Watch our video and then read about the trip below
Sleeping Giant State Park is full of great hikes, beautiful views, and fun discoveries. The Yellow trail is considered one of the easiest hikes but don't let that deter you from experiencing its 2 miles of lovely rolling hills. We suggest traveling East to West from the Chestnut lane Parking lot so you can walk down the stairs instead of up. This path also puts the sole vista point near the end of the trail as a reward for your hike. If you choose to go the other way you may find the end of your journey a bit lackluster.
We began our hike at the Eastern lot, known as the "Hikers lot", and spent the first section casually going up and down very small hills. This will represent the vast majority of your experience on this trail. As you can see from our video, there were quite a few logs down on this trail. A large "Microburst" devastated the entire park 2 years ago and the destruction is still very evident. It took an entire year to clean things up enough to open the park to the public again. This has left a number of sections of each trail exposed and full of new growth, and a welcome change of scenery on this trail.
The park hosts many very different biomes and each trail uniquely represents this. I like to think of each trail as having a personality of its own. We stumbled into an entire glad of Mountain Laurel, which was a pretty neat sight, and follow a dried stream bed up towards the highest point in the trail.
The Yellow Trail features a single Vista which happens to be fairly nice. At this park you get what you pay for in sweat, and so this view isn't quite as nice as some of the others. The trade off is that it was quite effortless to reach! This trail is also known for its stairs. Your descent will include two staircases wedged between some very steep and often slippery dirt trail. I personally would not enjoy going up these so I'm glad we descended them. If you want a harder and shorter journey, travel from the main parking lot, ascend to the vista, and just turn around.
Another short, up-and-down hill section represented the end of our journey. There were a few different ways to leave the yellow trail and we choose to take a few hundred feet of the gravel tower trail back to our ride. We parked a second vehicle in the main lot and thereby avoided a looping trip. if you want to make this an all day affair you can take any number of trails back east, all of them end up converging in the eastern parking lot!
Komentarze