Sunday, November 23, 2008

TRAVELLIN' TURTLE - 2 DAYS, 4 STATES, Part 6
(Charlestown, RI to Albany, NY)
A Visit to NWRS Kettle Pond Visitors Center
3.0 Mile Hike at Devil's Hopyard State Park
Sunday, November 23, 2008

I had hoped to make a short visit to Ninigret Park and the Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge (just across Rt 1 from the area of the race) before heading to Burlingame Park, but a variety of circumstances kept that from happening. I did manage to stop at the HQ for the National Wildlife Refuge System in RI - Kettle Pond Visitor Center - right after leaving Burlingame Park, since it's only a mile or so down the road. What I found there was a really great nature center with a variety of hands-on activities for kids and some excellent informational displays for everyone else. I also ended up buying a couple of guidebooks I'd never seen before, including one for a trail that apparently runs the entire N-S length of RI. Would have liked to walk some of the trails there, but with the relatively late start of Lil Rhody (11AM) and a 90+ minute drive to the park I wanted to visit this afternoon, I decided it was better to get back on the road.

I also stopped very briefly at Nature's Art/Dinosaur Crossing a ways north of New London... mainly to take some photos of Monty, a statue of a Tyrannosaurus they have in the parking lot. Someday I'd like to stop there for a bit longer and actually go into Dinosaur Crossing, where they have over 25 life-size dinosaur statues along the trails... sounds like a cool place to wander around!

Devil's Hopyard State Park

CT DEC site for Devil's Hopyard State Park

According to the CT DEC page for Devil's Hopyard State Park, the origin of the park's name is something of a mystery. One local story says that a farmer named Dibble grew hops (for brewing beer) in the area and over time Dibble's Hopyard became corrupted to the current name. Another possibility is that the name comes from the legend surrounding the smooth potholes in the rocks near Chapman Falls - that the devil was passing through the area, got his tail wet in the falls, and got so angry that his hooves burned holes in the rocks. In any case, I'd seen the signs for the park on a couple of occasions in the past, so when I realized I'd be passing nearby on my way home today I knew I had to try to stop there.

With various delays along the way I got to the park a little later than I'd hoped, so the light wasn't the greatest and I was only left with about 90 minutes to walk around and see some sights before I had to get back on the road (I was a little bit worried about getting locked in when the park closed for the night.) Started out by hiking up to Chapman Falls, and got some great views of the waterfall both from a trail leading down to its base and the path up to the top. This was definitely a good weekend for seeing waterfalls in CT, even if the skies were a bit grey much of the time.

After checking out the falls I headed into the woods on a loop trail which included two side trips - one up a steep climb to a jumble of rocks called the Devil's Kitchen, and another to an overlook. The trail turned out to be pretty challenging, given that my legs were a bit tired from the race this morning... a decent amount of climbing, including some scrambling over cool rock formations with some amazing icicles. I opted out of the climb to Devil's Kitchen - probably would have been fine on the way up, but getting back down would have been a problem. The overlook came after a long uphill slog, and I almost missed it... fortunately, I stopped to check my map to decide whether to try to complete the loop or go back the way I'd come (in the end I chose the latter, since completing the loop would have meant at least a half more more hiking than backtracking and daylight was disappearing much too rapidly) and noticed that the overlook was also down a side trail. I almost didn't hike down to it, since I wasn't too keen on hiking back up the same hill just to get back on the trail to return to the parking lot, but in the end I decided I'd be kicking myself if I hiked all the way out there and didn't see the view. And it was well worth it.

After that I pushed to get back to the car both before it got much darker and before the gates were locked (no problem with either, it turned out) and then got back on the road for another hour or so of driving in CT before passing through my 4th state of the weekend, MA, on the way back to NY and Albany.

All in all, I had a pretty good weekend. Revisited some areas I haven't driven through in quite a few years and saw three parks I've never been to before, spent time with some old friends, and had a good (if challenging) run the Lil Rhody trail race. I'd like to spend a little more time in CT and RI in nicer weather - maybe next summer I'll take a few days and head down there to run, ride, and hike in a bunch of places I wouldn't usually get to... this weekend has me thinking that could be a nice change of pace and a lot of fun.

JMH
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