Pequot Trail
Posted By auntie on August 27, 2012
4.63 miles ★★★
this is a connecticut blue-blazed trail, the sign for which i’ve passed many times on route 2. i’ve always been curious, and just this morning, i found my 1997 copy of the connecticut walk book, so i looked it up and decided to try a section. i walked the northern end, from route 2 to route 165. i had my dh drive me from my car to the starting point, so i did it as a one-way hike.
one section through the powerline cut
can’t say it was the best marked or maintained trail i’ve ever been on, but it had some really pretty sections. also, it had some really bad sections, and the last 2 miles wove across and through a powerline cut, so you were in and out of the full sun a lot. i did see a lot of cool stuff on this walk, some i got photos of and some not, including a baby eastern rat snake and a black racer snake.
a clavarioid fungus
fungus shot! this time it’s a clavarioid, or coral-shaped, fungus. i also saw another stinkhorn fungus, this one delightfully called “stinky squid.” didn’t get a good photo of it, but you can see what it looks like on this wiki page. and again, i didn’t happen to notice any particularly bad odor.
old car in the woods
it’s not often i get to publish an abandoned car shot! it looked like this poor old thing had been used for target practice, among its many other indignities.
autumn olive berries
another of my “berry shots,” this time of autumn olive, elaeagnus umbellata. these are quite edible, and in fact are high in the anti-oxident lycopene; 17 times higher than the amount found in tomatoes. they’re also high in vitamins a, c, and e, and if picked just before the first frost, can be made into tasty jams and jellies.
this section of trail roughly parallels miller road in preston, ct, but further west. you can pick up the starting point of the section i walked where it crosses route 2, almost across from a sunoco station. a decent map can be found in the connecticut walk book (see link at the top of the post).
[…] had hiked the northern half of the pequot trail in august of 2012 from route 2 in ledyard to route 165 in preston. i thought i vaguely remembered […]