Naugatuck State Forest (West)

We had previously hiked the Naugatuck trail which is in the east portion of this state forest. The west portion has a lot of woods roads, but no blue blazed trails. It was a gorgeous fall day. We parked at the end of Hunters Mountain road and continued past the gate. About 0.2 miles in there is a letterbox placed by the CT DEP. It was just off of the road and pretty easy to find. We continued along the road to a junction shown on the DEP map, but not the GPS. We continued left at the junction which was just past a very pretty little pond (not shown on either map).


The road continued to drop elevation and then began a large 180° turn to the left. The trail we were looking for was supposed to head right at the end of the turn. We found what we thought was the road and began to climb. Although the trail map showed a woods road, the GPS did not. We climbed to the ridge overlooking the Naugatuck River, although we had no views. The expected trail to the left did not materialize so we just followed the road which headed right and then down. We hit a T intersection at the bottom which was not what we wanted, but at least we thought we new where we were. After a right turn we crossed a ridge and dropped down into another small valley where we took a left.



Just past the turn we dropped into a more narrow portion of the valley which had cliffs on both sides and a large rock jumble on the right.




The trail looped around the end of this ridge and headed back north. We passed by the reservoirs and came back to the pretty little pond and the trail junction back to the car.

It was a short walk back to the car. We figured we covered about 4.3 miles in a bit over 2 hours. Pretty area, but a bit confusing. On the way out we drove down to the bottom of the park right on the RR tracks by the river. Looks like there are a bunch of good (although unblazed) trails there. Worth a return visit.