Talk a Walk, Paddle, Scramble This Weekend

With the forecast calling for beautiful, sunny late spring weather with temperatures in the 70s you’d be hard pressed to get a better day to take a walk, run or paddle through some of the regions choice trails.

And if you’re up for a local guided excursion you’re in luck. This weekend the state is hosting the Connecticut Trails Day Celebration and there are a plethora of coordinated events scheduled for today and tomorrow.

“We want to get folks outside to connect with the outdoors for free. We want the public to know what a wonderful resource we have here in Connecticut,” Lori Brant, the educational director for the Connecticut Forest & Parks Association, said Friday of the hundreds of miles of hiking and paddling trails in the state.

Started in 1993, the special annual event is held in conjunction with the American Hiking Society’s National Trails Day event.

There are 193 sanctioned CT Trails Day events scheduled in 115 towns and will cover more than 500 miles of trails throughout the state, Brant said. With so many choices (the trails are ranked according to their difficulty), and of course miles of other local trails not on the list, there are plenty of options.

For the weekend various private landowners, nature conservancies and nonprofit organizations open up their property to the general public to allow them to explore and better understand why the Forest & Parks Assoc., founded in 1895, makes an effort to protect the state’s forest and passive recreational areas.

For 115 years the association has been part of the acquisition of more than 100 state parks and forests, helping to take Connecticut from a state that was 20 percent forested to one that is now 60 percent forested, according to its Web site. It is also the organization that established the state’s Blue-Blazed Hiking Trail System in 1929, a trail that it continues to maintain and that remains popular with thousands of hikers each year.

Although most of the Trails Day weekend events are taking place today, there are several scheduled for Sunday (all events can be found by clicking here or by reading the CT Trails brochure attached to this story). Here is a list of some in our region happening on June 5:

• Hike at Howard Porter Reservoir in Manchester, 9 – 11 a.m.

• Hike in the Albert E. Moss Forest, Wildflower, Wildlife Sanctuary in Mansfield, 2 -4 p.m.

• Hike through Soapstone Mountain in Somers, 9 a.m.  – 1 p.m.

• Trek the Metacomet Trail in Suffield, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.