200 Mount Carmel Avenue, Hamden, CT – Various trails 5 hours 7 mins and 10.55 miles

Sleeping Giant State Park is a very popular recreational and hiking destination in Hamden, CT. It is another one of those hikes that people will exclaim, “you’ve never been to Sleeping Giant,” when you say that you haven’t been. Dana and I were sans Bryan for the day and since blue-blazed trails or ones with waterfalls were out, we thought it would be a great day to explore Sleeping Giant. The park has various colored trails of varying difficulties (including 5 miles of blue which we did our best to avoid.)

We started out on the main trail to the Tower. It is a road-like trail that provides a gentle sloping walk and is busy with people. It does offer some great views and climbing spots but it is also littered and has graffiti. All of which had me turning my nose up at the park. We took the first option to take a side trail into the woods to get away from people, but it only brought us up and around a little further to meet the road again. We took the road the rest of the way to the Tower.

The tower is great and gives panoramic views of the surrounding hills and even the sound. We took our obligatory selfie and also had a nice woman take our pic to prove we have been to Sleeping Giant — because otherwise it didn’t happen, right? This is where my view of the park started to change.

We took a portion of the blue trail to meet up with the red trail. There were lots of rocks, tree roots, and leaves to navigate but nothing of significant difficulty. Red circled us through and around to the horseshoe trail. The traprock hills were to the side of us and they are pretty magnificent! We also saw where the blue trail goes up. The climb up looked intimidating and seeing this made up our minds that when we do this section of the Quinnipiac Trail it will have to be a perfectly dry day.

After about 5 miles we had circled back to the parking lot. Dana and I decided to do a few more miles and headed out to the yellow trail. The yellow trail is a 2.2 mile trail that took us up and east to the other side of the park. It has some gentle inclines and a few doozies that got the calves burning. The hardest part was navigating the heavy leaf coverage. Many sections of the trail are tree roots and loose rock and the leaves made it difficult to know where to step.

The yellow trail ended and we decided to take orange back. It is a 2.4 mile trail that went back to the parking lot. I think this was my favorite trail of the day. It had varying terrain and views. Similar to the yellow trail, the leaf coverage made some spots tricky, but nothing was hard.

Overall I enjoyed the trails here, the park is fairly well maintained, and the rock faces really are something to see. I will be back someday to do the blue trail, but other than that I probably won’t be frequenting here.

Adventurers included: Jes, Dana & Doggo