Sneaking through the back door

An essential hack for hiking seasons

There comes a time each summer and fall when hiking has become so chic as a seasonal activity that a lot of us write off the prospect of visiting superlative destinations like Mount Monadnock or Greylock. I’ll wait until November, when those goddamn leaf peepers have gone back to the West Village, you mutter as you brood on the porch with a smoldering blunt or a half-drained can of beer. We’ve all been there.

But if I’ve learned one thing over 20+ years of snooping around New England’s woods and meadows, it’s this. Like any castle or citadel, most major trails have at least one lesser-known back entrance. And thanks to the advances of digital mapping tools like Google Maps and AllTrails, it’s never been easier to find and enter these “back doors.”

Bob P. B. | CC BY 2.0

Consider Sleeping Giant—formally known as Mount Carmel, it’s one of Connecticut’s most prolific peaks, where massive traprock cliffs and a Romanesque lookout tower attract daredevils and architecture buffs in equal measure. (You can see New Haven and Long Island Sound from the top of the tower.) This lumbering 738-foot mountain is the slabby heart of Sleeping Giant State Park and with the campus of Quinnipiac University located next door, going for a hike here can necessitate getting up super early or visiting the park on a day when most hikers are stuck at their jobs. The main parking area where you can pick up the rocky, vista-rich Blue Trail fills up very quickly.

But thanks to a little stack sleuthing at the Boston Public Library this past spring, I found an alternative option for entering the state park. I was leafing through Gary Ferguson’s Walks of New England, looking for curious hikes in Connecticut to cover for the newsletter, when I stumbled upon a chapter alluringly titled “Cascade Gorge.” Over the next few pages, Ferguson explains that Sleeping Giant can be reached by a fringe pathway that follows a cascade-strewn gorge through the woods. I was sold.

Locating back door entrances to popular hikes is a two-step process and rather than jumping straight into a mapping app and toggling around the vicinity of a destination you’d like to visit, searching for alternate trails, I strongly recommend sourcing some of these trail ideas from books first. As helpful as an app/site like AllTrails can be for discovering lesser known trails, the fact that it’s a user-generated option means that obscure back door trails might have less user reviews or may not even be listed yet. It’s important to have a tangible idea of what you’re getting into before taking a back door trail because it’s likely to be more rugged and grown-in than well-worn paths—a difference that could push hikers to the edge of their comfort zones when elemental challenges like steep terrain, abundant mud, or poison ivy are probable concerns.

After taking a few pictures of Ferguson’s writeup of the Cascade Gorge access route to Sleeping Giant, I fired up AllTrails to verify that this path was current and open to the general public. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference between open trails and closed/inaccessible trails when using the AllTrails mapping system. Trails that appear as a series of dashes (see the photo on the left below) are fair game for hikers. But trails that present as a series of dots have either been cinched off to the public or they’re private ways that you can’t use (see the photo on the right below.)

Emboldened by research, I decided to explore the Cascade Gorge path on my drive home from a trip to Philly. (You’ll have to imagine the abundant greenery of summer because the photos from this hike were taken in late April.) The hike begins on the north side of Sleeping Giant State Park, in a sleepier pocket of countryside with cow farms and ancient stone walls running alongside the road. A chuckling brook graced the small parking area for the trail, which started off as a bed of stones and leaves that ran parallel to the brook. For the first few minutes of hiking, I followed red blazes and wondered if this was going to be one of those trails on which the trail builder, burnt-out and sick of swatting black flies in the woods, happened upon a little culvert and decided to call it a gorge because fuck it, this trail needs a hook and I need a bath.

But I was wrong to be cynical. Within the first mile, the brook running alongside the trail became more voluminous as the earth opened up around it, turning the trail into a shelf-like ledge path along an authentic gorge decorated with waterfalls and moss. This scenery imbued the early stages of the climb with a sense of wonder, which is saying something when you’re ascending the lower haunches of a mountain and the partial views are still a good 30-40 minutes away. It struck me as ironic that Cascade Gorge is a seldom-used access route to Sleeping Giant, but that’s the beauty of back door trails. The lack of activity along them makes for a more pristine environment.

Once the Cascade Gorge path reaches its first four-way junction, you’ve essentially entered the labyrinth of trails that wind through Sleeping Giant State Park. You can choose from a wide range of color-coded paths to explore the ridgeline and forests of the mountain, essentially Frankenstein-ing your route to the summit and back to your car. I remained on the red blazed trail for a bit longer, schlepping my way over several boulders alongside a swampy area before turning right onto a trail with orange blazes that crested the ridgeline and offered a glimpse of the summit tower, not too far away.

But I didn’t encounter a soul until I finally merged with the more popular Blue Trail just beneath the summit. Suddenly I was surrounded by other hikers wiping crumbs from their shirts and drinking in the view. I generally enjoy sharing a mountaintop with other ecstatic hikers and as I arrived at the gusty lookout deck of the tower, I exchanged a few nods of solidarity with fellow travelers. But there was an undeniable “backwoods bastard” satisfaction to slipping back into the forest and closing the loop hike with a descent to the parking area, on another lesser-used path on the park’s northern side.

Upon spotting my car through the trees, as this final trail brought me back to the Cascade Gorge trailhead, I noticed that a pickup truck had joined me in the parking lot. Perhaps the owner lived nearby and snuck into Sleeping Giant State Park this way on a regular basis. Or maybe sniffing out the rear entrances to popular New England mountains is their de facto approach to hiking. I wish I could have met them, for the same reason that I’d rather rob a bank with a friend. Getting away with a fat sack of simoleons is fine, but reveling in that victory with an accomplice would be priceless.

Give it a try sometime soon, as the summer winds down and the leaves begin to fall. Case a classic hike for alternative entry points. And please let me know how it goes!

Sleeping Giant via Cascade Gorge
Hike distance: 3.4 miles loop
Elevation gain: 627 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

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It fills me with sadness to report that the unexpected crop of solid disaster movies that we’ve had this summer has come to an end with the release of Beast, in which Idris Elba tries to reconcile with his daughters while being hunted by a jacked and vengeful lion in South African conservation lands. Movies like Beast need to be gritty as hell (IE, you should be able to feel your fingernails scraping through the dirt) or proudly absurd. Beast lands right in the middle. On one hand, the early scenes of the lion stalking our protagonists are tense and nerve-jangling. On the other hand, poor Idris Elba eventually has to punch that same lion. There’s an underrated movie from 2011 called The Grey with a similar premise—Liam Neeson and a crew of oil drillers running from wolves after their plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness—but that film worked because it was thoroughly bleak and hard-edged. The wolves were vicious. The men themselves were angry miscreants at the edge of the earth. Tonally it was a more consistent experience than Beast, for which I will say this: the lion looks great.

Maybe that’s all that really matters.