In mid-July of this year, Greater Boston was engulfed in dark skies due to a massive series of wildfires on the border of Ontario and Minnesota about 1,000 miles away. I’ve lived here for my whole life and have genuinely never seen skies like this ever, so I knew I had to scramble to document this phenomenon while it lasted.
We drove this road on the second of the two days of smoke, right as it began to clear up. If you look closely, you’ll be able to see the sky change color from orange to blue across each section of this post. Since this weather came on suddenly and was only here for a short time, I ended up staying relatively local for this one. I’d also like to give a huge shoutout to my friend Holly for joining me on such short notice (literally about 2 hours of time to prep)!
For the photo editing fans out there, I’m taking a bit of a different approach to these images than those of my other articles. Due to just how unique this weather phenomenon was, I’ll be editing the exposure and sharpness of the images like usual, but I won’t be touching the color temperature or vibrance at all. I want to do everything I can to maintain the feeling of what it was like to explore Hull on this particularly rare evening.
This is our drive down Nantasket Ave.
West Corner
While Nantasket Ave primarily runs the length of Hull, it begins just over the border at the confluence of three towns: Hull, Hingham, and Cohasset. This is definitely a less-used throughway than the 40mph George Washington Boulevard connecting Hull to Route 3A to the west, but it makes up for its slower speeds with a beautiful view of Straits Pond to the east.
As discussed in the intro, none of these pictures have had their temperature or white balance tampered with in editing – this was genuinely how orange everything was today! We met a few cyclists out sightseeing the alien skies, but otherwise the square was empty save for a few herons.
Nantasket Beach
Even with smoke in the skies, Nantasket Beach was still quite busy today (though we were able to get a parking spot easily, which is usually a tall order on normal days). This beach is perhaps the favorite of the South Shore, being slightly larger than its neighbor Wollaston Beach in Quincy. Growing up in Quincy, I went on many a school or family trips here during my childhood.
Alongside the beach, this part of Hull used to also be the home of the South Shore’s largest amusement park: Paragon Park. The park closed in the mid-80s (though its Fascination game survived until 2019, and was even featured in a classic Tom Scott video!), and today very few of its buildings remain beyond the historic carousel. What is left of the park still has absolutely beautiful architecture though, and serves as a wonderful historical reminder to Nantasket’s fame throughout the 20th century.
It was here that the smoke began to clear up a bit, with the sky now showing a warm gradient from north to south. Visibility was still not perfect, but there was enough to see Minots Light peeking over the rocks off the coast of Scituate.
Allerton
Ok, confession time: We did not successfully complete a One Road by my usual standards. This was because ongoing construction to replace the seawalls north of the Hull Yacht Club had the road closed the day we were there. Of course, we could still continue our trip with a quarter-mile detour along Fitzpatrick Way just to the south, which is exactly what we did (even though I was a bit unhappy about it).
At the very least though, the detour let us explore a bit more of the Allerton neighborhood than we otherwise would have!
Fort Revere
This location is a personal favorite of mine, as it’s somewhere I regularly take first-time visitors to the Boston area to get a sense of the scale and beauty of the harbor. Sat atop Telegraph Hill, in the historic Hull Village neighborhood, there’s an abandoned revolutionary-era fort that’s been transformed into a state park overlooking the entire length of what we’ve driven so far.
This park has always been fairly overgrown and is filled with graffiti, but I’ve always kind of loved that about it here. Fort Revere is one of the few places in the region where exploring feels like urbexing in its truest sense – climbing around a large manmade structure where people have clearly been, but it’s visited infrequently enough that you’ll rarely see other folks there when you are. And those views are unmatched!
It was here that we got our first glimpse at the sunset – right before our journey ended. But seeing as we’ve already broken the rules of One Road once on this trip, we weren’t about to let that stop us from enjoying the evening view.
Pemberton Point
Technically speaking, Nantasket Ave ends at a fairly anticlimactic intersection with Hull’s tiny Main Street in the Hull Village neighborhood. But seeing as this will likely be one of One Road’s only times here in Hull, I hope you don’t mind that I threw a little extension onto the end of this trip. Just 3/4ths of a mile west of the terminus, the small Pemberton Point beach looks out over the skylines of Boston and the South Shore, ending our journey to the edge of town with one of the most stunning views over Boston Harbor.
The dark orange smoke that covered the skies at the beginning of our trip had all but cleared at this point, leaving a beautiful sunset reflecting off the blue waters of the bay. While the smoke had lessened enough to restore the sky’s color and the smoky smell in the air had lifted, there was still enough haze in the air to look at the sun with the naked eye.
While these views are one-of-a-kind, it goes without saying that it’s a good thing this smoke is temporary. The wildfires that caused this haze have done severe damage to the forests of Minnesota and Ontario, and lowered air quality across the US from Chicago to Washington. Just a week after we took this short trip, Massachusetts sent a brigade of DCR firefighters to help fight the fires out west alongside several other states’ forces, and thankfully, it seems they’ve found success in doing so.
As of the posting of this article, Camp Fire, the main source of much of the smoke, has been largely contained. And the skies over Boston, Hull, and much of the east coast are clear once again.
In our next post, we’ll finally visit the last state we’ve yet to see on One Road, and explore a massively underrated scenic subregion of New England.
Written and Photographed by Rin Gately. Edited by Keith Libby.
One Road 
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