Horse Guard State Park

Update 11/20/20: The trailhead has been moved a little north. Address has been corrected.

Words that show my ignorance of Connecticut terrain: "It's in the middle of the city, how hard can it be?" I misled our group of 12 into thinking this hike would be a piece of cake, and was surprised, a bit chagrined, and also delighted to find a difficult climb.

The trail is easy to spot and begins with well-marked white blazes. However, the blazes stop appearing about a half mile into the woods. Perhaps they end because it's wise to turn around at that point, and half of our group opted to do just that. The terrain was nothing but rock and required some scrambling.

When we made it to the top, there were six of us remaining, but there was quite a view!

We paused for our devotional, taken from James 2:17:

"In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead." The author (Nathan Chapman) tells of a story when he and his friend were camping at a shelter and a group nearby was having a rowdy time, consuming a lot of alcohol in the process. Alcohol consumption while in the backcountry is extremely dangerous due to inability to register true body temperature and hindering our sense of direction. They woke in the middle of the night to find that one of the men had wandered off. His buddy found him facedown in a stream where he had vomited and passed out. Hypothermia had set in and he was in danger of drowning. While other campers rushed to help, Mr. Chapman had very little compassion for the fellow who had given in to such irresponsible behavior, and didn't offer to help. Later, guilt set in. He writes, "I was guilty of being inebriated by self-righteousness. Of all the people who should've been willing to lift another fallen soul, I should have been the first. Not because I was better, but because Jesus taught his followers to reach out to others. . . The scripture says if we have faith we will act. It's easy to give assistance to those who need help because of a situation they had no control over. Helping those who find themselves in need because of poor judgment or different priorities challenges our compassion. But where would we be if others had that attitude when we needed mercy? Since that night on the trail, I no longer sit back when others need help, because it is extension of my faith in Christ." We all have made foolish choices. We need to be sensitive to others who need help along the way, even when they get themselves into trouble.

We then started making our way down, which proved to be a bit tricky

The point where the blazes stopped. After some deliberation on the way up, we chose to go left. On the way down we found that a better choice would have been to go to the right.

While our total time was 2 hours, we had a couple of long pauses during the hike, one while we tried to decide which way to go and another when we realized our group had gotten separated. It could probably be accomplished in an hour and a half or less. We agreed that it was a fun hike and we'd like to do it again. 

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Note the spike in the center - on our way back we took a wrong turn to the north because some of the trees had white paint that looked like blazes. One of our members with a keen sense of direction felt it wasn't right (yay Lisa!). A check of our trusty Runkeeper app showed us we were going the wrong way, so beware of false blazes.

Address: 245 West Avon Road, Avon CT

Length: 1.3 miles

Duration: 2 hours

Calories burned: 475

Difficulty level: moderate to difficult