Return To Sleeping Giant

Along the reopened state park’s trails, it was as though we’d never left — almost.

For hikers, Sleeping Giant packs a lot of interest into a relatively small area, and is impressively wild for a place so close to an urban center, let alone a major part of Quinnipiac University’s campus, which is right across the road. The park draws hikers from around Connecticut and beyond. When I moved to New Haven with my soon-to-be wife in 2002, from New York City, Sleeping Giant’s proximity to our East Rock apartment was a big part of what made the area special to me. Walk south for 10 minutes, and I was in an downtown New Haven. Drive 10 minutes north, and I could be in the middle of the woods. After a few years in New York City, where I had to spend a couple hours leaving the city to get out in something that resembled nature (sorry; Central Park, Prospect Park, and even Inwood Park, while beautiful, just didn’t scratch that itch), Sleeping Giant was a delight and a refuge. I spent enough time there that I memorized certain trial routes that would give me the most variation in the shortest distance, a path that led from the parking area down along the bank of the Mill River, then up and over the Giant’s head to get to Sleeping Giant’s lookout tower. On Friday, I aimed to take that route again.

The changes to the park were evident immediately. The stand of trees that had once shaded part of the first parking area were gone. In fact, the close-up view of the head of the Giant in the first photo in this article wasn’t something you could have seen easily from the park before the storm. That field where all the cars are used to be a majestic stand of pines.

The trailhead I remembered lay at the end of that row of cars, and I descended a small ravine to get down to the Mill River. That trail used to plunge you into the woods right away. The changes there were dramatic, as the ravine was filled with downed trees, and several more that had been twisted and broken as though by giant hands. This also meant that there was a lot more sun than there had been, and the effects of that — plus the lack of foot traffic for a year — showed on the trail itself. Nature had been on the way to reclaiming what used to be a well-packed path of dirt and rocks.

At the bottom of the trail, where it connected with the river trail and a few others, the tree that had once borne the trail markings was no longer standing, though the volunteers had cleverly left the part of the tree with the markings on it in place. Though the landscape around me was radically transformed, in a pretty fascinating way, I knew where I was.

Right about there was where I ran into fellow hikers Jake Laperche and Danielle Moore. ​“We went to college at Quinnipiac and we’re still in the area, so we love the park,” Laperche said. ​“We’re excited that it’s open. and we wanted to see the condition that it’s in.”

Leperche and Moore, like me, had been frequent visitors to Sleeping Giant. ​“We started at Quinnipiac in 2013 and it was a part of our intro course to come and hike. Ever since then we’d hike a lot throughout the year,” Moore said. ​“Probably at least once a week we’d be here,” Laperche said. They both graduated in 2017. Laperche is now a medical student at Quinnipiac and Moore is an elementary school teacher in Hartford.

Laperche agreed that the loss of trees at the park entrance and the trail we were on was ​“definitely a new look.”

“We could see it when it happened from the street — it looked very different,” he added. But the felled trees and open spaces were also part of a natural process. The tornado’s damage and the changes wrought were ​“now part of the story of this park,” Laperche said.

And it was a story that, if you remembered what certain parts of the park used to look like, you could read. The wide open space on the opposite bank behind the fisherman used to be a dense stand of trees and underbrush, secluded enough that I at one point came across the half-rotted carcass of a deer there that was impossible to see until I almost stepped on it.

But further on, the tree damage became much less extensive, and the mostly shaded trails that I remembered were the norm. In addition to the enjoyable challenges of the river trail, which requires some scrambles up and over a couple rocky inclines, and the peacefulness of the woods, there was some amateur sleuthing to do. Were the trees at an incline put that way by the 2018 storm, or had they just succumbed to the precariousness of growing on a hillside?

By the time I got to the ruins of the quarry — the operation of which was part of the impetus for forming the park in the 1920s — it looked the same as I remembered, the tree cover thick and lush.

The quarried parts of the Giant’s head were as imposing as ever (this picture does not do it justice).

With the hike up the Giant’s head, it was easy to forget that the park had been closed at all, as I turned to the puzzle of figuring out the best route upward.

Halfway up the Giant’s head, on the other side of the Mill River and Whitney Avenue, it was possible to see a new clearing for a construction project. One of the benefits of going on a hike is to get new perspectives on things you see every day; in the context of surveying storm damage in the park, it was interesting to note that the clearing of trees in the park’s case is called a natural disaster, but in the construction project’s case, it’s called progress.

