I smelled adventure. To me, the scent of pine needles warming in the sun is the smell of adventure awaiting. The fragrance immediately calls to mind my childhood camping trips to the pitch pine woods and needle-strewn paths of Cape Cod. The scent of sunlight upon pine needles stirs within me a childlike yearning for exploration. Such redolence greeted me the moment I opened my car door at the Phillips Preserve on a glorious May day.

The Phillips Preserve is a woodland of some 69 acres on the west side of Lake Tashmoo. Marjorie Acker Phillips donated the land to Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, and the Margaret Stewart Lindsay Memorial Trail offers a loop walk around the property.

I grabbed a hiking stick and set out. The path begins at a kiosk along a dirt road named Army Road, so-called because it was built by the Army, or perhaps the Navy, during preparation for the second World War. The road runs perfectly straight and bisects the preserve. I crossed the road and entered the forest. Sunlight glinted on the gossamer strands of spider webs, strung here and there across the path. A rooster carried on in the distance.

This forest of black oaks, white oaks, pitch pines and white pines was bursting with vernal energy. The tender, red leaves of the black oaks had just unfurled. A sea of huckleberry grew knee-high throughout the woods, and all of these shrubs now cheerfully bore the light green leaves of spring. Beside the trail grew several white pines. I counted 24 whorls of branches on one white pine, meaning that particular tree is 24 years old, as each year the white pine grows upward and sends forth another whorl of branches, with all the branches radiating from the same position on the stem. We tend to conceal our good years and our bad, but white pines plainly display them: this year the tree grew 18 inches, the previous year, just six.

Velvet moss grows on the edges of the narrow path. Lichens cling to the bark of the trees. Bracken ferns wave about, having sprung from fiddleheads just last week. Here a glacial boulder protrudes from the earth, but the bulk of it lies buried below.

A snake. I heard the telltale rustle and stopped. I looked this way and that, and stepped off the trail and into the woods a few steps to startle the serpent, but to no avail. Warming itself in the sun, the snake must have tolerated my approach as long as it could, and then slithered off, camouflaging itself in the leaf litter. A bumblebee droned along the forest floor, an airplane droned lazily overhead.

Farther along, huckleberry gives way to a green glade of Pennsylvania sedge. It looks just like grass, but is not grass and requires no mowing. Through this glade I walked to the shore of Aunt Rhoda’s Pond. Beetlebungs line the shoreline, and the silhouette of Wood Island is visible in the distance. A bleached clamshell lies beside an oak tree, and the gentle breeze carries with it the scent of the nearby saltmarsh.

I returned along the path blazed red and blue, which makes the walk into a loop. I rambled through the glade of tall pitch pines and green Pensylvania sedge, a woodland idyll. The path steadily rises, crosses the Army Road and then the Road to Chappaquonsett. Eventually, the sedge yields the forest floor back to the thicket of huckleberry.

As I ascended I spotted the only real damage to this forest from the March northeasters: dismasted pitch pines, a tree buckled in two, another leaning, and another with a broken and dangling crown.

I reached the hilltop, and saw a side trail that skips over a stone wall and leads to Pilot Hill Farm. From the top, I hiked downhill to the trailhead.

A couple years ago, swarms of caterpillars killed a number of oak trees here, creating gaps in the forest canopy. In these gaps, sunlight floods the forest. In each of these gaps, awkward, adolescent pitch pine saplings reach for the sun, full of youthful exuberance. Their branches bear tender candles of new growth, and clusters of brand new pine cones, and they practically leap towards the sunlight and youthful promise that engulfs them.

The Margaret Stewart Lindsay Memorial Trail offers an hour-long vigorous walk, with a bench a third of the way through and some variation in terrain.

Take a hike; adventure awaits.

Adam Moore is executive director of the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation. The foundation formally unveils its new trail app on Saturday, June 2, National Trails Day.