any entrance | Quick after-work walks and dog walking, right across from the Abigail Adams State Park entrance |
| Puritan Road | Room for only 3 or 4 cars | Flat, low ground near the marsh, with a picnic table | Launching a kayak or canoe, though only near high tide |
| Wharf Street (Osprey Overlook Park) | Small lot, wheelchair accessible | Level ground, connects onward toward Jackson Square | Birding and the easiest access for anyone who needs a paved, ADA-friendly route |
Notice that only two of the four, Puritan Road and Wharf Street, offer wheelchair access. Elva Road, despite having the most parking, is the hardest entrance for anyone who cannot manage a steep hill. If you have only ever parked at Elva Road, you have been climbing a hill the rest of the park's regulars quietly avoid.
The ridge nobody built
The feature that gives the park its name did not come from any town planning decision. The esker itself, a winding ridge of sand and gravel running along the Back River, rises 90 feet, making it the tallest esker in North America. It formed 12,000 years ago as a retreating glacier deposited sediment through channels in the melting ice, the same glacial process that left the boulders at Weymouth's House Rock Park. On top of the ridge, oak, birch, and cedar dominate, with sumac, maple, and pitch pine mixed in. Near the Elva Road side, Kettle Hole Pond marks the spot where a block of glacial ice melted in place and left a depression behind.
None of that geology required a permit or a budget line. It has simply been sitting there since long before Weymouth existed as a town, which makes the human history of the park, layered directly on top of it, more interesting by contrast.
The tide decides your trip, not you
The reversing falls that give the trail spur its name are a small-scale version of the tidal phenomenon made famous on the St. John River in New Brunswick. When the tide goes out, water in the esker-ringed marsh flows east toward the Back River. When the tide comes back in, the flow reverses into the marsh. You only see it clearly around high tide, which is also the only window when the Puritan Road launch is usable at all. Paddlers who have logged trips here warn that the upper river is difficult to navigate at lower tides, so timing a kayak trip around the tide table is not optional the way it might be at a beach.
The wildlife on the same schedule. Two active osprey nest platforms sit within the park, installed after DDT thinned the birds' eggshells and drove their numbers down decades ago. Egrets and great blue herons feed along the marsh edges. In spring, river herring push upstream past the park on their way to Whitman's Pond, part of a run that Weymouth town records document as far back as 1648. About half a million river herring and rainbow smelt still make that trip each year, though they cannot climb the fish ladders further upstream and stay within the tidal stretch near the park.
The advocate behind the park
Great Esker Park exists as public land because of one person's persistence more than any planning department's initiative. Before 1965, the land belonged to the U.S. Navy, which had held it since the early 1900s as a buffer for the Naval Ammunition Depot across the river, the site that is now Hingham's Bare Cove Park. Local environmentalist Mary F. Toomey pushed for the land to be transferred to Weymouth through the National Park Service's Federal Lands to Parks Program, and the transfer went through in 1965. The following year, Toomey founded the Great Esker Park Natural Science Center and kept advocating for the Back River for the rest of her life, work that earned her an EPA Environmental Merit Award in 1991 and the Gulf of Maine Times Visionary Award in 2004. In 1982, her advocacy helped the Weymouth Back River earn the state's Area of Critical Environmental Concern designation, covering roughly 950 acres, about 180 of them tidal. In 2000, she helped establish what is now the Back River Watershed Association to keep that work going after her.
The park you walk through today, ridge, marsh, osprey platforms and all, runs on momentum she started six decades ago. The town has been finishing her project in pieces ever since, and the footbridge vote this June is just the most recent piece.
The trail that still stops short
The paved section of the Back River Trail currently runs about two miles, from Bridge Street through Great Esker Park to Osprey Overlook Park. The plan on paper is much longer. Eventually the trail is meant to extend from Webb Memorial State Park along Weymouth Neck to the Kibby Property and Abigail Adams Park, then pass under Route 3A through a boardwalk, continue through Great Esker and Osprey Overlook, run along Wharf Street through the Durante Property, and finally reach Lovell Field, the Stephen Rennie Herring Run Park, Herring Run Pool Park, Iron Hill Park, and Whitman's Pond. None of the boardwalk under Route 3A exists yet. Neither does most of the southern half of that route.
That gap is the same story as the footbridge, just at a larger scale. The park's boundaries look permanent on a map. On the ground, large parts of the vision are still unbuilt, funded in stages as CPA money and town votes allow, one footbridge or boardwalk segment at a time.
So the next time you park at Elva Road and climb the hill, or launch a kayak from Puritan Road at high tide, or notice the gap where the Boy Scout Bridge should be, you are looking at a park still being assembled by people who decided, one grant application and one town council vote at a time, that it was worth finishing. The design work on the new footbridge is expected to wrap sometime in 2027. Whether the physical rebuild follows quickly probably depends on the same kind of persistence that got the land protected in the first place.
If you are new to Weymouth or thinking through what life here actually looks like day to day, Alice Pierce has spent years working this stretch of the South Shore and is always glad to talk through the neighborhoods, the trails, and everything in between. Let's Connect.