The view from the ledge at the Giant’s chin remained one of my favorites in the park.

In a few places a felled tree and the resultant burst of sunlight to the forest floor seemed almost beneficial, at least to these flowering plants. At this place in the park, it would be hard to say whether this particular tree came down during the storm or through more normal forest processes. I have a biologist friend who told me once that there was a rule of thumb for how long trees survive in forests: if you stood in the same spot in the woods for 110 years, a falling tree would eventually hit you. Storm or no storm, maybe this particular tree’s number just happened to be up.

The trail I was on joined up with the tower trail — easily the most accessible and popular trail in the park — and it was clear that in addition to clearing this trail, the volunteers had taken the opportunity to do serious maintenance. The trail is all but brand new, smooth enough that people with strollers and wheelchairs were navigating it easily. For those of you who want to see the effects of the storm without the relative strenuousness of the trails that navigate the Giant’s head, the tower trail offers ample opportunity. Much of it is the same verdant forest that it was before the storm struck.

But then, you make a bend in the trail, and in the space of 10 yards the landscape transforms. (This picture and the one above it were taken by pointing the camera up the trail, and then turning around and pointing the camera down the trail.) For maybe another 40 yards, you’re in a place that has been effectively clear-cut by the storm’s energy, and then you’re plunged into the woods again. It’s a chance to appreciate the storm’s force — and the way the forest is already starting to come back.

On that part of the trail I met Steve Baker, who lives in Milford and works for an energy company. ​“On the ridge that’s out of the park” — he motioned northward — ​“I was delivering for my daytime job, and in the neighborhood there were a lot of switchbacks and side roads I had to go on, and you can actually see the trail of the microburst as it went up through the neighborhood. All last year they were cutting, and you could see this line that went all the way up through the neighborhoods, down the saddle, across the road, and up through the park.” He figured that was about a mile from where we were standing.

“Devastating storm,” he said.

Like Leperche and Moore, Baker was a regular visitor to Sleeping Giant before it closed. ​“I love hiking. I do some hiking in the New York area, the Hudson Highlands — I’ll give a shoutout to hikethehudsonvalley.com because it’s a great resource,” he said.

But he also frequented this park, closer to home. ​“It’s so close,” he said. ​“You can go on the tower trail, or you can go off the side trails, go up top and have something to eat, keep on going, and then go into town and grab a beer or something at the end of it.”

But that sense of proximity to town can be a double-edged sword. While on the trail, Baker found himself reflecting on the day of the storm.

“I didn’t know we were having a storm that day,” he said. ​“If I go to New York, I’ll check the weather, I’ll check the radar. But I never really think of it here. I’ll look outside and think, ​‘it’s sunny, maybe it’s going to rain.’ I figure it’s so close. But from here it would take us a good half hour to get to the parking lot. So if we had a storm, I was thinking, ​‘where would I go?’ I could try to hide under a rock and hope for the best. It was very fortunate that the person who was here” — Baker was referring to Hailey Wilson, the photographer who got some pretty terrifying pictures of the storm bearing down on the park — ​“was in the tower, and then could get out. I would have been really unprepared for that day.”

Regarding the current weather, he said, ​“I didn’t even check it today. I just looked outside.”

“I guess I didn’t learn much,” he deadpanned. ​“But this park, you feel comfortable because you always see someone. If you go off on one of the side trails, maybe you should tell someone, ​‘hey, I’m hiking Sleeping Giant.”… you should always let someone know before you go.” Safety concerns compel me to add that you should bring your cell phone on a hike and make sure it’s fully charged.

Baker and I took the tower trail to the summit. The tower appears the same, and as with the improvements to the tower trail, the crew took advantage of the park’s closure to add a metal fence around the perimeter.

On the inside of the tower, a steady stream of people ascended to the top to take in the views, as commanding as ever. On a clear day, you can see all the way across the Sound to Long Island.

The storm’s changes to Sleeping Giant give extra resonance to a marvelously wild place surrounded by civilization. From the top of the tower, what’s remarkable is how little of that civilization is visible. The entire town of Hamden and much of New Haven is obscured by tree cover. Only downtown’s buildings pierce the greenness, and even then, they appear not so much distant as tiny — overwhelmed by the forests, the hills, the water, the sky. For an area that has seen two hurricanes, a record-breaking blizzard, and a tornado in very recent memory, It’s a good reminder about the need to prepare, and to adapt. We don’t really know when the next storm is coming.