Ragged Mountain Preserve

Ragged Mountain

We began this section on April 21, 2012 and finished May 11, 2012
We hiked all of the Red Dot, White Dot, Green Dot, Blue-Red, Blue-Yellow, and Blue trails

Trail Head: The trail head for this section is located at West Lane & Wigwam Rd, Kensington, CT. There is a lot of roadside parking located near the trail head. Even on busy days, there has always been parking available. 

Length/Distance: It varies depending on which trails you decide to take. An excellent resource for maps is located on the Berlin Land Trust's website. One hike that we did was Blue-Red to Blue to Blue-Red. That looped hike was approximately 7-8 miles and took us about 3 hours. Here is my route for a shorter hike we did.  

Summary: This area is quite beautiful. There are many different cliffs with gorgeous views of lakes and other mountains. You can see the Hart Lakes, Wassel Reservoir, Meriden and Talcott Mountains, and the UConn Health Center from different lookout points on the Blue trail. However, I would caution anyone hiking there to be wary of poison ivy. I have only just recovered from a bout of poison ivy that I got from hiking at Ragged Mountain after losing the trail (Tecnu and Calagel are great stuff). If you go straight at the trail head to wrap around the right side of the mountain on the Blue-Red, make sure to follow only clearly marked trails. There were a number of trails that seemed to go in the proper direction but were not clearly marked as being any color trail that dead-ended in the middle of a swamp. The maps of the area are helpful but don't appear to have been updated. The color markers have changed on some of the trails and there are many more cleared trails than are shown on the map. Also keep in mind that many streams intersect with the trails and overflow, causing very muddy conditions. Expect to wear boots if it's rained in the past week.   

On the trail, we did see a 5-foot-long Eastern Ratsnake (Pantherophis alleghaniensis) sunning itself on a rock. This variety of snake is quite harmless. A listing of CT snakes with helpful pictures is available here. We also encountered many ticks; this area seems to have a LOT of them, both Dog and Deer ticks.